Social locations, spatial locations and voting at the 1997 British general election: evaluating the sources of Conservative support

Abstract

Most study of British voting behaviour focuses on class and other compositional influences on party choice, paying relatively little attention to contextual influences — spatial variations in patterns of party choice. Recent work stresses the interdependence of social and spatial locations as influences on how people vote, which this paper analyses using the large British Household Panel Study data set. By locating respondents in their local social milieux as well as their class and other contexts, it shows that how people voted at the 1997 British general election reflected just as much on where they lived and who they lived among as to what social categories they belonged to.