Abstract
The British voter is subjected to a heavy barrage of propaganda from all the major parties — and to occasional salvoes from minor groups and independents — during election campaigns, and to a lesser degree at other times. Earlier chapters of this book have sought to describe the various ways in which the parties seek to influence public opinion. This chapter will attempt to discern whether all this activity makes much difference to the way that people vote.
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Notes and References
David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974, 2nd edition);
Bo Särlvik and Ivor Crewe, Decade of Dealignment (Cambridge University Press, 1983);
Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, How Britain Votes (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985).
A strikingly similar ‘generational effect’ among American voters, which may largely have accounted for a long-term swing from Republican to Democrat, had earlier been detected by Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, The American Voter(New York: Wiley, 1960) especially pp. 45–6.
Anthony Heath, ‘Comment on Dennis Kavanagh’s “How We Vote Now”’, in Electoral Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, April 1986, p. 30.
Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper, 1957), and see, more recently,
David Robertson, Class and the British Electorate (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984).
See ‘Opinion Polls and Party Propaganda’, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 28, Spring 1964, pp. 13–19.
See John Curtice and Michael Steed, ‘An Analysis of the Voting’, in David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 1979 (London: Macmillan, 1980) p. 422.
See Ian McAllister and Anthony Mughan, ‘Differential Turnout and Party Advantage in British General Elections, 1964–83’ in Electoral Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, August 1986, pp. 143–52.
See Joseph Trenaman and Denis McQuail, Television and the Political Image (London: Methuen, 1961).
See Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, British Political Finance 1830–1980, (Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1981) pp. 274–6.
See Mark Abrams, Public Opinion Quarterly, vol. 28, Spring 1964.
P. M. Williams, ‘Two Notes on the British Electoral System’, in Parliamentary Affairs, Winter 1966–7, pp. 13–30.
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© 1991 Dick Leonard
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Leonard, D. (1991). How People Vote. In: Elections in Britain Today. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21445-7_13
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21445-7_13
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