Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263 www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud Party identification, economic perceptions, and voting in British General Elections, 1974–97 David Sanders ∗ Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK Abstract Levels of strong partisanship are much lower in Britain than they were 30 years ago. At the same time, contemporary voters are often likened to discriminating—or fickle—consumers, who are far more likely to cast their votes on the basis of relatively short-term factors such as the condition of the economy. The relative importance of party identification and economic perceptions as influences on support for the major parties in British general elections between 1974 and 1997 is considered in this article. The evidence suggests that, notwithstanding the decline of strong partisanship, party identification has not lost much of its explanatory power in accounting for voting. Indeed, the effect that identification exerts on party support has remained broadly constant since the mid-1970s. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Partisanship; Economic voting; Party support 1. Introduction Party identification (or partisanship) was one of the key concepts developed by Warren Miller and his associates in The American Voter to explain why a high proportion of US voters supported the same party over several elections. The idea that most US voters have a ‘stable and enduring affective attachment’ (Campbell et al., 1960, p. 121) to one or other of the major parties has subsequently been employed in a wide range of other electoral contexts. In Britain, the concept of partisanship has proved particularly useful in explaining why voting patterns are relatively stable over time, with relatively small swings from one party to another between elections ∗ Tel.: +44-1206-87-3557; fax: +44-1206-87-3598. E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Sanders). 0261-3794/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0261-3794(02)00014-8
Party identification, economic perceptions, andvoting in British General Elections, 1974–97
David Sanders∗
Department of Government, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ, UK
Abstract
Levels of strong partisanship are much lower in Britain than they were 30 years ago. Atthe same time, contemporary voters are often likened to discriminating—or fickle—consumers,who are far more likely to cast their votes on the basis of relatively short-term factors suchas the condition of the economy. The relative importance of party identification and economicperceptions as influences on support for the major parties in British general elections between1974 and 1997 is considered in this article. The evidence suggests that, notwithstanding thedecline of strong partisanship, party identification has not lost much of its explanatory powerin accounting for voting. Indeed, the effect that identification exerts on party support hasremained broadly constant since the mid-1970s. 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Partisanship; Economic voting; Party support
1. Introduction
Party identification (or partisanship) was one of the key concepts developed byWarren Miller and his associates inThe American Voter to explain why a highproportion of US voters supported the same party over several elections. The ideathat most US voters have a ‘stable and enduring affective attachment’ (Campbell etal., 1960, p. 121) to one or other of the major parties has subsequently been employedin a wide range of other electoral contexts. In Britain, the concept of partisanshiphas proved particularly useful in explaining why voting patterns are relatively stableover time, with relatively small swings from one party to another between elections
∗ Tel.: +44-1206-87-3557; fax:+44-1206-87-3598.E-mail address: [email protected] (D. Sanders).
0261-3794/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/S0261-3794(02)00014-8
240 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
(Butler and Stokes, 1974). There is clear evidence, however, that Britain began toexperience a decline in ‘strong’ partisanship during the 1970s (Sarlvik and Crewe,1983). This trend, moreover, has continued ever since.
In response to this development, several studies have pointed to a concomitantrise in ‘consumer voting’ (Himmelweit, 1981; Franklin, 1985). By this account, aspartisanship has weakened, voters have become more like discerning consumers,picking and choosing between parties on the basis of relatively short-term consider-ations, and frequently switching their preferences from one party to another. One ofthe key ‘short-term’ factors in British elections in recent years has been voters’perceptions of the economy. Aggregate analyses have shown that these perceptionstend to vary considerably over the lifetime of a parliament, and that they correlatevery strongly with patterns of party support (Sanders, 1991; Clarke et al., 1997).Unlike their more faithful partisan predecessors, ‘consumer voters’ tend to supportthe incumbent party if the economy is going well and to support the opposition ifit is not.
This paper focuses on two main questions. First, has the weakening of partisanshipsince the 1970s reduced the importance of party identification in the decision calculusof British voters? In other words, has partisanship become less important as a predic-tor of vote choice? Second, have economic perceptions increased in importance assources of electoral preference in recent years? And, in particular, have theyincreased in importance relative to party identification? Ideally, these two questionswould be investigated empirically over the entire period since the first British Elec-tion Study (BES) data were collected in 1964. The lack of suitable BES data aboutperceptions of the economy, however, means that the empirical analysis is restrictedto the 1974–97 period.
The ideas underpinning the claim that party identification has diminished in impor-tance as an influence on voting are reviewed in Section 2. The perennial questionabout how party identification should be measured is addressed in Section 3. InSection 4, the model specification developed to test the hypotheses is outlined. Find-ings from the analysis of data from successive British Election Studies between 1974and 1997 are presented in Sections 5 and 6. The evidence reported there shows thatthe strength of partisanship among British voters did, indeed, decline substantiallyover the period. At the same time, however, the individual voting calculus appearsto have changed very little in the intervening years. The relative importance of partyidentification and economic perceptions in determining the electoral choices of Bri-tish voters has remained broadly the same over the period.
2. Theory and hypotheses
How voters arrive at their individual vote calculus is not at issue in the presentanalysis. Rather, our concern is to assess the claim that declining party identificationhas been accompanied by the greater significance of perceptions of the economy onindividual vote decisions. The arguments underlying the claim are set out here.
2.1. Party identification as a causal influence on the vote
As noted above, party identification, or partisanship, refers to an enduring affectiveattachment a voter feels towards a particular political party, which disposes him orher to vote for that party in elections. Partly through socialisation in childhood andthe workplace, individuals come to feel that their own political beliefs and valuesare ‘closer’ to the core ideological and policy positions of one party rather another.Some individuals may enter adulthood as fully-fledged ‘ identifiers’ with a particularparty. For others, the process may take longer. Further, the more frequently individ-uals vote for a particular party over time, the more likely it is that they will cometo ‘ feel closer to’ or ‘ identify with’ that party: they will become ‘party identifiers’ .This, in turn, will reinforce the individual’s tendency to continue voting for the party,even when other factors might militate against doing so. A distinction is sometimesmade between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ identifiers, depending on the strength of the indi-vidual’s attachment to the party in question Sarlvik and Crewe (1983)). Both ‘strong’and ‘weak’ identifiers are contrasted with ‘fl oating’ or ‘ independent’ voters, whoexhibit no obvious attachment to one party over time and may vote for differentparties at successive elections.
Although party identification is primarily a psychological concept, it has a directcounterpart in rational choice theory in Downs’ concept of the ‘standing vote’(Downs, 1957; see also Dunleavy, 1991). According to Downs, voters can developa habit of voting for one party as a way of reducing the costs of continuously col-lecting and evaluating political information. Relatively early in their political lives,voters make judgements about which party is closest to their own ideological andpolicy positions and tend subsequently to continue supporting that party unless anduntil some major political trauma leads them to reassess their ‘standing decision’ .Fiorina’s work on voting in the USA goes some way to combining the psychologicalnotion of affective attachment with Downs’ idea of the standing vote (Fiorina, 1981).Fiorina argues that party identification is best seen as a running tally, or cumulation,of voters’ retrospective evaluations of the major parties. In short, identification resultsfrom a voter’s perception that a particular party has out-performed its rival(s) overtime, which disposes the voter to support that party in the current election.
Note, however, that early socialisation experiences cannot explain why some vot-ers switch their party identification (from, say, Conservative to Labour) mid-waythrough their voting lives. Fiorina’s notion of identification as a cumulative updatingof retrospective assessments of party performance is useful in this context. Considera voter, A, who, as a result of childhood and early adult socialisation experiences,identifies with—and accordingly votes for—the Conservatives at one election.Assume further that the Conservatives appear so incompetent at the two subsequentelections that A switches to vote for Labour on both occasions. In these circum-stances, A may also shift identification to Labour to reflect the fact that his ‘ runningtally’ of retrospective performance now favours Labour rather than the Conserva-tives. Although Fiorina’s analysis does not predict the precise point at which votersmay switch their identification from one party to another, it offers a plausible expla-
242 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
nation for how it is that, notwithstanding early political socialisation, voters canchange their identifications over time.
Despite these ambiguities, however, the empirical predictions following from partyidentification theory are straightforward. Voters who ‘ identify with’ or ‘ feel closerto’ a particular political party will be much more likely to vote for that party thanfor other parties. There is an abundance of empirical evidence, from a range ofcountries and time periods, to support this supposition.1
2.2. Economic perceptions as a causal influence on the vote
Three forms of economic perceptions have been identified as influences on voters’electoral preferences. The first concerns their retrospective assessments of personal(‘egocentric’ ) and national (‘sociotropic’ ) economic conditions. The causal mech-anism linking these assessments to voting preferences is reward–punishment (Clarkeet al., 1990). Voters are hypothesised to reward the incumbent party with their sup-port if personal and/or national economic conditions have improved in the recentpast. Concomitantly, they punish incumbents by voting for other parties if conditionshave deteriorated. A second set of economic perceptions focuses on voters’ prospec-tive assessments of the economic future. The causal mechanism in this context isoptimism–pessimism. Voters who are optimistic about the outlook for the economyare likely to support the incumbent party in order to preserve the political status quothat created their optimism (Sanders, 1991). In contrast, pessimists are more likelyto vote for the opposition, in order to remove the political status quo that producedtheir pessimism. Finally, voters’ perceptions of the relative economic managementcapabilities of the main contending parties have also been identified as importantsources of electoral preferences (Sanders, 1996). The incumbent party’s economicrecord or financial promise is less important to voters than the ability of any partyto convey a general sense of managerial competence. On this account, voters supportthe party they believe is best equipped, compared with its rivals, to manage theeconomy effectively.
A large number of aggregate- and individual-level studies have provided empiricalsupport, in a variety of national contexts, for such connections between voters’ econ-omic perceptions and their political preferences. In Britain, aggregate time-seriesdata collected since the mid-1970s suggest that prospective economic perceptionsare strongly linked to patterns of party support (Clarke et al., 1997; Sanders, 1999).Moods of economic optimism among voters are associated with increased supportfor the governing party; moods of economic pessimism with a decline in governmentsupport. More limited time-series data collected since 1991 suggest that voters’assessments of the parties in terms of their managerial competence are fundamental
1 In the British context, see Sarlvik and Crewe (1983); Heath et al. (1985, 1991); Evans and Norris(1999).
to their electoral fortunes (Sanders, 1996).2 Individual-level data also support theconclusions about the impact of economic optimism and perceptions of economiccompetence on party support (Price and Sanders, 1995). They also support the notionthat retrospective economic assessments influence party support (Pattie et al., 1999).
It would clearly be desirable to test for the effects of all three forms of economicperceptions in the present analysis. Unfortunately, BES3 data are available in mul-tiple-election form only for retrospective economic perceptions. Accordingly, theanalysis here focuses on voters’ retrospective assessments as the indicator of econ-omic perceptions. The main hypothesis to be tested is straightforward. Voters whobelieve economic conditions have worsened will wish to punish the incumbent partyand, therefore, will be less likely to vote for it and more likely to support an oppo-sition party. Concomitantly, voters who believe that economic conditions haveimproved or remained the same will be more likely to support the incumbent partyand less likely to support an opposition party.
2.3. Relative importance of party identification and economic perceptions
There are good theoretical and empirical reasons, then, for supposing that bothparty identification and retrospective economic perceptions affect voters’ electoralchoices. However, there are two reasons for supposing that, in Britain, the relativeimpact of party identification may have declined over time. The first derives fromthe intimate connection in Britain during the 1960s between party identification andvoters’ class location and class identity. Working class voters were more likely toperceive themselves to be working class; and their disproportionate tendency toidentify with, and vote for, the Labour Party derived from socialisation in workingclass communities, which led them to believe that Labour represented the interestsof working class people. In a similar vein, middle class voters tended to perceivethemselves to be middle class; to believe that the Conservatives best representedmiddle class interests; and to identify with, and vote for, the Conservative Party(Butler and Stokes, 1974).
Since the 1960s, however, there has been considerable change in Britain’s classstructure and in the relationship between class and vote. The simple distinctionbetween the working class and the middle class has weakened and fragmented associal and geographical mobility have increased (Rose and O‘Reilly, 1998). Theextent to which voters perceive their working or middle class positions ‘correctly’has declined substantially. And although ‘class voting’ has by no means disappeared,
2 For example, in the run-up to the 1992 general election, the Conservatives were consistently wellahead of Labour in terms of economic competence ratings—even though the two parties were neck-and-neck in the opinion polls. The Conservatives duly won the 1992 election by a clear margin of 7 percentagepoints. The collapse in Conservative support in the autumn of 1992, from which the party failed to recoverbefore the 1997 election, coincided exactly with the party’s loss of its reputation for economic competencein the wake of the September 1992 ERM crisis.
3 The BES is the most reliable source of individual-level data for analysing British electoral behaviour.It is also the only survey that has measured party identification over a long time period.
244 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
it has progressively weakened over the last 30 years (Evans and Norris, 1999). Inshort, the social environment in which Labour and Conservative party identificationsdeveloped and thrived has dissipated significantly. In these circumstances, it mightwell be anticipated that the impact of party identification on voters’ electoral prefer-ences would also diminish; that is, the effect of partisanship on the vote would havedeclined progressively since the 1960s.4
A second reason for supposing that the impact of party identification might havedeclined relates to changes in education levels and in the UK media environmentover the last three decades. Contemporary British voters are generally both moreeducated and more exposed to a wider range of media outlets than their counterpartsin the 1960s. The expansion of media sources has exposed voters to a much widerrange of ideas, lifestyles, and life-opportunities. To make sense of this larger infor-mation base, Britain’s generally more educated citizens have had to become morediscriminating in their judgements about which media outlets to use and how theyshould use them. This increased media sensitivity could, in turn, have encouragedvoters to be more discriminating in their political judgements. As a result, votersare likely to be less inclined to rely on familiarity and habit—that is, on party identi-fication—in making their electoral choices and more inclined to base those choiceson more ‘proximate’ considerations, such as their perceptions of recent changes ineconomic conditions. As intimated above, these ideas were crystallised in Him-melweit’s claims in the 1970s about the rise of ‘consumer voting’ (Himmelweit,1975). They imply a very simple hypothesis: as media outlets and informationsources proliferated in the 1980s and 1990s, the type of habitual voting associatedwith party identification should have declined in importance. In consequence, moreimmediate, short-term, economic concerns should have become more important tovoters over the same period.
3. Operationalising party identification
The discussion in the previous section suggests that the effects of party identifi-cation on voting have declined since the 1960s while the effects of economic percep-tions have increased. But before outlining the model specification to test the claim,we need to consider the issue of how party identification is measured. From 1964onwards, the BES borrowed the standard US National Election Study (NES)sequence of questions for measuring party identification. The question (with minorvariations in different elections) is:
Generally speaking, do you think of yourself as Conservative, Labour, Liberal-Democrat, (Nationalist) or what?
4 Note that this claim relates to the vote preferences of individuals, not to the effect of class votingon the outcome of an election: the aggregate effects of class voting may have changed without changingthe effects of class at the individual level.
Respondents who specify a particular party in response to that question are thenasked:
Would you call yourself a very strong [name of party], fairly strong, or notvery strong?
Respondents who answer ‘None’ or ‘Don’ t know’ to the first question are asked:
Do you generally think of yourself as closer to one of the parties than the others?
Respondents who answer ‘Yes’ to that question are then asked:
Which party is that?
The distribution of responses to this battery of questions among successive cohortsof BES respondents is reported in Table 1. The overall pattern is clear. The percent-age of respondents, across all parties, who ‘very strongly identify’ with the partyhas fallen progressively since the early 1970s. In 1964, almost 44 per cent of voters
Table 1Measured levels of party identification in Britain, 1964–1997
Source: British Election Studies. Notes: Cell entries are column percentages, calculated as a percentageof all respondents.
246 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
were classified as ‘very strong identifiers’ with one or other of the major parties. By1997, this figure had fallen to under 15 per cent. At the same time, ‘not very strong’identifiers with the three major parties increased from 11 per cent of voters in 1970to over 30 per cent in 1997. The only category that remained relatively stable overtime were the ‘ fairly strong identifiers’ .
A major concern about this standard partisanship question sequence, however, isthat it may not measure anything very different from voters’ current party prefer-ences. There are two reasons for supposing this to be the case. First, as Table 1shows, responses to the standard question suggest that, since the 1960s, around 85–90 per cent of British voters held some degree of party identification. This is clearlya much higher level of ‘measured’ partisanship than in the US, where the conceptof party identification was originally developed and where Republican and Democratidentifiers account for around 65–70 per cent of voters (Miller and Merrill Shanks,1996). The higher levels of partisanship in Britain imply, in turn, much greater over-time stability in British voting patterns, since partisans generally (though not always)tend to vote for the party with which they identify whereas non-partisans are morelikely to switch their votes between parties. Yet electoral volatility over the last 30years has not been noticeably lower in Britain than in the US.5
The second reason for questioning what the party identification battery measuresis that, as the British data show, major shifts in party identification levels (in 1979,1983, and 1997) have coincided with major shifts in voting behaviour. This impliesthat both, perhaps, are indicators of current electoral preferences rather than separatephenomena. This conclusion is supported by monthly time-series data collected byGallup which show that short-term fluctuations in British partisanship correlate verystrongly with short-term changes in party support levels (Clarke et al., 1997). Moreformal tests, based on the principles of convergent validity, indicate that, in Britainat least, measures of party identification are statistically indistinguishable from meas-ures of voting preference (Brynin and Sanders, 1997). This implies, in turn, thatmodels of vote choice which include party identification as an explanatory variablemay be tautologically mis-specified because the independent variable (identification)is not measured independently of the dependent variable (vote).
Concern about the measurement properties of the standard partisanship questionhas led some scholars (Bartle and Crewe, 2000) to conclude that the standard batteryinvites respondents to admit to a partisan identity even when they do not have one.As a result, some researchers have advocated using a ‘fi lter’ when measuring parti-sanship. Typical of a filter question is the following:
I am now going to ask you a question about party politics in [country]. Somepeople think of themselves as usually being a supporter of one political partyrather than another. Setting aside your current views about the government andopposition parties, do you usually think of yourself as being a supporter of oneparticular party or not?
5 Compare, for example, the evidence in Miller and Merrill Shanks (1996) with Sanders (1997).
Respondents who answer ‘Yes’ to this question are then asked: ‘Which one is that’?The filter allows survey respondents to indicate from the outset that they do not
usually think of themselves as supporters of a particular political party. Surveyexperiments using this form of filter have been conducted in Canada, Britain, theUS, and elsewhere (Blais et al., 1999). As a result, measured levels of party identifi-cation fall considerably. In Canada, switching from the traditional question to thefilter question reduces party identification levels from around 70 per cent to 40 percent of the electorate; in Britain, identification falls from around 90 per cent to under50 per cent; and in the US it falls from roughly 70 per cent to 60 per cent.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to establish definitively how party identificationshould be measured (see Bartle, this issue). However, given that using the ‘fi lter’produces so many non-identifiers, logic suggests that there cannot be so many ‘genu-ine’ identifiers as the distributions in Table 1 imply. The problem is to determine howmany there actually are. Given that we cannot go back to respondents interviewed inthe past, we are obliged to make the best use we can of the available data. Accord-ingly, the analysis conducted here begins with a very restrictive definition of partisan-ship, assuming, initially, that only ‘very strong identifiers’ are ‘ true’ identifiers. Thismay underestimate the incidence of partisanship among British voters, but, critically,it minimises tautologically mis-specifying the estimated models. Then, in the sub-sequent analysis, the restrictive assumption is relaxed: the definition of partisanshipis, first, widened to embrace both ‘very strong’ and ‘ fairly strong’ identifiers; then,next, it is extended to include also ‘not very strong’ identifiers.
This approach provides some analytical leverage on whether or not a moreencompassing operational measure of partisanship is damagingly tautological.Assume for the moment that ‘ fairly strong’ and ‘not very strong’ identifiers (as wellas ‘very strong’ identifiers) are ‘ real’ identifiers and therefore can be legitimately—that is, non-tautologically—included in an all-embracing identification measure. Inthese circumstances, we would expect that, because the ‘ fairly strong’ and the ‘notvery strong’ are less committed partisans than the ‘very strong’ , their inclusion inthe partisanship measure would dilute the estimated effect of partisanship on vote.In other words, we would expect an all-embracing identification measure to have asmaller effect on vote than the restrictive definition that included only ‘very strong’partisans. This is because the probability that ‘ fairly strong’ and ‘not very strong’identifiers would vote for their preferred parties should, on average, be less than theprobability that strong identifiers would vote for their preferred parties.
Assume now, in contrast, that the ‘ fairly strong’ and the ‘not very strong’ are not‘ real’ identifiers but are artificially—and tautologically—measured as ‘ identifiers’simply because they vote for party X and the party identification battery elicits aresponse which classifies them as party X identifiers. In these circumstances, wewould expect an all-embracing identification measure to have a larger (apparent)effect on vote than a more restricted definition that included only ‘very strong’ parti-sans. Note, however, that this ‘stronger effect’ would not be a causal effect. Onthe contrary, it would represent a theoretically uninteresting tautological relationshipreflecting that large numbers of party X voters were being ‘wrongly’ classified as
248 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
party X identifiers. It would indicate that the definition of identification was beingstretched to make it barely distinguishable from vote.
The two assumptions, and the reasoning that follows from them, give us a clearinterpretative rule. If the encompassing definition of identification increases theeffect of identification on vote, this constitutes prima facie evidence to support theproposition that the more encompassing definition is tautologically rather than caus-ally related to vote. If the more encompassing definition reduces the effect, thisconstitutes support for the notion that the weaker forms of measured partisanshipcan legitimately be regarded as ‘ real’ party identification.
The results reported in Sections 5 and 6 indicate that the more encompassingdefinitions do indeed increase the impact of identification on vote. This suggests,therefore, that the more restrictive definition of partisanship is more likely to producea measure that is not tautologically related to vote.
4. Model specification
The modelling strategy employed here involves estimating identical individual-level models of Conservative, Labour, and Liberal (Democrat) support at the generalelections for which comparable data are available. These models include terms forparty identification, economic perceptions, and a range of other (mainly socio-demographic) control variables. The lack of suitable data means that the models wereestimated only for the 1974 (October), 1979, 1983, 1992, and 1997 general elections.For all the other elections, no suitable BES data are available for the economicperceptions variable. This reduces the time period over which the models can beestimated, but it still means that changes over the 1974–97 period can be examinedin considerable detail. The general model specification employed in the empiricalanalysis here is:
Vote for partyi /not � f (respondent identifies with partyi /not; respondent (1)
believes economic conditions have worsened/not; control variables)
The party identification variable, as noted above, denotes whether or not therespondent strongly identifies with the party in question. The expectation is that thecoefficient will be large and positive. The economic perceptions variable measuresrespondents’ retrospective assessment of the general economy—that is, sociotropicretrospections—since data for egocentric (personal) retrospections are not available.To simplify interpretation of the results, and to provide a straightforward comparisonof the changing magnitudes of the coefficients for partisanship and economic percep-tions, the economic perceptions term is a dummy variable that takes the value ofone if the respondent believes economic conditions in the last year have worsenedand zero otherwise. The expectation here is that the coefficient will be negative ifa party is in government (i.e., if economic conditions are perceived to have worsened,respondents will punish the governing party) and positive if it is in opposition (i.e.,respondents will be more likely to switch votes to an opposition party).
To ensure that the estimated model is correctly specified, it includes as many aspossible of the known correlates of voting. These control variables fall into twobroad categories: socio-demographic and attitudinal. The socio-demographic controlsare age, gender, education (graduate or not), manual working class or not, owner-occupier or not, unemployed or not, and region (dummies on South West, Midlands,North, Wales, and Scotland, with South East as the base category). The attitudinalcontrol variables are respondents’ subjective social class (middle class or not);whether or not the respondent cares a lot about the election outcome; whether ornot the respondent believes there is a significant difference between the parties; andthe respondents’ ideological position in left–right terms (measured by whether ornot they are pro-big business and whether or not they are opposed to trades unions).
The empirical results presented in Section 4 involve estimating model (1) for eachof the three major British parties and for each of the general elections in 1974(October), 1979, 1983, 1992 and 1997. On the basis of the discussion in Section 1,the expectation in the models is that the impact of party identification declines overtime while the impact of economic perceptions increases over time.
The notion of ‘declining impact’ needs unpacking, however. It contains twoelements: the first relates to the explanatory power of party identification; that is,the ability of party identification to explain variations in voters’ preparedness tosupport one party rather than another. The evidence reported in Table 1 shows that‘very strong’ identification has declined progressively since 1970. It follows that, ifwe accept the arguments developed earlier and restrict the definition of identificationto ‘very strong’ identifiers, party identification should be less able to ‘explain’ thevote choices of all voters in later elections (when partisanship levels were lower)than in earlier elections (when partisanship was higher). If there are fewer identifiersamong the electorate, then identification should, other things being equal, be a lesspowerful predictor of the vote choices of all voters. This implies that the ‘modelimprovement’ obtained by including a party identification term in Eq. (1), as opposedto excluding such a term from the model, should fall progressively over time.
There are several measures of ‘model improvement’ that could be deployed inthis context. The simplest, and the one used here, is the improvement in pseudo-R2
that derives from including (as opposed to excluding) a party identification term ina given model. A relatively large improvement in pseudo-R2 implies that the newly-included variable ‘explains’ a relatively large amount of the variance in the choicesmade by all voters to support or not to support a particular party. A relatively smallimprovement in pseudo-R2 implies that the newly-included variable has less explana-tory power. The simple prediction engendered by the long-term decline in very strongpartisanship, as shown in Table 1, is:
Hypothesis 1. The improvement in pseudo-R2 obtained by adding a party identifi-cation term to a given model of party support should fall progressively from 1974to 1997.
The second element in the ‘declining impact’ of partisanship relates to the magni-tudes of the coefficients in the relevant estimated models. The expectation is that,in a period when ‘voter-as-consumer’ has arguably taken over from ‘voter-as-party-identifier’ , being an identifier should not act as such a strong cue to vote for the
250 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263
identified party. By the same token, economic perceptions should have become moreimportant as cues to party preference. Taken together, these two tendencies imply asecond hypothesis:
Hypothesis 2. The ratio of the magnitude of the party identification coefficientsto the magnitude of economic perception coefficients should fall over time, as parti-sanship declines in importance and economic perceptions increase in importance inthe decision calculus of all voters.
Finally, we can add a simple counter-hypothesis to Hypothesis 2, to assert thatdeclining levels of partisanship do not necessarily imply substantial changes in voterpsychology. If this is the case, we would have to conclude that partisans are just aslikely to vote for the party with which they identify as they ever were:
Hypothesis 3. The ratio of the magnitude of the party identification coefficientsto the magnitude of economic perceptions coefficients should remain more or lessconstant over time.
5. Empirical results: very strong identifiers only
An illustrative set of results, derived from estimating model (1) for the three mainparties in the October 1974 election, is shown in Tables 2–4. Estimation is by logisticregression; and for strong partisans only. The results set out in Table 2 are for theConservative support model.
The raw coefficients in logistic regressions are difficult to interpret beyond theobservation that the signs and significance levels in Table 2 are consistent with theor-etical expectations. The exp(B) figures indicate the odds ratios for respondents whopossess the specified characteristic. Thus, for example, the exp(B) value for anti-trades unionism in Table 2 indicates that respondents who are opposed to tradesunions are almost six times more likely to support the Conservative Party thanrespondents who are similar in terms of the other characteristics in the model butwho are not opposed to trades unions.
The pattern of significant coefficients in Table 2 is consistent both with previousfindings (Sarlvik and Crewe, 1983; Heath et al., 1985, 1991) about the correlates ofConservative support and with the broad hypotheses advanced about the importanceof party identification and economic perceptions as influences on voting. In 1974,other things being equal, respondents were more likely to support the Conservativesif they were older; if they were owner-occupiers; if they perceived themselves to bemiddle class; and if they were pro-big business and anti-trades union. They wereless likely to support the Conservatives if they were manual workers; if they weregraduates; or they if lived in Wales or Scotland. If they were strong Conservativeidentifiers, they were much more likely (15 times more likely!) to support the Con-servatives than if they were not strong Conservative identifiers. The economic per-ceptions coefficient, although significant and correctly signed, is more modest inmagnitude. Thus, although they had been in opposition for only eight months in1974, the Conservatives apparently benefited from voters’ perceptions that economicconditions had deteriorated over the previous year. Controlling for all the other vari-
Table 2Effects of Conservative Party identification and retrospective economic perceptions on Conservative vot-ing, October 1974. Strong identifiers only
Independent variable Coefficient Standard error Significance exp (B)
Conservative identifier/not 2.74 0.26 0.00 15.53Believe national economic conditions 0.71 0.13 0.00 2.04have worsened in last year/not
Constant �4.68 0.33 0.00
N 2253Nagelkerke Pseudo-R2 0.42Chi-square model improvement 803Percent correct 79.1
Source: British Election Study. Notes: The dependent variable is Conservative vote/not. Estimation is bylogistic regression.
ables in the model, respondents who believed economic conditions had worsenedwere more than twice as likely to vote Conservative than those who believed con-ditions had improved or stayed the same.
Table 3 tells a similar, but mirror-imaged, story for Labour. In 1974, voters weresignificantly more likely to support Labour if they were manual workers; if theycared a lot about the election outcome; and if they thought there were significantdifferences between the parties. They were significantly less likely to vote Labourif they were owner-occupiers; if they thought of themselves as middle class; and ifthey were pro-big business and anti-trades union. In line with partisanship theory,strong Labour identifiers were highly likely to vote Labour (again, 15 times more
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Table 3Effects of Labour Party identification and retrospective economic perceptions on Labour voting, October1974. Strong identifiers only
Independent variable Coefficient Standard error Significance exp (B)
Labour identifier/not 2.76 0.21 0.00 15.77Believe economic conditions have �0.62 0.11 0.00 0.53worsened in last year/not
Constant 0.60 0.24 0.02
N 2253Nagelkerke Pseudo-R2 0.45Chi-square model improvement 892Percent correct 78.9
Source: British Election Study. Notes: The dependent variable is Labour vote/not. Estimation is by logis-tic regression.
likely than non-identifiers). And although Labour had been in office for only eightmonths in 1974, it suffered from an anti-incumbent vote amongst those who thoughtthat economic conditions had worsened in the previous year.
The pattern of coefficients in Table 4 is familiar to observers of Liberal, or LiberalDemocrat, voting. The only socio-demographic variables significantly related to votein 1974 were owner-occupiers (who were somewhat more likely than non-occupiersto vote Liberal) and living in Scotland (where the success of the SNP cut into Liberalsupport). This reflects the traditionally weak socio-demographic support base for theLiberal Party. The coefficients on the two ‘ ideology’ items (negative for pro-bigbusiness and positive for anti-trades union) reflect the Liberals’ consistent failure
Liberal identifier/not 2.51 0.22 0.00 12.35Believe economic conditions have �0.05 0.14 0.72 0.95worsened in last year/not
Constant �1.39 0.29 0.00
N 2253Nagelkerke Pseudo-R2 0.18Chi-square model improvement 247Percent correct 86.8
Source: British Election Study. Notes: The dependent variable is Liberal vote/not. Estimation is by logis-tic regression.
either to deter or derive votes as a result of its broadly centrist ideological stance.As with Tables 2 and 3, however, our interest is focused on the independent variablesof partisanship and economic perceptions. The partisanship variable is againimmensely powerful as a predictor of vote: strong Liberal identifiers are 12 timesmore likely to vote Liberal than non-identifiers. Note, however, that the Liberalsderived no additional support from voters who believed economic conditions hadworsened. Clearly, then, insofar as economic voting operated at all in the October1974 election, it did so only in relation to the Conservative and Labour parties.
Table 5 summarises the results from repeating the models shown in Tables 2–4 forthe five elections 1974–97. Partisanship is measured exclusively in terms of strong
254 D. Sanders / Electoral Studies 22 (2003) 239–263T
identifiers with one of the three national parties. Coefficients are not reported forthe socio-demographic and attitudinal control variables.
The overall pattern of results suggests that the partisanship coefficients remainremarkably stable over time, which is contrary to Hypothesis 2, postulating thedeclining importance of party identification as an influence on vote. The Conservativeidentification coefficient, for example, is 2.74 in 1974, 2.34 in 1979, and 2.02 in1983, suggesting progressive decline in the importance of partisanship. The resultsfor 1992 and 1997 (B=2.65 and B=4.62, respectively), however, indicate that thetrend was not sustained. On the contrary, the impact of Conservative partisanshipon Conservative voting was greater in 1997 than in 1974, and, indeed, for everyother election in the series. Similar conclusions are suggested by the sequence ofpartisanship coefficients in the Labour and Liberal (and Liberal Democrat) models.The effects of Labour partisanship on Labour voting declined between 1974 and1983, but showed a marked increase through to the 1997 election. As in the Con-servative models, the largest partisanship effect in the series is observed in 1997.The Liberal partisanship coefficients increase progressively with each election, theexact reverse of what is anticipated in Hypothesis 2.
The effects of voters’ economic retrospections are, on the face of it, somewhatmore mixed since some of the coefficients are negative and some positive. However,once it is recognised that economic perceptions impact primarily on the incumbentparty by damaging it if voters perceive that economic conditions have worsened, thepattern becomes clearer. Labour was the incumbent party in 1974 and 1979; accord-ingly, it was damaged by negative coefficients for economic perceptions in thoseyears, while the Conservatives (with positive coefficients) benefited and the Liberals(with non-significant coefficients) were unaffected. In 1983, 1992, and 1997, how-ever, the incumbent Conservatives were damaged by negative economic perceptions.Both Labour and the Liberal (Democrats) benefited from significant (if small) posi-tive coefficients on the economic perceptions variable: in a sense they ‘shared’ thebenefit derived from the damage inflicted on the Conservatives by negative economicperceptions. By 1997, Labour was, once more, the sole beneficiary of perceptions ofpoor Conservative performance; the Liberals (with their non-significant coefficient)reverted to being unaffected. This pattern makes extremely good sense in terms ofthe widespread doubts among voters in both 1983 and 1992 that Labour, if elected,could manage the economy effectively.
Perhaps the most intriguing feature of Table 5, however, is the set of (absolutevalue) ratio coefficients shown under each pair of coefficients for partisanship andeconomic perceptions. These coefficients directly test Hypothesis 2. Consider, first,the Conservative ratio figures. In 1974, the ratio of the impact of partisanship toeconomic perceptions on Conservative voting was 3.85. This figure oscillates in theensuing years but in 1997 it was also 3.85. This indicates that the relative importanceof partisanship and economic retrospections as determinants of Conservative votingin 1997 was exactly the same as in 1974. In short, the relative influence of partisan-ship and economic perceptions on Conservative voting changed not at all in overtwo decades—which seems just about as clear an example of plus ca change, plusc’est la meme chose as is ever likely to be observed with individual-level data.
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There is not much change in the Labour pattern either, although it is more markedthan for the Conservatives. The ratio of partisanship to economic perceptions forLabour voting rose from 4.44 in 1974 to 9.74 in 1983; it then fell back somewhat,to 7.76, in 1997. Note, however, that this constitutes an increase in the relativeimportance of partisanship vis a vis economic perceptions—not a decline as the ‘ riseof consumer voting’ thesis implies. The Liberal (Democrat) ratio is impossible tointerpret because of the non-significance of the economic perceptions term in threeof the five models.
According to the retrospective economic perceptions argument, it is the incumbentparty that is damaged by voters’ perceptions of poor economic performance. Thus,to compare ‘ like with like’ , we need to compare the effects of partisanship relativeto economic perceptions for the incumbent party only. The relevant ratios are shownbolded in Table 5. On this comparison, the ratio falls from 4.44 in 1974 (whenLabour was in office) to 2.94 in 1992 (when the Conservatives were in office) butis 3.85 in 1997. Again, not a noticeably different position from that in 1974. In short,for incumbent parties, the ratio of partisanship to economic perception effectschanged hardly at all between 1974 and 1997. If anything, it actually increased overtime, reinforcing the idea that partisanship continues to be a powerful influence onvoters’ electoral choices.
The evidence relating to the coefficient magnitudes from the estimated models,then, tends to support Hypothesis 3 rather more than Hypothesis 2. What of Hypo-theis 1? Table 6 reports the pseudo-R2 values from the models summarised in Table
Table 6Psuedo-R2 values (Nagelkerke R2) and improvement in pseudo-R2 values after removing/adding partyidentification terms from/to the models estimated in Table 5. Strong identifiers only
R2 for Labour vote/not model, 0.35 0.30 0.34 0.23 0.28excluding Labour identifier/notR2 for Labour vote/not model, 0.45 0.39 0.43 0.33 0.37including Labour identifier/notR2 improvement 0.10 0.09 0.08 0.10 0.09
R2 for Liberal (Democrat) vote/not 0.09 0.04 0.06 0.09 0.09model, excluding Liberal(Democrat) identifier/notR2 for Liberal (Democrat) vote/not 0.18 0.08 0.09 0.12 0.13model, including Liberal(Democrat) identifier/notR2 improvement 0.09 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.04
5. More importantly, it also reports the improvement in pseudo-R2 that results fromadding the relevant party identification terms to models that previously excludedthem.
The results are equivocal. The ‘R2 improvement’ terms for the Conservative equa-tions fall, as predicted by Hypothesis 2, in 1979 and 1983. However, by 1997, the‘ improvement’ level (0.07) is almost the same as it was in 1974 (0.08). The Labourequations display a rather similar pattern of (predicted) decline and (unpredicted)recovery. It is only the Liberal (Democrat) equations that produce a clear fall after1974 which is maintained in subsequent elections. Taken together, these results implyonly limited support for Hypothesis 1: although there is evidence to suggest thatparty identification lost its explanatory power to a limited degree after 1974, thisloss was not so marked as implied in Hypothesis 1. Indeed, for Conservative andLabour partisanship, the explanatory power of party identification was almost asgreat in 1997 as it was in 1974.
6. Extended definitions of party identification
The discussion in the previous section related solely to strong partisans. Whathappens if more encompassing definitions of partisanship are employed? The rel-evance of the interpretative rule referred to in Section 2 is explored in Tables 7 and 8.
The results reported in Table 7 are based on extending partisanship to includeboth ‘strong’ and ‘ fairly strong’ identifiers with one or other of the major parties.Note, in particular, two points about the table. First, the partisanship coefficients(and the exp(B) values) in Table 7 are generally larger than their equivalents in Table5. This appears to imply that the effects of partisanship on vote are stronger whenthe broader definition of partisanship is employed. However, as discussed below,there are good reasons for rejecting this interpretation. Second, the ratios of partisan-ship to economic perceptions show evidence of both decline and random fluctuation.The Conservative ratios fall consistently over time, dropping from 6.18 in 1974 to4.08 in 1997. The Labour ratios, however, increase dramatically in 1983 and 1992(reflecting Labour’s failure to capitalise on the Conservatives’ economic difficultiesand its concomitant increased reliance on its identifiers in those elections). The Lib-eral Democrat ratios are very similar for the two elections in which economic percep-tions had significant effects (1983 and 1992). This inconsistent pattern suggests anoverall conclusion similar to that drawn from Table 5, in general, partisanship seemsto have been just as important as a determinant of voting in the late 1990s as it wasin the mid-1970s.
Table 8 reports the results from repeating the exercise but using a definition ofpartisanship that includes ‘not very strong’ identifiers along with ‘strong’ and ‘ fairlystrong’ identifiers. Apart from the yet larger magnitudes of the partisanship coef-ficients (and especially the exp(B) figures), the partisanship-economic perceptionsratios display virtually the same pattern as in Table 7: progressive Conservativedecline and random fluctuation for Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
Why should using broader definitions of partisanship appear to strengthen the
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connections between partisanship and the vote? It seems likely that this patternreflects the concern raised earlier—that broad measures of partisanship may be tauto-logically related to vote. The apparently powerful ‘causal’ effects of partisanship onvote shown in Tables 7 and 8 are perhaps not causal at all, but, rather, reflect thefact that broader definitions of partisanship simply define more Conservative votersas identifiers. This, in turn, strengthens the correlation between Conservative votingand Conservative identification. However, that higher correlation represents a tauto-logical relationship in which Conservative voting and partisanship are not definedor measured independently of one another. It does not mean that broader measures ofpartisanship genuinely exert a more powerful influence on vote than more restrictivemeasures. It suggests, instead, that a more restrictive definition of partisanship offersthe most fruitful approach to devising operational measures of party identification.
7. Conclusions
Party identification is one of the most enduring concepts employed by electoralanalysts. Although doubts have frequently been expressed about the portability ofthe concept outside the United States, researchers have found it difficult to developplausible explanations of voting without referring to it in some way. During the1970s, a number of competing, more proximate, causes of voting received rathermore attention than party identification. In Britain, the strong aggregate-level corre-lations between party support patterns and economic perceptions during the 1970sand 1980s suggested a degree of voter volatility that cast doubt on the continuingexplanatory power of partisanship. The analysis reported here tested for the continu-ing importance of partisanship in comparison with the importance of economic per-ceptions. Three general conclusions are warranted.
First, different operational measures of party identification (very strong only; verystrong plus fairly strong; and very strong plus fairly strong plus not very strong)produce different estimates both of the size of the party-identifying population andthe effects of identification on the vote. It is not possible to establish definitivelywhich measure most plausibly captures the theoretical concept of partisanship. Weknow that ‘fi lter’ questions, which explicitly give respondents the option of indicatingthat they have no identification, yield lower measured partisanship levels than non-filter questions. We know also from British Household Panel Survey data that, inBritain at least, the number of stable identifiers is much smaller than conventional,broadly encompassing, measures imply (Johnston and Pattie, 1997). The resultsreported in Tables 5, 7 and 8 clearly support the view that more encompassing meas-ures of partisanship are insufficiently different from vote—the phenomenon theypurport to explain—to permit their inclusion in models of voting choice. In thesecircumstances, the most prudent strategy is to use a relatively restrictive definitionof party identifiers. This strategy was adopted here, where the analysis focused prim-arily on the impact of ‘very strong’ identification on vote.
The second main conclusion is that, regardless of how partisanship is measured,party identification overall appears to have been just as important in determining
electoral choices in 1997 as it was in 1974. There is no consistent evidence to suggestthat the sort of deep-seated, long-term influence on vote represented by party identi-fication has been displaced by more immediate, ‘consumerist’ influences such asretrospective economic perceptions. On the contrary, as far as the impact of strongidentification is concerned, the ratios of partisanship coefficients to economic percep-tions coefficients either remained stable over time (as they did for the Conservatives)or even increased (as they did for Labour). Moreover, the pseudo-R2 improvementfigures, reported in Table 6, suggest that between 1974 and 1997 partisanship lostlittle of its power to explain the overall pattern of voting in Britain. In all, there islittle support in the available data for the notion that the decision calculus of individ-ual voters has shifted towards economic ‘consumer’ voting at the expense of partyidentification. Indeed, most of the indications are that the typical voter’s calculushas remained very similar over time. As Table 1 indicates, the number of partisanshas fallen since the 1960s. But the importance of partisanship as a determinant ofelectoral preferences, relative to economic perceptions, has remained broadly con-stant over time. The political sociology of partisanship may have changed, but thepolitical psychology of voting has not. In short, the theoretical perspectives thatWarren Miller developed along with his collaborators in the 1950s continue to pro-vide considerable leverage in understanding contemporary voting patterns.
Finally, our empirical analysis says something interesting about economic votingin Britain since 1974. The coefficients for economic perceptions, shown in Tables5, 7 and 8, indicate that the governing party loses support among those voters whobelieve that economic conditions have worsened over the previous year. Yet thesecoefficients also indicate that opposition parties do not always, as a corollary, benefitfrom the government’s discomfiture. In 1974 and 1979, the Conservatives did benefitin this way, although the Liberals—not seriously considered by voters at the timeas a party of government—did not. In 1983 and 1992, however, with Labour’s statusas a governing party seriously in doubt, Labour and the Liberal Democrats ‘shared’the dividend deriving from dissatisfaction with the government’s management of theeconomy. This reinforced the split in the opposition vote, thereby enhancing theConservative Party’s chances of re-election. In 1997, Labour benefited slightly morefrom economic discontent amongst voters, but to nothing like the extent that theConservatives were damaged by it.
The concept of party identification was born out of evidence of the long-termstability of voting behaviour amongst US voters. That economic competence—orperceptions of a government’s capacity to manage the economy—emerged as a criti-cal variable in analyses of British elections of the 1970s and 1980s challenged theexplanatory power of partisanship. The analysis reported here explicitly tested therival claims, and demonstrates that, among British voters, partisanship has been themore potent component in their decision calculus over that period and into the 1990s.It will be intriguing to see how the relative importance of partisanship and percep-tions of the economy play out after periods of New Labour government, periodsduring which economic competence has been given priority and partisan traditionshave been muted.
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the editor of this issue, and to two anonymous referees, for theircritical comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
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