Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-m9pkr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T16:19:55.115Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Housing Tenure and Party Choice in Australia, Britain and the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Extract

In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.

Type
Notes and Comments
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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 Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Kelley, Jonathan, McAllister, Ian and Mughan, Anthony, The Decline of Class Revisited: England, 1964–1979 (Canberra: Australian National University Working Papers in Sociology, 1983)Google Scholar; Rose, Richard, ‘From Simple Determinism to Interactive Models of Voting: Britain as an Example’, Comparative Political Studies, XV (1982), Table 2.Google Scholar

3 Of the various Michigan studies of United States voting behaviour that have been produced since 1948, none has considered housing tenure. Of the twelve countries covered in Rose's comparative study of electoral behaviour, only two consider housing tenure – Britain and Ireland. See Rose, Richard, ‘Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complete Realities’Google Scholar and Whyte, John H., ‘Ireland: Politics Without Social Bases’, both in Rose, Richard, ed., Electoral Behaviour: A Comparative Handbook (New York: Free Press, 1974).Google Scholar

4 Franklin, Mark and Mughan, Anthony, ‘The Decline of Class Voting in Britain: Problems of Analysis and Interpretation’, American Political Science Review, LXXII (1978), 523–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, , ‘From Simple Determinism’.Google Scholar

5 See, for example, Dunleavy, Patrick, ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment: Social Class, Domestic Property Ownership, and State Intervention in Consumption Processes’, British Journal of Political Science, IX (1979), 409–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Saunders, Peter, Urban Politics: A Sociological Interpretation (London: Hutchinson, 1979).Google Scholar

6 United Nations, Statistical Yearbook 1973 (New York: Department of Economic and Social Affairs, 1974), Tables 182 and 198.Google Scholar

7 On housing in general in Australia, see Jones, M. A., Housing and Poverty in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1972)Google Scholar and Neutze, Max, Urban Development in Australia (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1977).Google Scholar On Britain, see Berry, Fred, Housing: The Great British Failure (London: Charles Knight, 1974)Google Scholar and Dunleavy, Patrick, The Politics of Mass Housing in Britain, 1945–75 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981).Google Scholar On the United States, see Hadden, Jeffrey K. and Borgatta, Edgar F., American Cities (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1965).Google Scholar

8 See Central Statistical Office, Regional Statistics (London: HMSO, 1977, Table 6.2.)Google Scholar

9 On Australia, see Kemeny, Jim, ‘A Political Sociology of Home Ownership in Australia’, Australia and New Zealand Journal of Sociology, LXXXI (1977), 261–98Google Scholar, and on Britain, Cullingworth, J. B., Housing in Transition (London: Heinemann, 1963).Google Scholar

10 Fuerst, J. S., ‘Public Housing in the United States’ in Fuerst, J. S., ed., Public Housing in Europe and America (New York: Wiley, 1974).Google Scholar

11 Australian and American respondents who rented their homes from the state-run housing bodies were too few to permit reliable analysis and were therefore excluded.

12 Occupational status ranks individuals on a continuum with no clear discontinuities, according to the prestige of the job. The version used here assigns scores to the categories of Treiman's fourteen-category nominal classification of occupations. See Treiman, Don, Occupational Prestige in Comparative Perspective (New York: Academic Press, 1978).Google Scholar

13 On Australia, see Neutze, Max, ‘Flats and Houses: Who Rents and Who Owns’, Royal Australian Planning Institute Journal, IX (1971), 96.Google Scholar

14 Short, John R., Housing in Britain: The Postwar Experience (London: Methuen, 1983).Google Scholar Cf. Robson, Brian T., Urban Social Areas (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), pp. 41–3.Google Scholar

15 See Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, pp. 67ff.Google Scholar

16 Kemp, David, Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1978), p. 116.Google Scholar

17 See Dunleavy, , ‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment’, p. 437Google Scholar; Rose, , ‘Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities’, pp. 512–13Google Scholar; Särlvik, Bo and Crewe, Ivor, Decade of Dealignment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 102–7.Google Scholar

18 Aitkin, Don and Kahan, Michael, ‘Australia: Class Politics in the New World’ in Rose, Richard, ed., Electoral Behaviour: A Comparative Handbook (New York: Free Press).Google Scholar See also Aitkin, Don, Stability and Change in Australian Politics (Canberra; Australian National University Press, 1977), p. 127Google Scholar and Kemp, , Society and Electoral Behaviour in Australia, pp. 96–7.Google Scholar

19 However, two studies have utilized multivariate analysis. Dunleavy (‘The Urban Basis of Political Alignment’) uses log-linear analysis, while Rose (‘Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities’ and ‘From Simple Determinism’) uses automatic interaction detector (AID).

20 Butler, and Stokes, , Political Change in Britain, p. 198.Google Scholar A decomposition of the direct and indirect effects of housing tenure on partisanship showed that in Britain the effects were almost all direct, and there was little indirect effect via class self-image.

21 Figures are metric partial regression coefficients, estimated from a regression analysis predicting Labour partisanship from family background, socioeconomic status, demography, class self-image, and dummy variables for owner occupiers and private tenants.

22 For a review, see Kemeny, , ‘A Political Sociology of Home Ownership in Australia’, pp. 48–9.Google Scholar

23 See Butler, David and Kavanagh, Dennis, The British General Election of October 1974 (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 59 and 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by the same authors, The British General Election of 1979 (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 153.Google Scholar

24 Särlvik, and Crewe, , Decade of Dealignment, pp. 278 and 262.Google Scholar

25 Several other controls, including variables for region and length of residence, were initially introduced to ensure that family political background was not acting as a surrogate for strongly middle-class or working-class parents whose children were remaining in the same immediate area. These controls left the results presented in Table 5 virtually unaltered.

26 See Aitkin, Don, Stability and Change in Australian Politics, 2nd edn, (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982) for details.Google Scholar

27 See Särlvik, and Crewe, , Decade of Dealignment, for details.Google Scholar

28 Kmenta, Jan, Elements of Econometrics (New York: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 425–7.Google Scholar

29 Hertel, Bradley R., ‘Minimising Error Variance Introduced by Missing Data Routines in Survey Analysis’, Sociological Methods and Research, IV (1976), 169–84.Google Scholar