SURVEY RESULTS

Survey Results



Survey Results

Hypothesis

Non-manual workers are more likely to have voted than manual workers.

Introduction

The analysis of voting behaviour is known also as "psephology" deriving from the Greek "psephos" [a pebble] with which the ancient Athenians indicated their voting decisions. Psephologists in the UK distinguish between the period up till 2010 which they characterise as the era of electoral stability, two party dominance, party identification and class alignment and the period up till the present day which is described as the era of declining party identification/partisan dealignment and class dealignment although there are also important arguments as to whether the general elections of 1997 and 2001 ushered in a realignment of UK voting behaviour.

Crosstab

Count

Gender

Total

Male

Female

Q4

Strongly Agree

16

0

16

Agree

36

18

54

Disagree

3

11

14

Strongly Disagree

2

9

11

Undecided/Unsure

2

3

5

Total

59

41

100

In this document I shall focus especially on the ways in which the party identification model of voting behaviour was used in Butler and Stokes' "Political Change in Britain" [1969: second edition 1974] to explain relationships between social class and voting behaviour. Working class voters and middle class voters were shown to vote mainly for the Labour and Conservative parties respectively although there were also significant percentages of deviant voters who did not vote predictably according to their social class.

Revolutionaries are quite rightly distrustful about psephology - the study of voting behaviour. Voting figures and opinion polls provide static images of partial aspects of people's views. They ignore the contradictory ways in which people think, the way they will express one view in certain situations (for instance, if faced with a voting paper that comes through the letter box) and quite a different view in other situations (for instance, at a workplace meeting). Above all, they take no account of the way in which ideas can change in struggle. So they end up simply reflecting the ideological status quo, instead of showing how it could be changed.

Discussion and Analysis

Psephologists at the time demonstrated that voting behaviour was clearly correlated with a range of social variables including social class, age, gender, region, religion and "race" or ethnicity and that social class was the most significant influence on voting behaviour which enabled P.G.J. Pulzer to write in Political Representation and Election (1967) that "Class is the basis of British party policies: all else is embellishment and detail",  a conclusion which was endorsed fully by David Butler and Donald Stokes in their famous study "Political Change in Britain (Johnston, 2001, pp. 44).

These main elements can be stated as follows (Johnston, 2001, pp. 44).

Approximately 90% of respondents in Butler and Stokes' surveys stated that they did identify with either the Conservative Party, the Labour Party or, to a lesser extent the Liberal Party and the respondents'  party identifications usually remained relatively stable over the course of several elections and often throughout voters' lives sometimes hardening with age.

Their party identification was correlated strongly with their actual voting behaviour  such that, for example, in the Local Elections 85% of Conservative identifiers, 95% of Labour identifiers and 88% of Liberal identifiers voted in accordance with their stated party ...