Donald Stokes’s research while affiliated with Princeton University and other places

The role played by the parties in giving shape and direction to the behaviour of voters is so taken for granted that its importance is easily missed. Without it, however, the mass of the people could scarcely participate in regular transfers of power. Individual electors accept the parties as leading actors on the political stage and see in partisan terms the meaning of the choices which the universal franchise puts before them. British government would be fundamentally changed if parties were absent from the voter’s mind.

The electorate is by no means a constant, unchanging mass. Individual voters die and are replaced by new ones, perhaps fifty years younger, whose ideas and preferences may be quite unlike those their elders carried to the grave. There are also voters who leave the country, and others who come into it from the Commonwealth or other parts of the world. The scale of these demographic changes is sufficient to yield a 10 per cent turnover of the electorate within a five-year Parliament.

There has been a natural inclination in electoral studies to consider single elections. While the focus is a useful one, it is important to see that one election with all its preliminaries is but a moment in the life of the nation or the individual citizen and that much is to be gained by taking a longer view. The processes of change are hardly to be understood without doing so. We begin here with the development of political attitudes during the lifetime of the individual voter, identifying several phases of the political ‘life cycle’ and the characteristics of political attitudes and behaviour that are distinctive to each phase.

‘A Government is not supported a hundredth part so much by the constant, uniform, quiet prosperity of the country as by those damned spurts which Pitt used to have just in the nick of time.’ So wrote Brougham to Thomas Creevey in 1814. The fact that he could attribute the Tory hegemony in the 1790s to the same cause that was commonly given as the reason for the party’s success in the 1950s shows how deeply rooted in British politics is the idea that the Government is accountable for good and bad times. Popular acceptance of this idea means that the state of the economy has loomed large in the minds of all modern Prime Ministers as they pondered on the timing of a dissolution. And in the post-Keynesian era more than one government has been tempted to seek a favourable context for an election by expanding the economy, although dissolutions are more easily timed to coincide with expansion than the other way round.

The sheer complexity of the processes which change the parties’ strength is underlined again and again throughout this book. Indeed, the variety of the factors at work has dominated our discussion of the physical replacement of the electorate, of fundamental shifts of party alignment, and of more transient variations of electoral strength. Any catalogue of the factors involved in these processes must include some that are to be found in the voter’s mind, some in the circumstances that govern his chances of being born and of surviving to any given age, some in his interaction with his family and with his neighbours and workmates, some in the structure and operations of the communications media, some in the behaviour of political leaders and party organizations, and some in the trends of the economy or in world events — and even this list is far from exhaustive.

Over the years, as we have seen, large numbers of voters shifted their allegiance. What specific issues moved them to change? We have stressed the diversity of political behaviour — the numerous cancelling cross-switches, some of them often ascribable to personal events unconnected with public affairs; we cannot hope to ‘explain’ all the strands in the pattern of change. But we can examine the potential contribution to the aggregate movements made by a few of the most publicized issues and we can suggest how well, at different points in the decade, they satisfy the three conditions for major impact set out in the last chapter. We shall at least be able to show that the issues to which the parties gave most prominence were not always those which had the greatest potential for change. We shall, moreover, demonstrate the way in which the power of particular issues to affect the party balance could alter dramatically in a short space of time. We leave till later chapters the electors’ more generalized images of the parties and the leaders that are, of course, inextricably linked with their reaction to issues. We also, because of their special character, put on one side economic issues for treatment in a separate chapter.

We must look outward to the voters’ environment as well as inward to their attitudes and beliefs if we are to explain the links of class and party. There is a sociological as well as a psychological reality to these connections, and we must move beyond our analysis of the beliefs linking class and politics in the voter’s mind to consider aspects of the social milieu which forge a link between class and party. We shall first examine the transmission of social and political identifications in the initial social group, the childhood family. We shall then extend this analysis to consider ways in which this inheritance is aided or inhibited by education and the social environments of the later years. Such a discussion poses interesting questions about the political effects of broad changes in the structure of the economy and in Britain’s social policies for education and housing. At the end of the chapter we shall extend the treatment of the social milieu to include other sources of the political information and political cues to which the voter is exposed.

The class alignment has, as we have seen, supplied British politics its dominant motif for half a century. Much of the electoral history of this period can be presented in terms of a process of realignment on class lines that is in some respects still under way. It may therefore seem paradoxical to suggest that the class basis of party allegiance was becoming weaker in the 1960s. After all, the working class was at least as heavily Labour in the youngest age-group as in the older cohorts. Indeed, the 1960s continued a long process of evolution.

A two-party struggle between Conservative and Labour with party loyalty largely linked to class has dominated British politics for forty years and more. It is easy to forget that at the start of this century the basis of politics was very different. The Labour Party scarcely mattered and religion was at least as important as class in shaping partisanship. The fundamental realignments that have taken place over the last two generations have only slowly obliterated the old structure and, as we suggested in Chapter 3, it is not only in elderly survivors of a bygone era but also in their descendants that its political patterns can still be traced.