This essay will examine the topic of voting behaviour in the United Kingdom. It will investigate the social structures of Britain, and to the extent at which social factors such as class determine the voting habits of a nation. It will then go on to outline the ‘dominant ideology’ model of voting behaviour, wherein political groups determine through the media, the political agenda, through such things as opinion polls and newspaper editorials. Next, the ‘party identification’ model will be investigated, asking the question, how important is party loyalty important to elections?

The essay will then seek to find out, with balanced evidence, which one of these models of examining voting behaviour is the most accurate. The essay will then be summed up with a conclusion of all the points raised.

Firstly, we’ll examine the influence of class in the electoral process. One explanation for why people vote in a certain way could be that most people vote along class lines, or more accurately, along the lines of their profession. Traditionally, it is expected that the working class (low wage, annual workers), vote for the Labour Party, whilst those in non-manual work, such as the middle and upper classes, vote for the Conservative Party. However, it is accepted that between 1945 and the 1970, the working class made up the majority of the British population. If the method of measuring voting behaviour of class has any credibility, the Conservatives would have been out of power for the whole of this time. In reality, time in government was evenly distributed between the Labour and Conservative Parties.  Some records from this period did in fact show that more than a third of the working classes voted Conservative.

It is the theory of embourgeoisement that attempts to explain the phenomenon of the working class Conservative. It is the idea that it is due to factors such as rising wage levels and living standards that the working classes started to employ more middle class behaviour, such as voting Conservative. However, a study in the 1960s (Goldthorpe, et al. 1969), found no evidence to corroborate this theory. In fact, it found that non-Labour support of manual workers was higher amongst those who had friends and family who were non-manual workers.

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Also, the sociologist Frank Parkin argues that manual workers living outside the more traditional, single-industry, working class communities are more exposed to what he describes as the ‘dominant value system’, and are therefore less likely to vote Labour (Parkin, 1972).

It was the electoral period between 1979 and 1992 that led to the revival of the embourgeoisement theory as a way of explaining the decline in the working class vote for the Labour Party. However, due to the failure of the embourgeoisement theory to explain the fall in the middle class Conservative support, the theory has very few contemporary supporters.

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