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Two Models of Class Voting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

David L. Weakliem
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Extract

Until the late 1960s, most informed observers agreed with Pulzer's well-known claim that ‘class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail’. More recently, however, most analysts have come to believe that there has been a decline in the association between class and party choice, a development that is generally referred to as ‘class dealignment’. Nevertheless, several researchers have challenged this new consensus and argued that there has been little or no trend in the association between class and party.

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Notes and Comments
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , April 1995 , pp. 254 - 270
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

1 Pulzer, Peter, Political Representation and Elections in Britain, revised edn (London: Allen & Unwin, 1972), p. 102.Google Scholar

2 Särlvik, Bo and Crewe, Ivor, Decade of Dealignment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 82–91Google Scholar; Franklin, Mark N., The Decline of Class Voting in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; Kelley, Jonathan, McAllister, Ian and Mughan, Anthony, ‘The Decline of Class Revisited: Class and Party in England, 1964–79’, American Political Science Review, 79 (1985), 719–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Richard and McAllister, Ian, Voters Begin to Choose: From Closed-Class to Open Elections in Britain (London: Sage, 1986).Google Scholar

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4 Crewe, Ivor, ‘On the Death and Resurrection of Class Voting’, Political Studies, 34 (1986), 620–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose.Google Scholar

5 Heath, et al. , Understanding Political Change, p. 64.Google Scholar

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8 Dunleavy, Patrick, ‘Class Dealignment in Britain Revisited’, West European Politics, 10 (1987), 400–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose, pp. 8–9.Google Scholar

10 Heath, , Jowell, and Curtice, , How Britain Votes, p. 19.Google Scholar

11 This type of model is often applied to mobility tables, where it is known as ‘quasi-independence’. The basic quasi-independence model can also be estimated as a log-linear model. Most of the models fitted in this Note, however, place restrictions on the size of the latent classes that make it impossible to estimate them as log-linear models.

12 ‘Liberal’ will be use throughout to include the Alliance, Social Democrats and Liberal Democrats.

13 See Thomas, George B., Calculus and Analytic Geometry, 4th edn (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1972), pp. 728–31, for a discussion of these methods.Google Scholar

14 Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Benin to Choose, pp. 38–9.Google Scholar

15 Dunleavy, , ‘Class Dealignment in Britain Revisited’, pp. 414–16Google Scholar; Franklin, Mark N., ‘How the Decline of Class Voting Opened the Way to Radical Change in British Polities’, British Journal of Political Science, 14 (1984), 483–508.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Crewe, , ‘Changing Votes and Unchanging Voters’, p. 339Google Scholar; Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose, p. 52.Google Scholar

17 Campbell, Angus, Converse, P. E., Miller, W. E. and Stokes, D. E., The American Voter (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976; reprint of 1960 edn), p. 220Google Scholar; see also Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn (New York: St Martin's, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18 Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose, p. 8.Google Scholar

19 See Goodman, Leo A., ‘Measures, Models, and Graphical Displays in the Analysis of Cross-Classified Data’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 86 (1991), 1085–1111CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Becker, Mark P. and Clogg, Clifford C., ‘Analysis of Sets of Two-Way Contingency Tables Using Association Models’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 84 (1989), 142–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for detailed discussions of these models.

20 Downs, Anthony, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957).Google Scholar

21 Because there is no natural scale for these parameters, they are usually standardized by setting the mean equal to zero and the variance equal to one.

22 Goodman, , ‘The Analysis of Cross-Classified Data,’ pp. 112–17.Google Scholar

23 Because it is not possible to observe the scale for the underlying dimension, the parameters must be standardized. This is normally done by making the γ and τ scores have mean of zero and variance of one.

24 Crewe, , ‘Changing Votes and Unchanging Voters’, p. 339.Google Scholar

25 Gilula, Zvi and Haberman, Shelby J., ‘Canonical Analysis of Contingency Tables by Maximum Likelihood’, Journal of the American Statistical Association, 81 (1986), 780–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see Weakliem, David L., ‘The Two Lefts? Occupation and Party Choice in France, Italy, and the Netherlands’, American Journal of Sociology, 96 (1991), 1327–61, for an application.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

26 A computer program (CDAS) to fit association models, along with a variety of related models, is available from Scott Eliason, Department of Sociology, University of Iowa.

27 The data are given in Heath, et al. , Explaining Political Change, pp. 68–9.Google Scholar The class schema is discussed in Heath, , Jowell, and Curtice, , How Britain Votes, p. 16.Google Scholar

28 The class composition of voters for minor parties, primarily the Scottish Nationalist Party and Plaid Cymru, is significantly different from that of Liberal voters. The Liberal electorate is primarily from the middle class, while voters for minor parties are drawn more evenly from all classes. Because of the small numbers, including minor party voters would complicate the analysis while adding little new information. In 1992, voters for the old Liberal party are also excluded.

29 Crewe, , ‘On the Death and Resurrection of Class Voting,’ p. 627Google Scholar; Rose, and McAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose, pp. 138–9.Google Scholar

30 Most of these models cannot be fitted using standard packages for latent class models. Maximum-likelihood estimates were obtained using the method of scoring. GLIM 3.77 macros for these models are available from the author.

31 Crewe, , ‘Changing Votes and Unchanging Voters’, p. 339.Google Scholar

32 The model can produce negative estimates of the number of class loyalists. The variation that could reasonably be expected to occur from chance given these sample sizes is fairly large; consequently, the appearance of some negative estimates is not surprising when the true number of class loyalists is small. Because a negative number of class loyalists would have no sensible interpretation, I have reported negative estimates as zero.

33 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 194, 419.Google Scholar

34 The fit of A2 is identical to that of the log-linear model of constant class-party association used by Heath, et al. , Understanding Political Change, p. 70Google Scholar, because the two-dimensional model uses the same number of parameters for the class-party association as does the unordered model.

35 It would also be possible to allow the class or party scores to change between elections. Since it is possible to achieve a good fit without permitting such changes, they will not be considered further.

36 Because the dimensions are defined to be orthogonal, conclusions about changes in class voting would be essentially identical if the second dimension were entirely omitted. Nevertheless, the existence of a second dimension, and the lack of change in the strength of that dimension, are interesting in the light of theories that predict the development of new class cleavages that are not reducible to the traditional opposition between middle class and working class. Such theories would predict that changes in class voting should involve both dimensions. See Weakliem, , ‘The Two Lefts?’, for a more detailed discussion.Google Scholar

37 Heath, Anthony, Jowell, Roger and Curtice, John, ‘Trendless Fluctuation: A Reply to Crewe’, Political Studies, 35 (1987), 259–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Evans, Geoffrey, Heath, Anthony and Payne, Clive, ‘Modelling Trends in the Class/Party Relationship 1964–87’, Electoral Studies, 10 (1991), 99–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

39 The linear trend term is also significant when the sample is restricted to the 1964–87 period used by Evans, Heath and Payne.

40 The standard method of hypothesis testing involves fitting a comprehensive model that includes both alternative models as special cases. Because the latent class and association models have different functional forms, this procedure is not possible here. It is, however, possible to apply tests for ‘non-nested’ models developed by Davidson, Russell and MacKinnon, James G., ‘Several Tests for Model Specification in the Presence of Alternative Hypotheses’, Econometrica, 49 (1981), 781–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and extended by Weakliem, David L., ‘Comparing Non-Nested Models for Count Data’, in Marsden, P. V., ed., Sociological Methodology 1992 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1992).Google Scholar The results of these tests support the conclusions in the text: none of the models are fully adequate, but the latent class models are rejected more strongly.

41 Rose, and MacAllister, , Voters Begin to Choose, pp. 37–50Google Scholar; Crewe, , ‘On the Death and Resurrection of Class Voting’.Google Scholar

42 Heath, , Jowell, and Curtice, , ‘Trendless Fluctuation’Google Scholar; Crewe, , ‘On the Death and Resurrection of Class Voting’.Google Scholar

43 Heath, et al. , Understanding Political Change, p. 78.Google Scholar