How the Decline of Class Voting Opened the Way to Radical Change in British Politics

Abstract

The victory of an established major party in the 1983 British general election, with the other established party coming second, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that the outcome could easily have been very different. The purpose of this article is to show how the social structure that used to underpin traditional two-party voting has changed its nature in recent years, so that at least since 1974 the potential has existed for the right combination of political forces to reduce one or both traditional major parties either to the status of minor contender, or else to that of a more equal partner in what is no longer a two-party system. In a recent article, Crewe has documented the extreme and unpredictable nature of the volatility that has marked party preferences among the British electorate in recent years. The present article seeks to lay bare the underlying concomitants of that more visible phenomenon.