Electoral &dies (1986). S:l, 29-30

Comment on Dennis Kavanagh’s ‘How We Vote Now’

ANTHONY HEATH

University of Oxford, Barnett House, Oxford OX1 2ER, England

Dennis Kavanagh’s piece is an interesting and fair-minded one, although I am sorry if he thinks that ‘niggles, breast-beating, and the rubbishing of the work of the rivals’ characterize the books under review. I have great respect for the work of Dunleavy, Husbands, Rose and McAllister and do apologize if anything we wrote suggests otherwise.

My main dispute with Professor Kavanagh (perhaps predictably) concerns our treatment of social class. He is of course correct that our results are, in part, artefacts of our definitions just as previous results were, in part, artefacts of the social grade scheme. This is true of any technical definition, although we would hope to see a family resemblance in the conclusions reached by different class schemas. Our definition produces a smaller working class, and shows slightly higher levels of class voting, than does the social grade scheme. In these respects our conclusions may be artefactual.

But it would be rather alarming if, as Kavanagh implies, our conclusions about trends

over time in the size of the classes or in class alignment were artefactual. We reanalysed the 1964 data using our new definition of social class in order to ensure that we were comparing like with like. We would expect this definition to show a smaller working class than the social grade scheme does when applied to the 1964 data, just as is it did when applied to the 1983 data. The trends should thus be left unaffected.

One can of course carry out the reverse exercise and measure the trends over time using the social grade scheme for both data sets. When we do so, we find that the working class (defined as grades C2 and D) contracted by over 10 percentage points between 1964 and 1983. This is almost the same contraction as we described in How Britain Votes. We therefore see no reason to modify our conclusion that social change can account for half of Labour’s electoral decline over this period. (And we may note that Mark Franklin, although using rather different measures of social structure, reaches an identical answer.) We believe the conclusion to be a robust one, unaffected by definitions of class.

The same is largely true for class dealignment. Our essential distinction here is between absolute and relative class voting. Absolute class voting (the overall percentage voting for their natural class party) falls substantially whether we use the old or the new definitions of social class. And this is hardly surprising given the rise in the Liberal/Alliance share of the vote. Relative class voting, however, shows much less decline. In other words, Labour’s share of the vote has declined in all social classes, and by rather similar proportions. This conclusion too stands up well when social grade is used. Labour’s share of the vote was lower in all social grades in 1983 than it had been in 1964. True, there was a much sharper decline in grade C2 (the skilled manual category) than in the others, but as Dennis Kavanagh correctly points out, it is precisely here that there is most ambiguity in the allocation of occupations. (We should perhaps also point out that the method of allocating

0261-3794/86/01/0029-021903.00 0 1986 Butterworth & Co(Publishers)Ltd

30 Comment on Dennis Kuvanagb ‘s ‘How We Vote Now’

occupations to social grade used in the earlier surveys left a great deal to the initiative of the interviewers. The reliability of the social grade scheme has been called into question by a number of writers.)

The major reason, then, that our conclusions on class dealignment differ from those of other scholars is because we make the distinction between absolute and relative class voting, not because we adopt a different definition of social class. Opinions about class dealignment

depend on how one defines dealignment, not class. Nevertheless, we would agree with Dennis Kavanagh (and with Rose and McAllister)

that ‘there is a weak relationship between social class and vote, whatever theory of class is employed. Most British voters do not have their votes determined by their occupations.’ Our point is that occupation has netrer determined vote to any great extent. Mark Franklin for example shows that even in 1964 occupation explained only 11 per cent of the variance in vote (compared with 7 per cent in 1979). Our ‘rejigging’ of social class was not an attempt to show that class determined vote but rather to give a better account of the class interests that in a sense provide the infrastructure of British politics. But whether those class interests get translated into class voting will depend on how the voters themselves define their interests and how they perceive the political parties. Values and perceptions explain much more of the variance in vote than does social class, but then they always have done.