The purpose of the study is to examine how electoral behavior is affected during elections based on one of the long term factors of voting: focusing on the voters party identification. In this case, it contributes to the study of turnout decline and re
URN: 6133897
Research proposal for British Politics: Party Identification.
Introduction
The purpose of the study is to examine how electoral behavior is affected during elections based on one of the long term factors of voting: focusing on the voter’s party identification. In this case, it contributes to the study of turnout decline and relating it to the general decline in party loyalty recently. I would like to test how likely a voter or an individual tends to support a specific political party during electoral periods in addition to long term effects. I find this aspect of the study interesting as it gives an insight to how people in different environments are brought up to ‘support’ a certain party. According to Jones and Kavanagh, ’strong supporters are likely to vote for the party in spite of misgivings about particular policies or leaders. But the proportion has fallen from over 40 percent in 1964 to 12 percent in 2001’ (2003 p.85) and this can reflect what the electoral activity is like currently to us. In the proposal, I shall be suggesting a
Theory
Political identity in this research proposal focuses mostly on how results during elections are affected by that factor. In recent methods used for the studies of measuring party identification, they seem to lose the differentiation from those that are considered to be identifiers and non identifiers during surveys. The decline in turnout also raises the point in the decline in political identity thus shows correlation. In order for voters to catch up with events during election periods, Heath expresses that ‘non identifiers are more strongly influenced by political context than strong identifiers’ and so ‘it is possible that short term factors may have a stronger impact on those with weaker identity since their vote is less ingrained’ (2007) and so, articles that tend to measure party identification find challenges to understand to what extent voters are truly engaged with the politics. Tilley however states that another aspect is the influence of political partisanship and identity in relation to age as ‘generational life-cycle’ (2003) which explains ones attachment to a party based on the era that person grew in. Supported by the statement from Johnston and Pattie, even ‘with a minority of a large sample of British adults, consistently identifies themselves with a main party’ (1996), and so on the other hand there are the ‘young voters that are currently [politically] unaligned’, according to dr. Bartle which would cause limits to research resulting in constant modification of research models.
