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Are the Liverpool Liberals Really Different? A Path Analytic Interpretation of Local Voting in Liverpool 1973–82

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Michael Laver
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Extract

It has already been demonstrated that part of the success of the Liverpool Liberals in local elections can be attributed to split-ticket voting by Liverpool electors. In May 1979, when city council and Westminster elections took place simultaneously, substantial proportions of voters went into a polling booth and voted for different parties at local and national level. This note attempts a further investigation of the basis of Liberal support in Liverpool local elections. Its main purpose is to test two hypotheses.

1. ‘Liberal voting displays a weaker causal linkage to the socio-economic structure of Liverpool wards than does voting for the other two parties.’

2. ‘Liberal voting is much more directly related to ward turnout than is voting for the other two parties.’

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , April 1984 , pp. 243 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

1 See Cox, Harvey and Laver, Michael, ‘Local and National Voting in British Elections’, Parliamentary Affairs, XXXII (1980), 383–93.Google Scholar

2 There are two major qualifications to this statement. Occupational categories were not used because the 1981 figures were not available aggregated to ward level at the time of the analysis. Other path analyses of the relationship between voting and the 1971 census variables do show, however, that occupational categories do not have a significant independent effect on voting, but operate through intervening variables such as housing tenure and wealth (measured by car ownership). The ward percentages of people in Housing Association tenancies was included for 1981, even though it was not available in the 1971 census returns. This is because it was expected to be a crucial component in the second factor that was used in the path analysis, a matter that was considered sufficiently important to sacrifice strict comparability.

3 Non-voting and ‘party’ voting were measured as the percentage of the ward electorate either not voting or voting for ‘party’. The figures used were average figures for the 1973–78, and 1980–82 time periods. (The 1979 local election was excluded because of its atypical association with a Westminster election and consequently high turnout.) Average figures were used because the intention was to model the broad ‘partyness’ of a ward, rather than a specific election result. Obviously, the census data remain unchanged for each election in the relevant time period.