Developments in Electoral Geography by Ron Johnston Fred M. Shelley Peter J. Taylor

Author:Ron Johnston, Fred M. Shelley, Peter J. Taylor [Ron Johnston, Fred M. Shelley, Peter J. Taylor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Human Geography
ISBN: 9781317610069
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Return to Lipset and Rokkan

I began this chapter with a reference to the problems of the Alliance as it sought to ‘break the mould’ of British politics in the 1980s. This led to a discussion of what the mould is, for which Lipset and Rokkan’s concept of electoral cleavages provided a framework which has been widely employed in much recent writing about electoral behaviour.

A review of Lipset and Rokkan’s model, with particular reference to single-member constituency, plurality electoral systems in which the dominant parties are pragmatic rather than ideological, identified a number of problems. Cleavages are necessary, according to the model, because they structure political conflict within society and are thus a source of social order. If the cleavages are too well defined, however, that order is counter productive, since the minority group will be unable to gain access to power. There must be sufficient flexibility across the divide so that both the dominant parties in such systems can expect electoral victory.

The source of that flexibility was identified as the concept of retrospective voting, whereby people evaluate parties at general elections in terms of past performance relative to the voters’ own interests. Since most parties when in power will produce policies that benefit their core supporters, this retrospective voting can account for the relative uniformity of swing observed in Britain for several decades. Recently that pattern has broken down, however, and has led to the partial dissolution of the dominant cleavage and with it a major change to the electoral geography. The two parties have become more ideological. The successful one in the 1980s has succeeded by gaining many votes from all occupational classes in the parts of the country where its ideologically based policies have brought about prosperity for a majority; the main opposition party – Labour – has increasingly got support only in those areas of relative deprivation. Over the 1980s, therefore, class heterogeneity in voting behaviour has increased very substantially.

A major consequence of this shift has been the change in the number of marginal seats, such that it is now very difficult to see how Labour could win the next election – either alone or in some pact with the Alliance, which has been the source of relatively dissatisfied voters’ ballots in the prosperous part of Britain. The options open to Labour are difficult. Analysis of recent trends in New Zealand was undertaken to see whether they offered any pointers to possible Labour strategies in Britain. It showed another country with increased class heterogeneity in voting behaviour (in New Zealand the middle class has become more heterogeneous; in Britain, it is the working class that has done so) as a result of the Labour Party’s package of economic policies to win middle class support, defence and cultural policies to appease its own left wing, and promised social policies to retain the (grudging at present) support of its traditional working class supporters. There is one major difference between the two, however: the New Zealand Labour Party’s substantial pragmatic

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