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Testing the Butler-Stokes Model of a Polarization Effect Around the National Swing in Partisan Preferences: England, 1979

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

R. J. Johnston
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Extract

In the section of their book Political Change in Britain entitled ‘The Sources of Uniform Swing’, David Butler and Donald Stokes presented a model to account for an apparent paradox in Britain's electoral geography – the relative uniformity of the ‘two party swing’ between elections across all parts of the country. This uniformity is paradoxical because if the national trend in changes of partisan preferences were to apply equally in all areas then the swing against a party experiencing a net loss of votes should be greatest in those areas where it won most votes at the first election: indeed, as Butler and Stokes show, it may even register a net gain of votes where it was weakest, despite the national trend being against it.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , January 1981 , pp. 113 - 117
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

1 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1974), pp. 140–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 McLean, I. (‘The Problem of Proportionate Swing’, Political Studies, xxi, (1973), 57–63)CrossRefGoogle Scholar provided an early illustration of why this should be so. McLean also showed that division of the population of voters into ‘movers’ and ‘stayers’ provides a valuable model to account for areal variations that may result in an apparent uniformity of swing. Testing his model requires a study of a sequence of elections, and panel survey data which provide information on ‘permanent movers and stayers’ – i.e. new voters and deaths.

3 Johnston, R. J., ‘The Spatial Impact of Fiscal Changes in Britain: Regional Policy in Reverse?’ Environment and Planning A, xi (1979), 1439–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 This matrix was published in The Economist, 12 05 1979, p. 26.Google Scholar The sample was a national one, based on an interlocking quota design. There are two possible sources of error in this. The first is the representativeness of the sample; the report in The Economist notes that it was extremely accurate in predicting the inter-party distribution of votes. The second is that it is unrepresentative of England as a whole. Clearly if it is not representative – either because of local variations in preference shifts or because of the role of the Nationalist parties – error will be introduced. However, given the overall election result it is unlikely that the relative size of the nine elements in the transition matrix will be markedly affected by any such possible error and, in any case, it is the relative and not the absolute size of the predictions which is relevant for testing the model. Thus although the data are not perfect, their imperfections are almost certainly insufficient to affect the outcome of the analyses.

5 Wrigley, Neil, ‘The Use of Percentages in Geographical Research’, Area, v (1973), 183–6.Google Scholar

6 One possible complicating factor is the nature of the contest. Ten seats were not contested by the Liberal party in October 1974. At the constituency scale, exclusion of these produced regression results which were almost identical to those in Table 1. No alternative analyses were run for the other two scales. The intervention of the National Front may have been an important influence in certain places, but no significant pattern was observed in further testing using dummy variables.

7 Johnston, R. J., ‘Regional Variation in British Voting Trends 1966–1979:Tests of an Ecological Model’, Regional Studies, xv (1981), forthcoming.Google Scholar