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Community Cohesion and Voter Turnout in English Parliamentary Constituencies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Munroe Eagles  and
Stephen Erfle
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Extract

Voting turnout varies both over time and across space. In Britain there has been a secular trend in the postwar period for decreasing turnout at parliamentary elections (from a high of 84.1 per cent in 1950 to 75.4 percent in 1987, with a low point of 71.8 per cent in 1970). Such temporal variations in turnout are dwarfed in scale, however, by differences in turnout across constituencies at the same election. In the 1970 election, for example, turnout ranged from a low of 44.9 per cent in Stepney to 85.3 per cent in Cornwall North. Though diminished slightly, variation in constituency turnout rates remained significant in the June 1983 election (from a low of 51.8 percent in City of London and Westminster South to a high of 81.1 percent in Leicestershire NW).

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Notes and Comments
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , January 1989 , pp. 115 - 125
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

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22 The 1981 census tables only provide figures on those travelling to work by car, bus, rail or underground. Those remaining must, therefore, travel to work on foot or by bicycle, but there is no way to distinguish the relative proportions of these. We report coefficients for both the percentage walking (WALK) and walking and cycling (BALK) for the earlier time periods since the former permits a stronger inference about the proximity of homes and workplaces.

23 The logistic transformation of the percentage of voter turnout is defined as: Logistic (turnout) = log (turnout/OCX) – turnout)) where turnout is the percentage of the eligible voters in a constituency who cast a ballot in the election. This transformation is appropriate in situations where the dependent variable has a limited range (in this case the range is zero to 100 per cent). The transformed variable has a range of negative infinity to positive infinity; thus predictions cannot be made outside the allowable range of the dependent variable (as would be the case if the dependent variable were bounded by 0 and 100).

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26 We departed from Denver and Hands by excluding the census category ‘non-manual workers’ from this class measure because the class location of these lower white-collar workers is ambiguous. Moreover, the proportion of employers and managers alone was identified by Miller, William, Electoral Dynamics in Britain Since 1917 (London: Macmillan, 1977), p. 64CrossRefGoogle Scholar, as one of the strongest single predictors of turnout.

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32 The same pattern holds in other years as well. Indeed, three of the four largest residuals in 1970 are these three constituencies. The fourth, Morpeth, is also a mining constituency (34.8 per cent mining), which has the fifth highest Hscg score. Morpeth also exhibited the fifth largest positive residual in 1966.