Hostname: page-component-7bb8b95d7b-qxsvm Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-09-12T07:00:38.324Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

A Comment on ‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

In an ingenious piece of aggregate data analysis Stan Taylor finds a significant relationship between the percentage of the coloured population in a constituency, and the percentage voting for the National Front amongst whites, in the two general elections of 1974 (‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’, this Journal, IX (1979), 250–5). He tests two alternative models of this relationship. The first is a linear model which postulates a white ‘backlash’ of increasing magnitude with further concentrations of coloured people; the second is a curvilinear model which postulates maximum National Front support in areas of moderate concentrations of coloured people, the argument being that people in this situation may feel most threatened by the possible future influx of coloured people. It is an elegant exercise in model building and testing, which finds the non-linear model consistent with the data for the February 1974 election, and the linear model consistent with the data for the October 1974 election.

Type
Notes and Comments
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1980

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See Whiteley, Paul, ‘The National Front Vote in the 1977 GLC Elections: An Aggregate Data Analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979), 370–80.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The data on which this paper and the present comment are based are available from the SSRC Survey Archive, Essex University, in SPSS version 6 format.

2 The detailed definitions of these variables appear in Paul Whiteley, ‘The National Front Vote’.