How People Vote by Mark Benney E.P. Gray R.H. Pear

Author:Mark Benney, E.P. Gray, R.H. Pear [Mark Benney, E.P. Gray, R.H. Pear]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9780415175470
Google: -Uf_wAEACAAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 1998-01-15T04:47:39+00:00

Hall-Jones Scale

1, 2 and 3 % 4% 5% 6 and 7%

Conservative 66 80 28 17

Labour 23 16 66 80

Liberal 11 4 6 3

N. (=100%) (52) (57) (263) (237)

As these two cross-tabulations show, the proportion who voted Conservative steadily decreased and the proportion who voted Labour steadily increased with each step down the social scale, whether we select income or occupational prestige as the chief criterion for placing informants. For example, to take the index which we shall use most often, the Socio-Economic Status Scale, among the 2% of our sample with the highest incomes, about 8 people out of 10 voted Conservative, and only about 1 in 10 voted Labour, while among the poorest 11 %, less than 2 out of 10 voted Conservative, and nearly 8 out of 10 voted Labour. The two groups which were intermediate in wealth were more evenly divided in their vote, but again the better-off voted largely Conservative and less well-off largely Labour.

The pattern is in general similar if we take as our index the Hall-Jones scale, but in this case there is one irregularity in the progression from Conservatism to Labour as we descend the social hierarchy. People in Class 4 occupations (which were non-manual jobs requiring comparatively little skill and training and carrying no authority over others) voted Conservative even more often than those in the higher-prestige occupational groups. Because of the small numbers in the sub-groups the difference is not statistically significant, and it may well be due simply to ‘sampling error’. It is, however, a difference worth watching for in future studies of the present kind. It may be that people in such occupations, on the fringe of the middle class, feel a need to safeguard their position by more strict conformity to middle-class norms where they have a choice, to make up for their inability, for financial reasons, to conform in other ways.1

The most interesting point about Table 9, however, is the wide gap in the proportions voting Conservative and Labour between the lower level of our ‘middle class’ (‘Average’ on the S.E.S. grading, and Grade 4 on the Hall-Jones Scale). and the upper level of the ‘working class’ (‘Average Minus’ on the S.E.S. grading, and Grade 5 on the Hall-Jones Scale). This suggests that although finer class gradations might be distinguished by methods more subtle and exact than ours, we are justified both in speaking of two major classes, and in claiming that our indices give us an approximate and useful method of identifying their members. Because the differences in vote between socio-economic strata are so sharp (as we shall see, they are stronger than any other difference defined by objective attributes), and because class position is associated in greater or lesser degree with almost all other variables, we shall retain the division between middle class and working class in studying other group variations in vote.

OCCUPATION AND SELF-ASSIGNED CLASS

1–3 4 5 6–7

% saying they were % % % %

Upper Middle Class 11 8 1 —

Middle Class 44 57

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