Accounts for the changes in voting behaviour in the last 30 years in UK general elections

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Marc Murray

Accounts for the changes in voting behaviour in the last 30 years in UK general elections

 This essay will look at the events and reasons that can be held accountable for the changes in voting behaviour within the UK general elections during the past 30 years.  To be able to understand the changes in voting behaviour this paper will examine events that have taken place over the last third of a century, from the post-war period (1945-70) in which the British political system consisted of support for the two major parties and voting behaviour was easy to explain with individual identifying with one of these parties through tradition and social class.  This essay will concentrate on these two major parties and provide evidence to show how during this period the two-party vote was the accepted norm, to the latter part of this period as changes in the class system and an era of ‘partisan dealignment’ saw the electorate’s awareness and understanding of political issues become more important resulting in a change. To address the causes of this change, it will then provide a framework giving social factors for this change and the political influences that shape the behaviour of the electorate.

To be able to understand the changes in the voting behaviour of the electorate within the last 30 years in the UK general election, it is important to begin with how the political system operated in the post-war period (1945-1970) and the emergence of Psephology, or the study of voting behaviour.  During this time voting behaviour was easy to explain with the majority of voters identifying with one of the two major parties developing a tradition and trend for the two-party vote.  Social class at this time was a massive influence of the way in which people would vote, individuals were perceived as being either middle or working class with regards to their occupation and studies indicate that there is a strong correlation between social class and the preferred party of the voters within that class. The majority of the working class would vote for the Labour party and the majority of the middle class in favour of the Conservatives, with an average of 90% of voters in support of these two parties. As stated the majority of these voters were ‘identifiers’ or partisans who would traditionally stay with one of the two parties mentioned.

Clearly there were various 'deviant' groups: working class Conservatives, middle class Labour voters, the few remaining Liberal voters and what were termed 'floating' voters, those who switched in a seemingly aimless fashion between the parties and between voting and non-voting. These groups had to be 'explained'. However, the predictive value of the 'class equals party' model, i.e. the extent to which a person's class can predict and explain his or her voting behaviour, has gradually declined, especially since 1974

It was at this time that the agreed assumption by the majority of Psephologists, that the British people followed the set tradition of voting due to their social class and partisanship, started to gradually fade away with the electorate seeming to pay more attention to the issues that a particular party would address.  This new method of voting by individuals brought about an era of ‘partisan dealignment’, people no longer voted blind i.e. perpetuated the accepted norm, but began to pay attention the issues that each party was addressing and then voting on the package that was the most attractive to them.  

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Before the study of voting behaviour developed in the twentieth century, voting was seen as an individual act by electors who weighed up the differing party policies on offer and who then made a rational decision about which party to vote for, based partly on individual advantage and partly on wider considerations of what was good for the country, one's class and so on.  It was in 1964 that an organisation started to monitor the behaviour of voters during election and have continued to do so up to the present day.

The BES (The British Election Panel) or ...

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