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Left-Right Position Matters, But Does Social Class? Causal Models of the 1992 British General Election

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 1998

John Bartle
John Bartle*
Affiliation:
Department of Government, University of Essex
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Extract

Social class has long been assumed to be the predominant social or structural determinant of voting behaviour. This article assesses the effect of class on voting behaviour at the 1992 general election by adopting the causal modelling perspective developed by Warren E. Miller and J. Merrill Shanks. It explores two mechanisms (party identification and left–right ideological positions) which may mediate the effect of class on voting behaviour. However, it demonstrates that wherever class is assumed to be located in the causal order, it does not dominate analysis of voting behaviour and left–right positions.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , July 1998 , pp. 501 - 529
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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Footnotes

The 1992 British Election Studies data used in this article was provided by the ESRC Data Archive at the University of Essex. The research was supported by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (grant no. R00429434022). The author would like to thank the following for comments upon earlier versions of this article: Sarah Birch, Jonathon Burton, Ivor Crewe, Dylan Griffiths, Anthony Heath, Anthony Lyons, David Sanders, Elinor Scarbrough and Hugh Ward, as well as his postgraduate student colleagues at the University of Essex. These individuals, however, are absolved from responsibility for any errors of interpretation.