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Voting Behaviour in the UK : Part B: From the 1970s to the General Elections of 1992 and 1997

See also Voting Behaviour in the UK:  Part A: The Era of Party Identification.

See also The General Elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005: Some Comparisons

See also PowerPoint Presentation on The Era of Party Identification

BBC Coverage of 1992 and 1997 This source provides interesting video clips, for example on the Sheffield Rally and further links to information on all post -war general elections 1945-1997]

YouTube: 60 Interesting Video Clips!

• Introduction

• The General Election of 1992

• The General Election of 1997

• Assignment: Comparing the General Elections of 1992 and 1997

• Introduction

In this document I shall refer fairly briefly to some of the significant political and social changes and important theoretical developments which have increased the complexity of studies of voting behaviour studies in the last 40 or so years. The issues to be considered in the introduction can reached via the following links and once these issues have been covered I shall turn to the 1992 and 1997 General Elections.

Declining Support for the Conservative and Labour Parties

The Decline in Party Identification

Changes in Class Structure and in the Nature of the Working Class

Class Dealignment: Measurement Difficulties

Class Dealignment: Sociological Explanations

Class Dealignment: Individualistic and Political Explanations related to Issue Voting

Some Criticisms of the Issue Voting Model

Spatial Issues and Valence Issues

Valence Issues, Leadership and Party Image

Other Social Influences on Voting Behaviour. [This link returns  Part A of Voting Behaviour in the UK .Scroll down Part A for  Other Social Influences on Voting Behaviour].

The General Election of 1992

• Declining Support For Conservative and Labour Parties

Since the 1960s overall electoral support for the Conservative and Labour Parties has declined while support for the Liberals/Alliance/Liberal Democrats and the Nationalist parties has increased although single party majority governments have still almost always been formed courtesy of the First Past the Post [FPTP} parliamentary election system.

Election Results: Percentages of the Popular Vote

[You could use these statistics to check your knowledge of British political history 1945-2005. For example who were the successive Prime Ministers and Leaders of the Opposition?] Notice that no post 2nd World War UK  government was ever elected with 50% or more of the votes cast , that  electoral support for the two main parties declined after 1970. and that the parliamentary under-representation of the Liberals/Alliance/Liberal Democrats led to stronger calls for reform of the electoral system. 

• Decline in Party Identification {To see the  extent of declining party identification click here and then scroll down to page 6 for information from "The 2005  General Election in Great Britain [David Sanders, Harold Clarke, Marianne Stewart and Paul Whiteley].

Psephologists have emphasised the extent to which Party Identification [which was so central to the explanation of voting behaviour in Butler and Stokes' Party Identification Model] declined significantly especially in the 1970s. It is generally agreed that since then overall party identification has changed little although there has been further long term decline in the extent of strong party identification. Several possible reasons have been suggested for the decline of party identification.

1. Changes in the nature of individual social classes and in the class structure as a whole could result in partisan dealignment .

2. For example increasing working class affluence, the decline of traditional working class communities, the growth of the "new working class" and the increased importance of sectoral cleavages within the working class could all in principle result in declining party identification with the Labour Party.

3. Traditional processes of political socialisation which encouraged working and middle class people to identify with the Labour and Conservative Parties respectively have weakened thereby weakening traditional allegiances with these political parties.

4. Improved average education levels may enable more people to appreciate the complexity of political arguments and to recognise that no single political party has the "right answers" to political problems. Although it is also true for some people that increased education strengthens rather than weakens their party identification they may be in a minority.

5. Since the 1950s political issues have been covered in greater detail in the mass media and as individuals access serious TV and radio discussions between major spokespersons of the political parties and/or careful media analyses of party political programmes they may increasingly come to see merit in different sides of political questions and therefore to identify less with one particular party political viewpoint. This seems a generally plausible argument although it may also be argued that many listeners/watchers of serious political programmes may be especially likely to be strong party identifiers although, again , these may be in a minority.

6. Alternatively peoples' identification with any one  particular political party may be much weakened by more strident campaigns in the popular press against what would otherwise have been their preferred political party.

7. People may interpret the performances of both major parties in government as poor leading to declining identification with both major political parties as occurred for example in the late 1960s and 1970s due to the perceived inabilities of both Labour and Conservative governments to manage the economy effectively.

8. By the 1970s it was possible that some individuals were increasingly concerned with so-called post-materialist issues relating to environment, quality of life , civil liberties, nuclear disarmament  and "Third World" development which they believed were not being addressed seriously by the major political parties all of which resulted in declining party identification [and in some cases  increased pressure group membership] among such individuals.

9. In the original formulation of the party identification model by Butler and Stokes it was suggested that party identification had a degree of permanence as a result of long term processes of political socialisation which caused working class and middle class voters to identify primarily with the Labour Party or the Conservative Party respectively and that individual issues, policies and political leaders had little influence on voting behaviour. However it has increasingly been argued that party identification also has an important more transitory component such that party identification could be influenced also by changes in party leadership, changes in ideology, changes in image and changes in policy. Thus, for example, party identification with Labour may have declined in the late 1960s and 1970s due to disaffection among previous party identifiers with core Labour Party principles of public ownership, increased welfare spending and support for the trades union movement. Similarly, the 1992 ERM crisis could have reduced identification with the Conservative Party while disillusion with the New Labour project could have reduced identification with the Labour Party especially by the time of the 2005 General Election.  

• Changes in Class Structure and in the Nature of the Working Class

1. There are major controversies surrounding the concept of social class and the analysis of the UK class structure. However it is generally agreed that in the last 40 years there have been significant changes in the shape of the UK class structure involving the relative growth of non-manual [or "middle class"] employment and the relative decline of manual [or "working class"] employment which in principle could be expected to harm the electoral prospects of the Labour Party. [Click here for Dawn Collis' IPSOS MORI article indicating  changes in UK class structure measured in relation to the AB, C1, C2, DE Social Grade classification system which has traditionally been used in studies of voting behaviour.]

2. It has been suggested also that the nature of the working class has changed in various ways. Perhaps affluent manual workers have experienced a process of embourgeoisement [a theory which has been heavily criticised] or perhaps the working class has become an increasingly fragmentary social class as a result of so-called "sectoral cleavages" within the working class. or  as a result of increasingly important differences between "the old working class" and "the new working class"

• Class Dealignment: Measurement Difficulties

1. Perhaps these changes in the nature of the working class are among the factors  which have led to a long term process of working class dealignment whereby working class voters became decreasingly likely to vote for their "natural class party": i.e. for the Labour Party .

2. There is evidence also of long term class dealignment among middle class voters who have reduced their support for their "natural class party": i.e. for the Conservative Party.

3. The actual measurement of the extent of class dealignment has presented several problems. In particular the psephologists Heath Curtice and Jowell argued  in their study "How Britain Votes [1985] that the traditionally used social grade scheme [the AB, C1, C2, DE  scheme] provided inaccurate measures of class position and that it should therefore be replaced by a more theoretically sophisticated social class schema involving the allocation of individuals into a new five class schema containing the salariat, routine non-manual workers, the petty bourgeoisie [including self employed manual workers], foremen and technicians and  the working class . In this schema classes are defined so as to take account of differences in authority and autonomy at work as well as differences in income and the authors' data suggest that these variables have a considerable impact on voting behaviour. [Clearly some complex technical details are involved here but the authors point out that, for example once foremen are defined out of the working class the remaining skilled manual workers are more likely to vote Labour than semi-skilled and unskilled workers which is the reverse of the conclusion derived from the AB, C1, C2, DE schema].

4.  Heath, Curtice and Jowell argued further that measures of class voting such as the Absolute Class Voting statistic and the Alford Index  should be replaced by the use of so-called Odds Ratios which provided a measure of relative class voting which in their view was a more useful measure of class voting.

5. Absolute Class voting is measured as follows: it is [the percentage of working class voters voting Labour + the percentage of middle class voters voting Conservative] divided by 200; the Labour Alford Index is measured as follows: it is the percentage of working class voters voting Labour- the percentage of middle  class voters voting Labour; similarly the Conservative Alford Index is the percentage of middle class voters voting Conservative -the percentage of working class voters voting Conservative. The Odds Ratio used as a measure of relative class voting in the Heath, Curtice and Jowell study is measured as follows: it is [the percentage of working class voters voting Labour divided by the percentage of working class voters voting Conservative] divided by [the percentage of middle class voters voting Conservative divided by the percentage of middle class voters voting Labour]

6.  According to Heath, Curtice and Jowell when these methodological changes were made there was no evidence of class dealignment after all, although the authors did agree that the long term decline in the size of the working class had harmed Labour considerably. These conclusions in relation to class dealignment for a time generated considerable controversy in the psephological community. However it is now widely agreed that these controversies have subsided because in the General Elections of the 1990s there was evidence of class dealignment however it was measured.

7. An amendment: [Oct 19th 2009]  I have had some difficulty finding a link to data on trends in class dealignment as measured by the methods mentioned above but you may now click here for a link to the relevant data from Political Choice in Britain. The Consistency Index referred to in the diagram is  [the percentage of working class voters voting Labour- the percentage of middle  class voters voting Labour] plus  [the percentage of middle class voters voting Conservative -the percentage of working class voters voting Conservative.] This means that the Consistency Index = the Labour Alford Index plus the Conservative Alford Index.  If possible you should also consult Political Choice in Britain [ a very detailed complex study by H. Clarke, D. Sanders, M. Stewart and P. Whiteley  2004], Elections and Voters in Britain [David Denver : Second Edition 2007] and also  Sociology Themes and Perspectives [Haralambos and Holborn] for further discussion.

8. If we remember that at the high point of class voting in the General Elections of 1950 and 1951 approximately 80% of middle class voters voted Conservative while 20% voted Labour and approximately 65% of working class voters voted Labour while 35% voted Conservative the following data from IPSOS MORI can be used to give some indication of the extent of class dealignment between the early 1950s and 2005 . [With grateful thanks to IPSOS MORI] . I shall have occasion to repeat this table at intervals later in this document.

• Class Dealignment: Sociological Explanations

However disputes about the causes of class dealignment remain  and we may distinguish here between sociological and political explanations of class dealignment.

1. As already mentioned working class dealignment could in principle be caused by changes in political attitudes which in turn were caused by sociological changes in the nature of the working class deriving from embourgeoisement and/or the growth of the new working class and/or increasing sectoral cleavages most notably between public sector and private sector workers and/or between consumers of private health care, education and transport consumers and consumers of publicly provided health care, education and transport and/or the growth of a "new working class" different in several respects from the "old working class."

2. From the 1950s onwards it was increasingly suggested that the more affluent sections of the working class were experiencing a process of Embourgeoisement. That is to say, these manual workers were becoming middle class. Their work was now less physically demanding; they were regularly consulted by management; they were better paid than many clerical workers; and it was claimed that consequently  they did not see themselves as working class and partly as a result of this, were unlikely to vote Labour which helped to explain the three successive defeats for Labour in the General Elections of 1951, 19551955 and 1959. If this theory was correct, the boundary between the middle class and the working class was becoming very blurred especially if some proletarianisation of the clerical worker was also occurring.

   However, the theory of Embourgeoisement was heavily criticised by Goldthorpe, Lockwood, Bechhofer and Platt in the so-called "Affluent Worker" studies of the late 1960s in which they aimed to compare the class positions of affluent factory workers, clerical workers and members of the traditional working class.  I shall not consider the details of the study here but in summary, Goldthorpe and CO claimed to have uncovered not a process of Embourgeoisement but the emergence of a "new working class" whose work experience, life styles, attitudes and values, although different from those of the traditional working class, were ,nevertheless, still recognisably working class. They argued also that a process of "normative convergence" between the "new working class" and the clerical workers was underway as clerical workers also increasingly joined trade unions attempting to halt the relative decline in their living standards  

   The authors found also that in the late 50s and early 60s, affluent manual workers were still highly likely  to support Labour as shown by the fact that  80% of their sample had voted Labour in the 1959 General Election.  However, the Goldthorpe Lockwood study also indicated that this affluent working class support for Labour was conditional, instrumental and potentially volatile such that under different political circumstances, the affluent manual workers in the Goldthorpe Lockwood study could easily imagine themselves voting Conservative . Working class support for Labour did fall  considerably in the 1970 General Election won by the Conservative Party but Labour recovered to some extent in the two General Elections of 1974, both of which it  won narrowly.

   The Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher won the General Election of 1979 which resulted in another significant decline in working class support for Labour such that by 1979 only 41% of C2 and 49% of DE voters were voting Labour. In 1983 Labour lost working class support not to the Conservatives but to the Lib/SDP Alliance but from1983 onwards working class support for the Labour Party gradually began to increase again. Nevertheless by  the  late 1980s, it was again argued by some that the Embourgeoisement  process was underway as the living standards of manual workers in secure employment did improve significantly and more and more of them bought their own houses , bought shares in privatised industries and were more likely to vote Conservative now than they had been in the 1960s, thus contributing importantly to Conservative General Election victories of 1979, 1983, 1987 and 1992.  Social class inequalities actually increased in the 1980s and early 1990s again discrediting the idea that affluent sections of the working class were now experiencing embourgeoisement after all but such ideas obviously influenced the development of Labour's electoral strategy from 1983 onwards as we shall see below in the materials on the General Elections of 1992 and 1997.

    

3. In their study "British Democracy at the Crossroads" [1985] P.Dunleavy and Christopher Husbands developed a so-called radical model of voting behaviour which departed in several respects from the traditional Party Identification Model but also called into question some of the conclusions of the Issue Voting Model[ to be discussed below]. According to Dunleavy and Husbands class dealignment occurred  because of the growth of sectoral cleavages  within both the working class and the middle class as between public sector and private sector workers and between consumers of publicly and privately provided housing, health care, education and transport. Public sector workers and consumers of publicly provided services are more likely to Labour  because they perceive Labour as the party most likely to improve public sector pay and conditions and to improve public services while private sector workers and consumers of privately  services may be more likely to vote Conservative because they oppose the higher levels of taxation necessary to defend public service employment and the expansion of public services which they do not use. Thus the theory helps to explain why middle class public sector employees and/or consumers of publicly provided services are disposed to vote Labour and working class private sector employees and/or consumers of privately provided services are more likely to vote Conservative. [Also in their radical model Dunleavy and Husbands claim that governments may use their own policies  to improve their own electoral prospects [as when the Conservatives embarked on a programme of council house sales; that the mass media help to spread a dominant class ideology whose widespread acceptance means that the voters' decisions are not as "rational" as is sometimes implied in models of issue voting and that the apparent correlation between voters policy preferences and their voting behaviour may arise because they have adjusted their stated policy preferences to conform to their voting decisions which have actually been determined by other factors. They argue  also that the power of governments to determine the timing of the general election gave the Conservatives a significant advantage in 1983 . However it did not help the Conservatives in 1997 and it may be that it is unlikely to help Labour in 2010.

4. In your studies of voting behaviour you are certainly likely to encounter other versions of the dominant ideology model which focus entirely ion ways in which the mass media disseminate a dominant class ideology . As we now see Dunleavy and Husbands' radical model incorporates the dominant ideology but also includes other important elements.

5. Class dealignment has also been explained by Ivor Crewe in terms of differences between the old and the new working class noting that in the General Elections of 1987 and 1992 working class people living in the North or renting council accommodation  or who were trade union members or who worked in the public sector[= "the old working class" ] were more likely to vote Labour than were working class people living in the South  or buying/owning their own accommodation or who were not members of trade unions or who worked in the private sector [="the new working class"]. The predicted future growth of the new working class and decline of the old working class could be expected to harm labour's electoral prospects or so it was thought in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Crewe noted also that there appeared to be significant divisions within the middle class: middle class voters who were university educated and worked in the public sector were less likely middle class voters working in the private sector to vote Conservative and more likely to vote for the Alliance Parties and for the Labour Party. Perhaps it would be those middle class voters who by 1997 would be especially attracted to New Labour?

6. We may adapt the above analyses to distinguish between Labour's core working class support and working class voters who occupy cross class locations. If Labour's core voters are those who live in the North and in council housing and work in the public sector and are members of trade unions it is clear that an increasing proportion of working class people do not fall into all of these categories so that they may be said to occupy cross class locations and as a result they may be less like than the core voters to vote Labour.

7. Increasing numbers of families may be seen as mixed class families where for example male partners are skilled manual workers and female partners are clerical workers. One or other of the partners may be fairly likely to vote against their "natural class party" because of their exposure to competing political messages.

• Class Dealignment: Individualistic, Political Explanations Based On the Issue Voting Model

1. Alternatively it came to be suggested in more individualistic models of voting behaviour known variously as rational voting, consumer voting or issue voting models that voters' decisions were now less influenced by social background factors [and especially by social class] and more influenced by individual voters' own assessments of different political parties' policies on issues which they considered to be salient. Thus, in simplified terms, if say Health, Education and Unemployment are seen by voters as the most salient issues of the general election campaign and if Labour has the preferred policies on these issues it is likely to win the general election. Especially in 1997 and 2001 but also to a lesser extent in 2005 voters preferred Labour policies to Conservative policies over a wide range of salient issues and it can be argued that this contributed significantly to Labour's three consecutive general election victories.

• Criticisms of the Issue Voting Model

1. However important criticisms were made of the issue voting model. It was argued both by Heath, Curtice and Jowell and by Dunleavy and Husbands that individual voting decisions might in reality be influenced mainly by social background factors and/or by the broad images and/or the broad ideologies of the political parties and that when asked about their detailed party policy preferences they would simply adjust their policy preferences to conform to their choice of preferred party. Their judgements on party policies derived from their voting decision but it certainly did not explain their voting decision.

2. It was pointed out also that in some cases parties lost general elections despite being the preferred party on several of the most salient issues. In these cases it came to be argued that even if economic competence did not necessarily register as one of the most salient issues it was in reality one of the main determinants of voting behaviour. In 1992 , for example , Labour was the preferred party on several of the apparently most salient issues but may have lost the 1992 General Election mainly because of its perceived lack of economic competence and also because John Major was ranked much more highly than Neil Kinnock as a potential Prime Minister.  

3. It was argued in particular by Heath, Curtice and Jowell [1985] that voting decision-making processes involved attempts by the voters to compare the broad ideologies of the political parties with their own ideological beliefs and that voters' party preferences derive much more from voters' ideological preferences than from their policy preferences on particular issues. More information on ideological voting is provided below.     

• Spatial Issues and Valence Issues

Spatial issues are those on which political parties  adopt different political positions: [for or against privatisation; for or against increased taxation; for or against increased government spending; for or against greater economic equality; for or against industrial relations legislation sympathetic to the trade unions  and so on]  whereas valence issues are those on which there is a general consensus among political parties and voters in that for example all political parties and all voters are in favour of increased economic efficiency , improved living standards, better health care and reduced crime and on these issues voters are assumed to choose between the political parties on the basis of their assessments of the likely competence of the political parties to achieve these objectives. Especially important are the voters assessments of the economic competence of the political parties but it is also possible that even if voters approve of a particular party's policies on particular issues they may still doubt the competence of that party to implement its stated policies effectively thereby undermining that party's electoral prospects. Also, if it should be the case that actual differences in party policies on specific issues are small this will obviously increase the significance of valence issues as voters are more likely to vote on the basis of their assessments of overall governing competence. For this reason valence issues may have been especially significant in the General Elections of 1997 , 2001 and perhaps to a lesser extent in 2005.

•  Leadership and Party Image and Valence Issues .

It is very difficult to estimate  the relative importance of party identification, issues, ideologies and leadership effects on voting behaviour. One party leader may be more popular than the leader of a competing party partly as a result of his/her own leadership qualities but also partly because of greater party identification with his/her political party, because his/her party espouses a more popular broad ideology or because it has more popular policies on the most salient political issues of the day.

In the era of strong party identification prior to the 1970s it was usually argued that leadership effects on voting behaviour were much weaker than the effects of  party identification. There were very strong correlations between party identification and leadership preferences and where there was no such correlation it was clear that voting decisions were influenced more strongly by voters' party identification than by their leadership preferences. Thus, for example Butler and Stokes calculated that in the 1960s Labour identifiers who preferred the Conservative leader nevertheless voted Labour rather than Conservative in the ratio 2:1 and that Conservative identifiers who preferred the Labour leader still voted Conservative in the ratio 3:1.

In general elections between 1964 and 2005  it is clear that the party with the most popular leader usually won the general election although there were exceptions as when the Conservatives won in 1970 although Labour leader Harold Wilson was more popular than Ted Heath and in 1979 when Labour leader James Callaghan was more popular than Margaret Thatcher.

It has been argued more recently that in the era of declining party identification and increasing mass media focus on the political leaders that political leadership is an increasingly important influence on voting behaviour. This may arise especially if party policy differences on spatial salient issues are  relatively small because in these circumstances perceptions of overall governing competence to deliver on valence issues [such as improved living standards, better health care and reduced crime] are  likely to be more significant determinants of voting behaviour and it is the perceived abilities [or otherwise] of the  party leaders [and other significant members of the leadership team] which are crucial to the creation of an image of governing competence.

Using this line of argument voters relative preference for John Major over Neil Kinnock in 1992 helped to improve the Conservatives' overall ratings for economic competence and thereby helped them to win the 1992 General Election while voters' preferences for Tony Blair over John Major [1997], William Hague [2001 ] and Michael Howard [2205] are considered by many to have been important influences on the General Election results of 1997, 29001 and 2005 although it has also been argued that Blair's declining popularity did cost Labour votes in 2005 although he was at least still more popular than Michael Howard. Nevertheless some controversy still exists: some famous analysts such as Ivor Crewe argued for example that in 2001 the Conservatives lost more because William Hague was unable to offset  the unpopular policies and image of the Conservative Party than because he actually added to Conservative unpopularity. 

• Ideological Voting     

The  development of the ideological model of voting behaviour is associated most especially with Heath, Curtice and Jowell's study "How Britain Votes " [1985] . This is a long, detailed,  complex study but its main elements may be summarised as follows.

1. Individual voters are socialised to accept particular attitudes and values much as in the party identification model but whereas in the party identification model it tends to be argued that most voters' political preferences lack ideological coherence, Heath , Curtice and Jowell argue that in many cases voters' attitudes and values can be combined to form recognisable ideological positions which exercise a major influence on voting behaviour and indeed a more significant influence on voting behaviour than voters' stated preferred policies on the most salient issues of the campaign.

2. Most voters vote for the party whose general ideological position is closest to their own general ideological position and on this basis the Conservatives won in 1983 primarily because more voters favoured their general ideological position by comparison with the ideological positions of the Labour Party and the Alliance parties. This does not mean that the Conservatives won because of the growing overall popularity of Thatcherism : they won because Thatcherism was more popular than the decidedly unpopular version of radical social democracy on offer from the Labour Party in 1983.

3. Voters ideological positions derive to a considerable extent from their social class backgrounds as in the party identification model and changes in the class structure involving the relative growth of the "middle classes" and the relative decline  of the working class explained perhaps as much as 50% of Labour's decline in popularity between 1964 and 1983.

4.  However Heath, Curtice and Jowell emphasise that they are not offering a purely deterministic model of voting behaviour in which social class position determines ideological values and ideological values determine voting behaviour.

5. Instead it is perfectly possible that political parties can take actions which will increase or reduce their levels of voter support beyond the levels which would be predicted by the overall shape of the class structure. Thus it is argued that in 1983 Labour's more radical ideological position was especially electorally damaging but so too were voters' perceptions as poorly led, economically incompetent, disunited and saddled with unpopular policies.

6. Thus Heath , Curtice and Jowell do not entirely reject the issue voting model : they argue instead that voting behaviour is based mainly by voters' class related ideological positions but that leadership, economic competence, unity and policies on salient political issues also exercise some influence over voting behaviour.

7. They themselves state that they are combining in their model the most useful elements of the party identification and issue voting models. 

• Key Political Events

Individual elections may well be influenced by key political events. Possible examples include the following.

1. The Winter of Discontent of 1978-9 which may have undermined Labour's electoral prospects in the 1979 General Election.

2. The Falklands War of 1982 which may have contributed to the increased popularity of the Conservatives during the run in to the 1983 General Election.

3. The resignation of Mrs Thatcher and her replacement by John Major in 1990 which improved the Conservatives' electoral prospects in 1992.

4. The ERM crisis of September 1992 which undermined the Conservatives' reputation for economic competence and contributed to their electoral defeat in 1997 .

5. The involvement of the UK in the Iraq War from 2003 onwards which in various indirect ways may have adversely affected Labour in the 2005 General Election.

• The Voting Context Model

So far it has been argued that voting behaviour is influenced to some extent by sociological variables such as class, gender , ethnicity, age, region and religion as in the party identification model; that it is influenced by voters' assessments of party policies on salient political issues, as in the issue voting model; that sectoral cleavages within social classes exercise an important influence as in the radical model; that mass media influences are significant as in the dominant ideology model which also appears as an element of the radical model; and, in the ideological voting model  that voters are influenced more by broad ideological factors than by specific political policies on salient issues. All of these models contribute importantly  to the overall explanation of voting behaviour.

In the voting context model  it is emphasised that although voting decisions are influenced by all of the factors mentioned above ,they also vary according to the differing nature of elections and the differing circumstances surrounding them. This model focuses on the explanations of why turnout is much higher in general elections than in local and European elections; why turnout in parliamentary elections is declining; why individuals abstain from voting; why they may vote tactically and why they may depart from their usual voting behaviour in particular elections.

Very useful information on the Voting Context Model [and on voting behaviour in general may be found in British Politics in Focus [ R. Bentley, A. Dobson, M. Grant and D. Roberts 2000] and you may also like to discuss the European Elections of 2009 as an example of  elections which were influenced very much by the special political context  in which they were held which derived from the controversies surrounding MPs expenses.

• Future Documents

Early in the New Year I shall post some essays in which I try to assess the relative usefulness of the various models of voting behaviour outlined above. Meanwhile this is clearly an important task for yourselves!

• The General Election of 1992

BBC Coverage of the 1992 General Election: Once you reach this page you will see that although it is entitled Politics 97.it nevertheless provided good detailed coverage of the 1992 General Election. The links to the left of this page take you to more 1997 General Election pages  but for more information on the 1992 General Election you can scroll down to the bottom of the pages and follow the links provided. However I have also copied these links immediately below and again in the section on the analysis of the 1992 General Election result!