Between 1964 and 1987 the amount of people identifying with one of the two major parties also fell, from 81% to 70%. The ‘Strong’ identifiers for each party also fell during this period, from 38% to 25% and by 1997 had reached 16%. Fewer voters felt they were tied to a party, which meant that more voters flowing between parties was taking place.
During this period the Conservative share of the middle class vote fell from four fifths to just over a half. Support for Labour and the Liberals had started to develop within middle class areas such as the teaching, nursing and local government professions.
At the same time there was a shift in the balance between the classes of the electorate, from a 60-40 middle class to working class split to a figure today of the reverse, making Labours natural vote diminish. The class base itself was also been weakened by the Thatcher reforms of the 1980’s, that lead to changes such as a fall in council rented houses from 45% to 25% of the housing stock and a fall in trade union membership, from 53% in 1979 to 40% in the 1990’s.
One of the reasons for this was that the social makeup of the workforce was changing as manufacturing industry declined and employment in services and white-collar occupations grew. This has over the past two decades accelerated and has given rise to more ‘partisan dealigment’ with voters not supporting the party of their cause. The change was also helped along by the working classes themselves choosing to adopt more middle class ideals and values, a process called embourgeoisement. Crewe identified the growth of a ‘New Working Class’ that had a far greater tendency than the ‘natural working class’ to vote Conservative (1988).
Most people in Britain are now in mixed social class groups, such as working class home owners, but it is clear that Britain overall is becoming more middle class.
Also over the 1970’s to present day, the level of support for the two main parties has fallen. Between 1945 and 1970 they had a 90% share of the vote. Since 1970 it has fallen to around 75%. The stability of the previous elections has been replaced by fluidity and the two party class based voting system has been replaced by a three party less-class voting since 1983.
This period also saw a large rise in support for the Liberals and then the SDP Alliance. From a 7.5% share of the vote in 1970 they rose to achieve a 19.3% share in 1974. This rise remained with them, 25.4% in 1983 and 22.6% in 1987, and when they formed the Liberal Democrats still claimed a 17% share in 1992, showing that from the 1970’s onwards people did not feel so stuck with a party and were prepared to make decisions for themselves.
This rise in the third party support allowed people a chance to vote tactically and would have aided them in not voting for their ‘natural’ party. The concept of tactical voting is that you support a candidate or party that is not your first choice with the intention of preventing the election of the candidate you least favour. The 1980’s showed evidence of this with a trend encouraged by the centre parties. The 1997 election saw the intervening of the media on this issue and some newspapers even produced lists of minority seats with information on how to get certain candidates out. A ‘Get Rid of he Tories (GROT) campaign was started and heavily backed by left wing Democrats.
During the 1980’s, the link fell off dramatically. According to Sarlvik and Crewe (1983), it was an era of partisan dealignment with people not been lead blindly by there parents or workmate but choosing themselves who to vote for based on the issues and the parties views towards them.
It is safe to say that during the first 25 years of the post war period class voting or partisanism was the main pattern of voting behaviour. It lead to a Labour/Conservative party system, with the amount of votes each party gained not varying greatly. Between 1950 and 1970 the Conservative share of the vote ranged from 49.7% (1959) to 41.9% (1945). Labour share has ranged from 48.8% (1951) to 43.8% (1959). The general electoral trend was stability and at the time nothing much looked like it was going to change.
However with the preference in the 1980’s for people to choose whom to vote for by use of the issue, a whole new model of voting behaviour was shown, that of issue voting.
The issue voting model shows us that people give difference importance to different issues and tend to vote for the party that has views on the issues they consider important that most match their own.
The issue-voting model is sometimes called the Consumer Voting Model and can best be explained like this perhaps. It ‘sees voters as shoppers in a political market-place (Downs 1957; Himmelweit et al. 1985, p. 70; Rose and McAllister 1986), choosing policies as they choose a powder that “washes whiter” or a lager to reach inaccessible parts’ (Kingdom, 1999, p. 246).
As I said above this model became popular with the decline of partisanism and showed that people were more likely to look at who they were voting for and not just put a cross in a box.
Research by Saunders (1995, p. 136) showed that Labour lost a number of its potential supporters by promising to renationalise the water and electricity industries. The supporters had all bought shares in these companies.
The two parties both seem to have separate issues that the public support them for. Labour is generally better faring in the health, employment and education areas, whilst the voters prefer the Conservatives views on issues such as law and order, defence, taxation, inflation and the economy. The last been quite surprising considering the Conservatives history on that issue, Newton (1993) called it one of the puzzles of British Politics. At the 1992 general election, the country was in recession, and still the voters thought the Conservatives were the best people to solve the problems they had helped to create (Saunders, 1993; Pattie et al. 1995). By the 1997 election this lead had been quashed and Labour outrun the Conservatives on all issues apart from defence, on which the Conservatives had a tiny 2% lead.
In the 1987 and 1992 elections the Labour party was most favoured on three of the major issues, unemployment, health and education. However the party still lost those two elections. Surveys at the time showed that people expected Labour to increase taxes but they were prepared for them to be increase to aid public services. So according to these surveys Labour should have won. Following the elections Gallop polls were carried out that showed 30% of people thought they would be better off under Labour, but 48% of people thought they would be worse off. This highlights the fact that despite people agreeing with parties’ policies they choose a personal point to base their decision on. This behaviour casts doubt on the entire concept of issue voting.
However it should be stated that it is difficult to research issue voting as it is hard to distinguish between true issue voting and the concept that people agree with party policies due to party loyalty and partisanism.
One recent factor that has entered the political forum that could be affecting the way people vote is that of ‘Presedentialisation’. This factor can be seen to have reduced elections to a contest between the party leaders (Brown 1993; Mugham 1993; Clarke and Stewart 1995). Both Michael Foot in 1983 and Neil Kinnock in 1987 and 1992, according to researchers, harmed their parties’ election chances because of their bad images. In contrast to that Thatcher had great admiration as the Conservative leader, and within three months of coming to power in 1992 John Smith had took over John Major in the polls. When Blair took over the Labour party in 1994 he consistently remained high with an average rating of 39%, compared to Majors 19% and Ashdowns 14%.
This form of choosing whom to vote for, if real, has greatly been increased by the heightened media coverage of elections of the past two decades, and if the process continues then will in the future play a bigger part in how people choose to vote.
This factors importance is still debated by scholars (Crewe and King, 1994).
Perhaps the most general factor that people argue affects voters choice is the ‘feel good factor’. The ‘feel good factor’ is a term created by the media to put a name to the populous general feeing towards the economy.
Evidence exists to both support and discredit this model.
Since the beginning of the post war period, a number of factors can be seen to have influenced the voting behaviour of the population.
While it cannot be argued that class did have its day at the beginning of this period, it is clear that with the increase of political awareness of people and the weakening of the class structure people began to not follow there forbearers and peers in voting for a party. Instead they made their own choices.
Although models have been created to categorise peoples voting behaviour, you must remember that despite the considerable study and research gone into the subject since the 1950’s the way people vote is still not clear. ‘Human motives and emotions are seated in the subconscious and not easily unlocked by the researcher with the clipboard’ (Kingdom, 1999, p. 247)
