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A by-election is held to select a Member of Parliament when a vacancy has occurred between general elections. It provides an opportunity for the electorate to pass judgement upon a government’s performance, and thus by-election results... more
A by-election is held to select a Member of Parliament when a vacancy has occurred between general elections. It provides an opportunity for the electorate to pass judgement upon a government’s performance, and thus by-election results reflect the translation of opinion changes within the electorate into voting behaviour.2 This chapter attempts to examine a number of propositions about the behaviour of the electorate at a by-election using elementary statistical methods.
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In a disingenuous piece of aggregate data analysis Paul Whiteley suggests that, because he found that the correlation between two variables in a local election held at one point of time in one city was spurious when a third was controlled... more
In a disingenuous piece of aggregate data analysis Paul Whiteley suggests that, because he found that the correlation between two variables in a local election held at one point of time in one city was spurious when a third was controlled for, this implies that the relationships between two variables, one calculated on a different basis, in two general elections which took place three years earlier and covered a wide area of England, will also be spurious when an additional variable is introduced into the analysis. It is an inelegant analysis in model building and testing, in so far as it cannot explain the findings it purports to explain. Unfortunately it is also a textbook case of making causal inferences from variables associated with each other for reasons that lie outside the scope of the model.
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Most explanations of variations in electoral support for the National Front involve some consideration of the importance of resentment and fear of coloured people among whites, the level of which is conditional upon the local incidence of... more
Most explanations of variations in electoral support for the National Front involve some consideration of the importance of resentment and fear of coloured people among whites, the level of which is conditional upon the local incidence of coloured populations. Some writers, notably Harrop and Zimmerman and Whiteley, have suggested that National Front support, in so far as it can be explained by white ‘backlash’, may be considered as directly related to the relative size of the coloured population in different locales. Their argument is that, the higher the proportion of the population which is coloured, the greater the extent that their presence will be resented, and the higher the level of National Front support. Other commentators have advanced a rather different interpretation. Although agreeing that the National Front will do worst in areas with small or non-existent coloured populations, they argue that the party might do better in areas with moderate-sized coloured populations...
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The English as a nation have been characterized as deeply committed to democracy, favouring moderation in the pursuit of political goals, and tolerant of difference and dissent.1 While recent research2 has suggested that this image may... more
The English as a nation have been characterized as deeply committed to democracy, favouring moderation in the pursuit of political goals, and tolerant of difference and dissent.1 While recent research2 has suggested that this image may have been somewhat overdrawn, particularly as it applied to the 1970s,3 this did not imply that the English had become sympathetic to the appeals of Fascism. The vast majority of Englishmen, including many of those who voted for, or even joined, the NF, retained a strong belief in the norms and values of liberal democracy. The fact that the NF was operating in an environment where there was a poor ‘fit’ between its Fascist ideology and the beliefs of the population at large, posed a problem to its leaders. How could they on the one hand maintain doctrinal purity, while on the other attract and maintain support for the party? The organization of the NF, the structuring of its ideological appeals, and its attempts to ‘re-socialize’ new members into supporting Fascism and ‘immunize’ them against possible ‘recontamination’, reflect in greater or lesser measure the ways in which the NF’s leadership tried to reconcile these conflicting interests.
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The central contention of sociological theories was that the causes of revolutions could be located primarily in the dynamics of social relations between members of society.1 Such theories involved a major stress upon social systems,... more
The central contention of sociological theories was that the causes of revolutions could be located primarily in the dynamics of social relations between members of society.1 Such theories involved a major stress upon social systems, social institutions and social stratification, although this did not preclude the use of related economic, cultural, political or psychological explanatory variables. Within this overall orientation, the sociological theories diverged in their approach to revolution, reflecting their origins in two different strands of socio-political thought, namely functionalism and conflict-coercion theory.2 These constituted quite different approaches to a common problem, the description and analysis of societal stability and instability.