You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 10 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Why do people vote the way they do? This is one of the central questions of UK politics, and the answer has changed dramatically over the past half-century. This lesson examines the principal theories and models of voting behaviour: the traditional model in which class shaped party allegiance, the twin processes of class dealignment and partisan dealignment that have weakened the old loyalties, and the newer frameworks — the primacy and recency models, issue voting, valence and rational choice — that political scientists use to make sense of a more volatile electorate. The emphasis here is on the theoretical models and the long-run changes in voting behaviour; the detailed operation of individual social factors, of issue and valence voting, and of campaigns, media and case-study elections is developed in the lessons that follow, so this lesson concentrates on the underlying frameworks rather than duplicating that material.
A confident command of these models is essential for Component 1 (Paper 1). Examiners expect candidates not merely to describe how voting behaviour has changed but to deploy the competing models analytically, to support claims with appropriate evidence, and to recognise that no single model offers a complete explanation. Voting behaviour is multi-causal, and the strongest answers treat the models as complementary tools rather than rival certainties.
For much of the 20th century, voting in the UK was closely aligned with social class. The relationship was strong enough that, in the post-war decades, knowing a voter's class was one of the best available predictors of how they would vote.
| Class | Typical Party |
|---|---|
| Working class (manual workers, lower income) | Labour |
| Middle class (professionals, managers, business owners) | Conservative |
The strength of this link was famously captured by the political scientist Peter Pulzer, who wrote in 1967 that "class is the basis of British party politics; all else is embellishment and detail". At the time this was barely an exaggeration: class and party were tightly bound together, and other factors seemed marginal by comparison. This is the benchmark against which all subsequent change is measured, and it is the starting point for understanding dealignment.
The class–party link did not arise by accident; it rested on several reinforcing foundations:
Together these created a politics of alignment, in which most voters had a stable, class-based party identity that they retained throughout their lives and passed on to their children. The two reinforced one another: class shaped material interests and community life, which in turn produced a durable party loyalty, which was then handed down through socialisation to the next generation, renewing the cycle. This is why the politics of the aligned era was so stable, with results moving only gradually from one election to the next. It is the erosion of these foundations — the fraying of class identities, the decline of the industrial communities and trade unions that sustained them, and the weakening of inherited loyalty — that the twin concepts of class dealignment and partisan dealignment describe, and to which the rest of this lesson turns.
Class dealignment is the process by which the traditional link between social class and voting has weakened.
It is important to be precise about what dealignment does and does not claim. It does not assert that class has become irrelevant, nor that classes have ceased to exist. It claims that the strength of the link between class and party has weakened: a voter's class now predicts their vote far less reliably than it did in Pulzer's day, and large numbers of voters routinely cross the old class–party lines.
| Indicator | Trend |
|---|---|
| Absolute class voting | The proportion of working-class voters supporting Labour has fallen substantially since the high-water mark of the 1960s |
| The Alford Index | A standard measure of class voting (the gap between working-class and middle-class support for the left), which has declined markedly since the 1960s |
| The Red Wall, 2019 | The Conservatives won many traditionally Labour-voting working-class seats in northern England, dramatising the breakdown of the old alignment |
| Middle-class Labour voters | Labour increasingly draws support from university-educated middle-class professionals, especially in cities, reversing the old pattern |
The Alford Index deserves a word of explanation, as it is the standard scholarly tool for measuring class voting. In essence it captures the difference between the percentage of the working class and the percentage of the middle class voting for the party of the left; a high figure indicates strong class voting, and a falling figure indicates dealignment. Its long-term decline is the clearest quantitative evidence that class voting has weakened. The 2019 "Red Wall" result and the growing tendency of graduates and urban professionals to vote Labour are the most vivid recent illustrations: voters who, on the old model, would have been reliably Labour (working-class northern voters) or reliably Conservative (middle-class graduates) have in many cases swapped their traditional allegiances.
It is useful to distinguish two ways of measuring class voting, because confusing them is a common error. Absolute class voting measures the raw proportion of each class voting for "its" natural party — for example, the share of the working class voting Labour. Relative class voting (which the Alford Index captures) measures the gap between the classes — how much more likely the working class is than the middle class to vote for the left. Absolute class voting can fall simply because a party becomes more or less popular across the board, whereas a fall in relative class voting indicates a genuine loosening of the class–party connection. Both measures have declined over the long run, which is why political scientists are confident that real dealignment — and not merely a change in the parties' overall popularity — has occurred. Deploying this distinction accurately is a reliable marker of a strong answer.
A longstanding strand of this debate concerns embourgeoisement — the idea, much discussed from the 1960s onwards, that rising prosperity was turning sections of the working class into middle-class-style consumers with correspondingly less attachment to Labour. The growth of home ownership, in particular, was thought to give former working-class tenants a stake in property values and lower taxation that pulled them towards the Conservatives. While the embourgeoisement thesis has been refined and contested over the decades, it captures an important mechanism behind class dealignment: as the lived experience of class changed — through affluence, home ownership and the decline of heavy industry and its tight-knit communities — the social foundations that once bound class to party were steadily eroded. Understanding dealignment as a social process of this kind, rather than merely as a change in voting statistics, lends depth to an answer.
Partisan dealignment is the decline in the strength of voters' long-term identification with a particular political party. It is closely related to class dealignment but conceptually distinct: class dealignment concerns the weakening of the class–party link specifically, whereas partisan dealignment concerns the weakening of party loyalty itself, from whatever source it derived. A voter can lose a strong party identity without reference to class at all.
The concept of party identification — a standing, often lifelong, psychological attachment to a party, akin to supporting a football team — was central to the old model of alignment. Strong party identifiers tended to vote the same way election after election almost regardless of the particular candidates or issues. Partisan dealignment describes the erosion of this kind of standing loyalty.
| Indicator | Trend |
|---|---|
| Strength of party ID | The proportion of voters professing a "very strong" identification with a party has fallen sharply since the 1960s |
| Floating voters | A growing share of the electorate describe themselves as having no fixed party allegiance and decide late |
| Electoral volatility | Swings between elections, and the movement of voters between parties, have become markedly larger than in the more stable 1950s |
| Split-ticket voting | Voting for different parties at different levels of election has become more common |
Three behavioural consequences are worth highlighting. First, the rise of the floating voter — the voter without a fixed allegiance, open to persuasion — has expanded the pool of voters who can change the outcome of an election. Second, electoral volatility has increased: larger numbers of voters switch parties from one election to the next, producing bigger swings and more dramatic results, of which the 2019 Red Wall shift and the scale of change in 2024 are recent examples. Third, split-ticket voting has become more common, as voters feel freer to support different parties for, say, a devolved body and for Westminster. All three reflect the loosening of the standing loyalties that once anchored the electorate.
The significance of partisan dealignment is that it removes the anchor that once held the electorate steady. Where a strong party identity acted as a standing filter — disposing a voter to interpret events favourably to their party and to vote for it almost regardless of the particular circumstances — its decline leaves voters more exposed to the influence of current issues, leaders and events. Partisan dealignment is therefore the hinge between the old world of alignment and the new world of recency-driven voting: it is precisely because fewer voters carry a strong standing loyalty that short-term factors have been able to assume the prominence they now have. A clear grasp of this causal link — dealignment loosening loyalties, which in turn amplifies short-term factors — is central to a high-quality answer on why voting behaviour has changed.
A helpful way to organise the theories of voting behaviour is to distinguish between two broad families of explanation: the primacy model and the recency model. This distinction provides a framework into which the more specific models — class, party identification, issue voting, valence — can be slotted.
The primacy model holds that voting is determined mainly by long-term factors that are established early and remain stable: above all social class and party identification, reinforced by family and community socialisation. On this view the key influences on a vote are "primary" — laid down well before any particular campaign — and elections largely reflect the enduring loyalties of the electorate. The primacy model corresponds to the era of strong class and partisan alignment, when most voters' choices were settled long in advance.
The recency model, by contrast, holds that voting is increasingly shaped by short-term factors specific to each election: the issues of the day, the perceived competence of the parties, the appeal of the leaders, and recent events. As class and partisan alignment have weakened, more voters decide on the basis of these recent, election-specific considerations rather than standing loyalties. The recency model corresponds to the dealigned, volatile electorate of recent decades, and it provides the natural home for issue voting, valence and rational-choice explanations.
The shift in emphasis from the primacy model to the recency model is, in effect, another way of describing the consequences of dealignment. As long-term anchors have weakened, short-term factors have come to matter more, which is precisely why elections have become more volatile and harder to predict. A strong answer can use this primacy/recency framework to structure a discussion of why voting behaviour has changed, rather than simply listing models in isolation.
Subscribe to continue reading
Get full access to this lesson and all 10 lessons in this course.