NE PROBLEM more than any other has dominated the study of electoral behavior in postwar Britain: the stability and social base of party voting, and more recently, the decay of these relationships. The former was most pronounced until the 1970s during which time Pulzer's oft-quoted dictum (1967: 98) seemed to rule the research agenda and scholars confirmed the solid class base of British parties (Blondel 1967; Alford 1963; Butler and Stokes 1969: 299-300). More recently the consensus of the late 1960s and 1970s was challenged by those who argued, first, the continuance of regional, ethnic, and religious influences on voting (Hechter 1975; Ragin 1977; Miller and Raab 1977; Urwin 1980, 1982; Wald 1983), some even suggesting the eventual breakup of Britain as a result of such tensions (Narin 1977); and secondly, as a corollary, the increasing volatility of the electorate as a precursor of dealignment or future realignment of existing partisan voting (Franklin and Mughan 1978; Butler and Stokes 1976; Crewe 1974, 1980; Rose 1982). The conclusions drawn from this literature are vastly important for liberal capitalist democracies. First, Britain was long considered the birthplace of modern political party organization which undergirds stability in the competitive electoral process and insured political tranquillity. Second, Britain had long been viewed as the preeminent example of an early class-based polity and more recently as a society undergoing a process of deindustrialization from the staple industries of the Victorian period to some yet undefined postindustrial polity. Third, in another schema Britain was example par excellence of a society passing from the core of the world economy to a semiperipheral status. If the historical electoral alignments could be so easily ravaged, then the social base of political life was more fragile than most scholars had admitted. What underlay all of this discussion, however, was the assumption of rock-like stability of the electoral alignments prior to the 1960s. The critical turning point in the reassessment of the stability and social base of electoral behavior was Crewe's critique (1974) of Butler and Stokes (1969). Crewe challenged the standard interpretation by noting several crucial factors unaccounted for in the original Butler and Stokes formulation: the decline in the portion of the total electorate voting for the established parties, the growing heterogeneity of the nationwide electoral swing, and