Class voting and the Labour Party in Britain: The analysis of qualitative data on voting preference in the 1987 General Election

Abstract

The paper analyses open-ended data from the 1987 British Election Survey. Respondents were asked their reasons for voting the way they did, and the responses were recorded verbatim. Replies from working-class and middle-class Labour voters were analysed, and content analysis was used to match responses to the main theoretical themes in the psephological literature. The main focus of analysis was on the prevalence of class and class-related references. Somewhat surprisingly, a great many of the reports from the respondents echoed the class themes outlined by Butler and Stokes in the 1960s. Moreover, class-related responses were very strongly represented in the middle-class component of the sample. The implications of the findings for estimations of the prevalence of class voting are explored.