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Generational Change and Continuity in British Partisan Choice
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
Extract
The strong relationship between social class and partisan choice is one of the most extensively documented facts of British political life; but that relationship declined markedly during the 1960s, as Butler and Stokes have shown. Their lucid documentation of the declining class–party nexus is among the major findings of the second edition of their book, and, as class-based partisanship is particularly low among the young, many might conclude that the relationship between class and party will continue to decline in future. It would, however, be premature to reach this conclusion.
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References
1 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain: The Evolution of Electoral Choice, 2nd edn. (New York: St Martin's, 1974), pp. 193–207.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 In the second edition of their study, Butler and Stokes rely mainly upon a manual/non-manual distinction to categorize persons into the working and middle classes, whereas in their first edition they classified lower grade non-manual workers as working-class.
3 Although computed differently, this measure is similar to Robert R. Alford's index of class voting. The only substantive difference between these measures is that Alford focuses on the direction of vote, or voting intention, as his dependent variable, whereas Butler and Stokes focus on the direction of party identification. For a discussion of the strengths and limitations of the class voting measure, see Alford, R. R., Party and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), pp. 79–86.Google Scholar Also see Korpi, W., ‘Some Problems in the Measurement of Class Voting’, American Journal of Sociology, LXXVIII (1972), 627–42.Google Scholar
4 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 204.Google Scholar My own analysis of British Gallup surveys conducted in 1955 and 1965 showed a decline in class-based partisanship but no marked age-group differences. See Abramson, P. R., ‘Social Class and Political Change in Western Europe: A Cross-National Longitudinal Analysis’, Comparative Political Studies, IV (1971), 131–55Google Scholar and ‘Who Votes Labour?’, New Society, XX (20 04 1972), 130.Google Scholar Ronald Inglehart analyzed a survey conducted for him in 1970 by Louis Harris Research, Ltd. and found class-based partisanship to be + 34, which is, as he notes, lower than levels of class votingfound by Alford in surveys conducted between 1943 and 1962. See Inglehart, R., The Silent Revolution: Political Change among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), Chap. 7.Google Scholar For a more detailed breakdown of the relationship between class and party in the five Butler and Stokes surveys, see Books, J. W. and Reynolds, J. B., ‘A Note on Class Voting in Great Britain and the United States’, Comparative Political Studies, VIII (1975), 360–75.Google Scholar
5 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 204–5.Google Scholar As Butler and Stokes note, the ‘1945’ cohort resisted the trend toward class depolarization. For a more detailed report of age-group differences over time, see Abramson, P. R., ‘Generational Change and Continuity in British Partisan Choice’Google Scholar, a paper delivered at the IXth World Congress of the International Political Science Association, 1973. Also see Books and Reynolds, ‘A Note on Class Voting’.
6 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 205.Google Scholar
7 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 206.Google Scholar
8 For a discussion of the assumptions that constitute a life-cycle and a generational explanation for low levels of class-based partisanship among young adults, see Abramson, P. R., Generational Change in American Politics (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1975), pp. 37–8.Google Scholar
9 In 1969, class-based partisanship among the youngest cohort was only + 14, and it rose twelve points, presumably because of the polarizing effects of the 1970 general election.
10 To obtain a representative sample with the 1970 Butler and Stokes survey one must employ a weighting factor that reduces the sample to 70 per cent of its actual size. With all my analyses weighting never affected the results by more than 3 per cent. All the percentages in this note are based upon the weighted N. The Ns in Tables 1 and 2 are the actual number of cases in each subset.
11 Respondents were assigned to a class on the basis of the ‘social class of the person to be graded’. In most cases that person was either the respondent or the respondent's husband. Throughout this analysis, I focus on the direction of partisan self-image as the dependent variable, and report the percentage of Labour identifiers among respondents having Labour or Conservative self-images. Similar results obtain when one uses direction of vote in the 1970 general election as the dependent variable. Cohort divisions were based upon the respondent's age (by year). Although the 1970 Butler and Stokes survey reported each respondent's year of birth, I used the age code in order to maintain comparability with previous Butler and Stokes cohort divisions.
12 According to my analysis, if Butler and Stokes had continued to employ the class divisions used in their first edition, the overall level of class-based partisanship in 1970 would have been + 32. Class-based partisanship among the five major age groups would have been as follows: pre-1918 (born in 1898 or before), + 24; interwar (born between 1898 and 1913), + 31; ‘1945’ (born between 1913 and 1928), + 36; 1951–64 (born between 1928 and 1943), + 33; and post-1964 (born between 1943 and 1953), + 27. (Note that I have used a slightly different age boundary for the youngest cohort than that employed by Butler and Stokes.)
13 For further speculation along these lines, see Railings, C. S., ‘Two Types of Middle-Class Labour Voter’, British Journal of Political Science, V (1975), 107–12.CrossRefGoogle Scholar