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Housing Tenure and Party Choice in Australia, Britain and the United States
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2009
Extract
In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.
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References
1 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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20 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 198.Google Scholar A decomposition of the direct and indirect effects of housing tenure on partisanship showed that in Britain the effects were almost all direct, and there was little indirect effect via class self-image.
21 Figures are metric partial regression coefficients, estimated from a regression analysis predicting Labour partisanship from family background, socioeconomic status, demography, class self-image, and dummy variables for owner occupiers and private tenants.
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