The moving centre: Preferences for government activity in Britain, 1950-2005

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 259-285

  Bartle, John ^a   Dellepiane Avellaneda, Sebastian ^b,c   Stimson, James ^b,c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

^b UNIVERSITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

^c UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 82455252111     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123410000463     Document Type: Article

References (108)

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12. Christopher Wlezien, 'Patterns of Representation: Dynamics of Public Preferences and Policy', Journal of Politics, 66 (2004), 1-24.
13. Stuart N. Soroka and Christopher Wlezien, 'Opinion-Policy Dynamics: Public Preferences and Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom', British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 665-89.
14. Robert S. Erikson, Michael B. Mackuen and James A. Stimson, The Macro Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
15. See Frank Teer and James D. Spence, Political Opinion Polls (London: Hutchinson, 1973);
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20. Hugh Ward, 'Preference Shaping and Party Competition: Some Empirical and Theoretical Arguments', in Judith Bara and Albert Weale, eds, Democratic Politics and Party Competition (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 245-70.
21. James Stimson, Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles and Swings. (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1999);
22. James Stimson, Tides of Consent: How Public Opinion Shapes American Politics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
23. James A. Stimson, Michael B. Mackuen and Robert S. Erikson. 'Dynamic Representation', American Political Science Review, 89 (1995), 543-65;
24. Erikson et al. The Macro Polity.
25. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Free Press, 1997), p. 127.
26. John W. Kingdon, Agendas, Alternatives and Public Policy (Boston, Mass.: Little Brown, 1984), p. 153.
27. See also George Orwell, Orwell: The Observer Years (London: Atlantic Books, 2004), pp. 4-5.
28. John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
29. See also James A. Stimson, 'The Micro Foundations of Mood', in James H. Kuklinski, ed., Thinking about Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 253-80.
30. Ian Budge, 'Identifying Dimensions and Locating Parties: Methodological and Conceptual Problems', in Richard S. Katz and William Crotty, eds, Handbook of Party Politics (London: Sage, 2006), pp. 422-34.
31. Erikson et al., The Macro Polity.
32. See James A. Stimson, 'Public Policy Mood: A Personal Narrative', Political Methodologist, 12 (2004), pp. 9-14, at p. 12.
33. Philip E. Converse, 'Belief Systems in Mass Publics' in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New York: Free Press, 1964), pp. 209-64, at p. 209.
34. Howard Schumann and Stanley Presser, Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys: Experiments on Question Form, Wording and Context (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996);
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36. See George H. Gallup, The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls, Great Britain, 1937-1975 (London: Random House, 1976), 2 volumes.
37. Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot (London: Macmillan, 1998);
38. Anthony Forster, Euroscepticism in Contemporary British Politics (London: Routledge, 2002).
39. Tom Nairn, The Left Against Europe? (London: Penguin, 1973).
40. see Young, This Blessed Plot, chap. 5.
41. See Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier, Kathleen Knight and Lee Sigelman, 'The Interplay between Macro-Partisanship and Macro-Ideology: A Time Series Study', Journal of Politics, 60 (1998), 1031-49;
42. Janet M. Box-Steffensmeier and Suzanna De Boef, 'Macropartisanship and Macroideology in the Sophisticated Electorate', Journal of Politics, 63 (2001), 232-48
43. This paper suggests that 'for the politically sophisticated group, there was a connection between macropartisanship and macroideology', p. 245.
44. Elinor Scarbrough, Political Ideology and Voting Behaviour: An Exploratory Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
45. The algorithm is developed in Stimson, Public Opinion in America. It has been used in various studies including
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48. Erikson et al., The Macro Polity, chaps 6 and 7;
49. Paul M. Kellstedt, The Mass Media and the Dynamics of American Racial Attitudes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003);
50. Erik Voeten and Paul R. Brewer, 'Public Opinion, the War in Iraq, and Presidential Accountability', Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50 (2006), 809-30;
51. Frank R. Baumgartner, Suzanna L. De Boef and Amber E. Boydstun, The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
52. We explore the issue of dimensionality further in John Bartle, Sebastian Dellepiane and James A. Stimson, 'The Dimensionality of British Political Preferences, 1950-2005' (paper presented at the 5th ECPR General Conference, Potsdam, 2009 - available from the authors).
53. Andrew Marr, A History of Modern Britain (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 2007), p. xi, p. 28 and p. 70.
54. Marr, A History of Modern Britain, p. 70.
55. Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik, B. and James Alt, 'Partisan Dealignment in Britain ,1964-1974',
56. British Journal of Political Science, 7 (1977), 129-90;
57. Ivor Crewe, 'The Labour Party and the Electorate', in Dennis Kavanagh, ed., The Politics of the Labour Party (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), pp. 9-49.
58. Bernard Donoghue, Prime Minister: The Conduct of Policy under Wilson and Callaghan (London: Jonathan Cape, 1987), p. 191.
59. Ivor Crewe, 'Has the Electorate Become Thatcherite?' in Robert Skidelsky, ed., Thatcherism (London: Chatto & Windus, 1988), pp. 25-49;
60. Ivor Crewe, 'Values: The Crusade that Failed', in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon, eds, The Thatcher Effect (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 239-50;
61. Ivor Crewe and Donald D. Searing, 'Ideological Change in the British Conservative Party', American Political Science Review, 82 (1988), 361-84;
62. Anthony Heath, Roger Jowell and John Curtice, How Britain Votes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985);
63. Anthony Heath, John Curtice, Roger Jowell, Geoffrey Evans, Julia Field and Sharon Witherspoon, Understanding Political Change: The British Voter 1964-1987 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991).
64. Wlezien, 'The Public as Thermostat'.
65. The full factor loadings for the 349 items are available from the authors on request.
66. The earlier British Election Studies also asked about the reported left-right position, but the filter question generated so much missing data that the resulting marginals were not included in our database.
67. The latter, it should be remembered, is not included in the former.
68. 2 = 0.93, N = 31 (*Not significant at p<0.05, two-tailed).
69. Paul Webb, The Modern British Party System (London: Sage, 2000), chap. 3;
70. Geoffrey Evans, 'Europe: A New Cleavage?' in Geoffrey Evans and Pippa Norris, eds, Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-term Perspective (London: Sage, 1999), pp. 207-22.
71. See Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution: Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989);
72. Stimson, Tides of Consent, chap. 3.
73. See Evan Davies, Public Spending (London: Penguin, 1998).
74. See Stanley Feldman and John R. Zaller, 'The Political Culture of Ambivalence: Ideological Responses to the Welfare State', American Journal of Political Science, 36 (1992), 268-307.
75. Wlezien, 'The Public as Thermostat', pp. 985-9.
76. Wlezien, 'The Public as Thermostat'.
77. Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics, chaps 3-4.
78. Jenkins, Mrs Thatcher's Revolution, chap. 1.
79. Clive Ponting, Breach of Promise (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989).
80. We have also considered analysis of the longer period, 1965-2005. That produces a compromise result where the effects are also highly significant, but less sharp than the shorter period of Table 3.
81. Walter Enders, Applied Econometric Time Series (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2004), chap. 6;
82. Jeffrey M. Wooldridge, Introductory Econometrics: A Modern Approach (Mason, Ohio: Thomson, South Western, 2006), chap. 18;
83. Peter Kennedy, A Guide to Econometrics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), chap. 19.
84. The longest single-source period was found in G. White and H. Chapman, 'Long-term Trends in Public Expenditure', Economic Trends, 408 (1987), pp. 124-8;
85. see Paul Johnson, Frances Lynch and John Geoffrey Walker, 'Income Tax and Elections in Britain, 1950-2001', Electoral Studies, 24 (2005), 393-408).
86. It is clear from Figure 2 in Johnson et al., 'Income Tax and Elections in Britain', that this correlates very well with average tax levels for married industrial workers too. These estimates are available only up to 2001, with the consequence that N falls to 51.
87. Ivor Crewe, 'Now relax, it's a dead cert', New Statesman, 12 February 2001.
88. See also Anthony King, 'Why Labour Won - At Last', in Anthony King, ed., New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls, 1997
89. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1998), pp. 177-207.
90. Stimson, Public Opinion in America, p. 98.
91. See Erikson et al., The Macro Polity, chap. 7.
92. David Butler, 'Reflections on British Elections and Their Study', Annual Review of Political Science, 1 (1998), 451-64, p. 455.
93. Labour actually obtained a lower share of the vote in February 1974 but obtained 301 seats to the Conservatives' 296. It obtained a tiny majority of just five seats in the subsequent election of October 1974.
94. Kenneth Newton, 'Caring and Competence', in Anthony King, ed., Britain at the Polls, 1992
95. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1992).
96. David Sanders, 'The New Electoral Battleground', in Anthony King, ed., New Labour Triumphs: Britain at the Polls (Chatham, N.J.: Chatham House, 1998), p. 217.
97. Polly Toynbee and David Walker, Did Things Get Better? An Audit of Labour's Successes and Failures (London: Penguin Books, 2001), p. 104.
98. See John Bartle, The New British Politics: Election Update (Harlow: Longman, 2005), p. 22.
99. Gary King, 'Replication Replication', PS: Political Science and Politics, 3 (1995), 443-99.
100. Erikson et al., The Macro Polity, chaps 6 and 7.
101. Wlezien, 'The Public as Thermostat' and 'Patterns of Representation'.
102. Martin Paldam, 'The Distribution of Election Results and Two Explanations of the Costs of Ruling', European Journal of Political Economy, 2 (1986), 5-24;
103. Martin Paldam and Peter Skott, 'A Rational Voter Explanation of the Cost of Ruling', Public Choice, 83 (1995),159-72;
104. Peter Naanstead and Martin Paldam, 'The Costs of Ruling', in Han Dorussen and Michael Taylor, eds, Economic Voting (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 17-44.
105. Stimson, Public Opinion in America and Tides of Consent.
106. Erikson et al., The Macro Polity, p. 5.
107. Converse, 'Popular Representation and the Distribution of Information'.
108. John Bartle, Sebastian Dellepiane and James A. Stimson, 'The Dimensionality of British Political Preferences, 1950-2005' (paper presented at the 5th ECPR General Conference, Potsdam, 2009).