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The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: A Comment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Martin Harrop
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Extract

In a recent article, Patrick Dunleavy argues powerfully for an independent effect of ‘consumption locations’ on the political process in general, and voting patterns in particular, in Britain (‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership and State Intervention in Consumption Processes’, this Journal, IX (1979), 409–44). Through an analysis of the housing and transport markets, Dunleavy suggests that people involved in ‘collective’ modes of consumption (such as council tenants and public transport users) are as a result of their own distinctive interests more likely to incline to the left than people involved in more ‘individual’ modes of consumption (such as home-owners and car-owners). Dunleavy suggests further that since consumption locations are at least partially independent of occupational class, the spread of home-ownership and car-ownership in the post-war period may help to account for the declining electoral influence of occupational class.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , July 1980 , pp. 388 - 398
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

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References

1 Dunleavy, , ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment’, p. 412.Google Scholar

2 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn. (London: Macmillan, 1975). p. 112.Google Scholar

3 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 132.Google Scholar

4 Equally, Dunleavy is probably right to criticize some of the more facile interpretations ofthat puzzling but persistent tendency for working-class people with a telephone to be more likely to vote Conservative than those without. But this minor psephological mystery still awaits its (dis)solution; it is certainly more difficult to make the effect go away than Dunleavy believes.

5 Dunleavy, , ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment’, p. 443.Google Scholar

6 Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, Social Survey Division, General Household Survey 1977 (London: HMSO, 1979)Google Scholar, Table 2·21, p. 16.

7 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 73, pp. 77–81.Google Scholar

8 Department of the Environment, National Dwelling and Housing Survey (London: HMSO, 1979)Google Scholar, Table 4, p. 29. Dunleavy does not distinguish in his empirical analysis between outright owners and owners still paying off their mortgage although he does note that the economic interests and demographic profiles of those two groups are not the same. Outright owners are in fact the more solidly Conservative group: a cumulated analysis of twenty-two national random surveys conducted by National Opinion Polls between October 1977 and April 1978 and based on 43,650 interviews showed a Conservative: Labour breakdown of 61:30 among outright owners, compared to 51:39 among those buying their home with a mortgage and 44:46 among the population as a whole. See NOP Market Research Ltd., Key Issues: Combined Analysis (London: NOP. no date).Google Scholar

9 The association of age and Conservatism is presumably one of the reasons why the people most heavily dependent on the state in Dunleavy's analysis (namely, the pensioners and others included in social grade E) in fact prove to be rather more Conservative than the semi-skilled and unskilled workers in grade D.

10 National Economic Development Office, BMRB Housing Consumer Survey (London: HMSO, 1977), p. 42.Google Scholar Although it would have been preferable to keep the priority and desirability dimensions separate, this conflation is not likely to affect the interpretation. The items shown in the table were selected from a larger pool of forty-three policies rated; the excluded items do not have such obvious effects on the relative positions of the various tenures. ‘Don't knows’ have been excluded from the table; a constant ‘don't know’ rate was also assumed in combining the scores for certain groups. The results shown in the table may be affected somewhat by information about housing policy given to the respondent after rating certain policies; see the original report for details. The survey (N = 1,590) was a random sample conducted in too constituencies between 20 October and 7 November 1975.

11 BMRB Housing Consumer Survey, p. 9.Google Scholar Emphases in original.

12 Market and Opinion Research International, British Public Opinion: General Election 1979, Final Report (London: MORI, 1979), pp. 55–6.Google Scholar

13 King, Anthony, ‘Polls Dispute Tory Lead’, The Observer, 8 04 1979.Google Scholar

14 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 81–94.Google Scholar

15 Alker, Hayward R. Jr. ‘A Typology of Ecological Fallacies’, in Dogan, Mattei and Rokkan, Stein, eds., Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969). PP. 69–86.Google Scholar

16 Although Dunleavy does distinguish empirically between one-car and two-car households, the more significant division, as his own theoretical analysis suggests, is surely between those who are and those who are not forced to rely on the vagaries of public transport. Similarly, the division between single-home and multiple-home owners is never likely to be as significant as the current division between owners and tenants, whatever changes in housing patterns the future may hold in store.

17 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 203–8Google Scholar; Crewe, Ivor, Särlvik, Bo and Alt, James, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, British Journal of Political Science, VII (1977), 129–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the figures cited by Dunleavy, the 1950s saw the most rapid growth of home-ownership while car-ownership grew most dramatically in the first half of the 1960s. The economic benefits of house-ownership and car-ownership do not of course remain constant over time and Dunleavy does seem to regard home-owners as an increasingly cossetted group.

18 The Gallup Poll, ‘Voting Behaviour in Britain 1945–1974’ in Rose, Richard, ed., Studies in British Politics (London: Macmillan, 1976), pp. 204–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and also based on Gallup data, Alford, Robert, Parly and Society: The Anglo-American Democracies (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1963), p. 133.Google Scholar

19 See Gallup Political Index, 06 1979, p. 9.Google Scholar See also Crewe, , Särlvik, and All, ‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, p. 169Google Scholar; and Market and Opinion Research International, British Public Opinion: General Election 1979, Final Report, p. 7.Google Scholar

20 Market and Opinion Research International, British Public Opinion: General Election 1979, Final Report, p. 6.Google Scholar

21 Dunleavy, , ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment’, p. 443.Google Scholar

22 Atkinson, A. B., The Economics of Inequality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Chaps. 2 and 4.Google Scholar