¹ On the rise of the class alignment see Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and for a discussion of whether the 1974 elections saw a permanent erosion of this alignment, see Crewe, Ivor, Särlvik, Bo and Alt, James, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, British Journal of Political Science, VII (1977), 129–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar It should be pointed out here that, for the sake of prose style, the terms ‘party identification’ (‘party identifiers’) and ‘partisanship’ (‘partisans’) are used interchangeably throughout this article.

² All aggregate election statistics used in this article come from Penniman, Howard R., ed., Britain at the Polls: The Parliamentary Elections of 1974 (Washington D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1975), pp. 242–7.Google Scholar

³ See Crewe, , Särlvik, and Alt, , ‘Partisan Dealignment’.Google Scholar Because of their similar concern with the changing alignment of partisanship in Britain, Butler and Stokes in their Political Change in Britain also pay scant attention to the more variable relationship between partisanship, voting preference and electoral outcomes. The contribution that both these studies make to understanding the distribution of the vote in British elections is further limited by their common tendency to ignore the Liberal party. This analysis is intended to go some way toward remedying their neglect on both counts.

⁴ This analysis is predicated upon acceptance of the argument that party identification and voting preference are meaningfully distinguishable phenomena in the British electoral context. The evidence for this argument is most extensively and persuasively presented in Crewe, , Särlvik, and Alt, , ‘Partisan Dealignment’, pp. 136–42.Google Scholar Their case is strengthened by the fact that this article shows variation in the strength of the identification-vote relationship both between parties and across elections to be in part responsible for the Conservative and Labour vote losses in 1974.

⁵ Crewe, , Särlvik, and Alt, , ‘Partisan Dealignment’, p. 143.Google Scholar

⁶ In the 1964, 1966 and 1970 sampies, respondents who had voted Conservative or Labour in constituencies not contested by the Liberal party were asked: ‘Would you have voted Liberal if a Liberal candidate had stood in this constituency?’ The possible responses were: ‘Yes, would have’, ‘Might have’ and ‘No, would not have’. In February 1974, however, the wording of this question was changed to: ‘If a Liberal had stood how likely is it that you would have voted for him?’ and the possible responses became: ‘Very likely’ and ‘Not very likely’. Since the Liberal party contested all but four seats in the October election, the question was not asked of that sample. In arriving at the compensated cell entries in Tables 1 and 2 I have treated the ‘Yes, would have’ and ‘Very likely’ categories as signalling the same firm Liberal commitment. Thus, only those making either of these responses are included in the compensated figures.

⁷ It might be objected that responses to a hypothetical situation are likely to produce a biased estimate of Liberal voting strength. This is an objection that is virtually impossible to disprove and I have tried to guard against it by taking only strong, pro-Liberal responses as being tantamount to the respondents having voted Liberal had there been a suitable candidate.

⁸ A study of the electorate as a whole provides slightly different estimates of the extent of the redistribution of partisanship, with the major parties experiencing a 6 per cent decrease and the Liberals no increase at all in their shares of partisans in the electorate. See Crewe, , Särlvik and Alt, ‘Partisan Dealignment’, p. 143.Google Scholar My estimates differ because this analysis focuses only on Conservative, Labour and Liberal identifiers and voters.

⁹ One might have expected this relationship to strengthen rather than weaken because, as the major parties lost weak partisans, they should have been left with a hard core of strong ones. This expectation was not realized, however, because in 1974 these parties not only lost identifiers and voters, but also their remaining identifiers tended to become more weakly tied to the party. See Crewe, , Särlvik, and Alt, , ‘Partisan Dealignment’, pp. 145–6.Google Scholar On the subject of partisan defections, it would have been very interesting to study patterns of continuity and change in the reasons for such defections over the whole decade. But this proved impossible, principally because the numbers involved were too small for reliable analysis. The absolute number of major-party identifiers voting for the other major party, for example, ranged only between seven and nineteen over all five elections.

¹⁰ For extensive discussions of the character of Liberal party support, see Alt, James, Crewe, Ivor and Särlvik, Bo, ‘Angels in Plastic: The Liberal Surge in 1974’, Political Studies, xxv (1977), 343–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lemieux, Peter H., ‘Political Issues and Liberal Support in the February 1974 British General Election’, Political Studies, xxv (1977), 323–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ The Liberal surge in February 1974 and its clear regression in October towards the pre-February norm was further reinforced by the voting behaviour of non-identifiers. Between 1964 and 1970, 77·7 per cent of those non-identifiers who actually voted for one of the three largest parties cast their ballot for either the Conservative or Labour party. This figure dropped to 66·3 per cent in February 1974 and returned more or less to its pre-February norm in October when it rose to 73·5 per cent. Thus, the voting behaviour of non-identifiers closely resembles that of identifiers and suggests no caveats to the pattern of electoral change described in the text.

¹² Like all election surveys, the five used in this analysis record a much higher turn-out than actually occurred in the election. Assuming that this error is constant across both parties and elections, however, it does not affect my conclusions since these are based on trends across time rather than on single elections. In other words, the absolute level of reported turn-out is less important in the context of this analysis than its variation from one election to the next.

¹³ Stokes, Donald E., ‘Parties and the Nationalization of Electoral Forces’ in Chambers, W. N. and Burnham, W. D., eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 182–202.Google Scholar