Hope's comments provide me with the opportunity to correct one statistical error which unfortunately found its way into the original article. He points out that, as the correlations rac and rbc were each about +0.2, deviations from the expected level of car- and house-ownership given a constituency's proportion of manual workers can only account for about 4 per cent of the variance in deviations from the expected Conservative share of the two-party vote. This, it is gently implied, hardly amounts to convincing evidence on behalf of the embourgeoisement thesis. The correlation coefficients given in the article were serious underestimates, however, and are in fact +0.571 and +0.328 respectively. Thus, deviations from the expected level of houseownership explain almost a third (32.6 per cent) of the variance in deviations from the expected Conservative share of the two-party vote, and deviations from the expected level of car-ownership explain over one-tenth (10.8 per cent) – which is more substantial
1 See, for example, Rogin, Michael, ‘Politics, emotion and the Wallace Vote’, British Journal of Sociology, XX (1969), 27–49.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
2 See Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 147.Google Scholar