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Generational Replacement and Partisan Dealignment in Britain and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Paul R. Abramson
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Extract

Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik and James Alt (‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, this Journal, VII (1977), 129–90) have made a major contribution to our understanding of partisan change in Britain. Whereas the declining share of the Conservative and Labour party vote can be documented through electoral statistics, Crewe and his colleagues focused on individual-level change in attitudes toward the parties, and thus provided valuable insights that help explain the dealignment that has occurred. One of their major findings was that the strength of party loyalties has declined among the British electorate. Building a measure of mean partisan strength that captures the distribution of ‘very strong’ identifiers, ‘fairly strong’ identifiers, ‘not very strong’ identifiers, and non-identifiers, they show a continuous decline in the strength of partisan loyalties between 1964 and October 1974. In 1964 the partisan strength of the electorate was 2·19; by October 1974 it had fallen to 1·90 (pp. 162–4). This overall decline is quite substantial, given that their measure of mean partisan strength ranges from 0·0 to 3·0.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 8 , Issue 4 , October 1978 , pp. 505 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

1 For my analysis, see Abramson, Paul R., ‘Generational Change and the Decline of Party Identification in America: 1952–1974’, American Political Science Review, LXX (1976), 469–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 My estimates of the age distribution of the British electorate in 1964 were based upon the frequency addendum to the 1964 Butler and Stokes codebook. This is, of course, the same study used by Crewe and his colleagues to derive their 1964 results.

3 Older cohorts which were not traced over the full decade were assigned the mean partisan strength score for the oldest cohort presented by Crewe, Särlvik and Alt. This is a rather conservative procedure since the older cohorts that left the electorate through death had high levels of partisan strength. Basing an estimate of their partisan strength upon the partisan strength score among the oldest surviving cohort probably tends to lower the overall estimated level of partisan strength, and may somewhat exaggerate the importance of period effects. However, as my purpose is to demonstrate the importance of generational replacement, it seems reasonable to use an estimation procedure that biases the final estimate in favour of period effects.

4 See Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain: The Evolution of Electoral Choice, 2nd edn. (New York: St Martin's Press, 1974), pp. 41–4.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 For the full cohort matrix upon which these calculations were based, see Abramson, Paul R., ‘Developing Party Identification: A Further Examination of Life-Cycle, Generational, and Period Effects’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1977, Table 3Google Scholar; this paper also presents additional evidence suggesting that whites and blacks should be analysed separately in cohort analyses of partisan change). For older cohorts that had too few cases to be included in the matrix, I assigned a mean partisan strength score based upon all the surviving respondents, plus the oldest cohort still included in the matrix. As the cohorts that left the electorate through death had high levels of partisan strength, using data from the oldest surviving cohort to estimate their partisanship probably tends to lower the overall estimated level of partisan strength. As with my British calculations, I used a procedure that may somewhat overestimate the importance of period effects.

6 For a detailed discussion of the decline of partisan strength between 1964 and 1966, see Converse, Philip E., The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort Analyzing Party Identification (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1976), pp. 69–80.Google Scholar

7 The only exception to this statement is the failure of partisan strength to decline between 1974 and 1976. There is some evidence, based upon a preliminary analysis of the 1972–74 panel survey conducted by the Center for Political Studies of the University of Michigan, that the low levels of partisan strength in 1974 resulted partly from the impact of Watergate upon Republicans. See Brody, Richard A., ‘Stability and Change in Party Identification: Presidential to Off-Years’ (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, D.C., 1977).Google Scholar