Policy Voting in Britain: The Colored Immigration Issue in the 1964,1966, and 1970 General Elections

American Political Science Review

Volumn 72, Issue 1, 1978, Pages 46-64

  Studlar, Donley T ^a  

^a Centre College of Kentucky   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 84909069217     PISSN: 00030554     EISSN: 15375943     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/1953598     Document Type: Article

References (51)

1. V. O. Key, The Responsible Electorate (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1966); Richard W. Boyd, “Popular Control of Public Policy: A Normal Vote Analysis of the 1968 Election,” American Political Science Review, 66 (June 1972), 429–49; Martin Fishbein and Fred S. Coombs, “Basis for Decision: An Attitudinal Approach Toward an Understanding of Voting Behavior” (paper delivered at Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago, 1971); Gerald M. Pomper, “From Confusion to Clarity: Issues and American Voters, 1956–1968,” American Political Science Review, 66 (June 1972), 415–28; Mark A. Schulman and Gerald M. Pomper, “Variability in Electoral Behavior: Longitudinal Perspectives from Causal Modeling” American Journal of Political Science, 19 (February 1975), 1–18; John E. Jackson, “Issues, Party Choices, and Presidential Votes,” American Journal of Political Science, 19 (May 1975), 161–85; Arthur H. Miller el al., “A Majority Party in Disarray: Policy Polarization in the 1972 Election,” American Political Science Review, 70 (September 1976), 753–78.
2. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard R. Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice, 3rd ed. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); Bernard R. Berelson, Paul F. Lazarsfeld, and William N. McPhee, Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954); Angus Campbell, Gerald Gurin, and Warren E. Miller, The Voter Decides (Evanston, Illinois: Row, Peterson, 1954); Angus Campbell el al., The American Voter (New York: John Wiley, 1960); Philip E. Converse, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,” in Ideology and Discontent, ed. David E. Apter (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1964), pp. 206–61; and Angus Campbell el al., Elections and the Political Order (New York: John Wiley, 1966). A recent critique of the issue-voting findings is Michael Margolis, “From Confusion to Confusion: Issues and the American Voter (1956–1972),” American Political Science Review, 71 (March 1977), 31–43.
3. The latest statement on the responsible parties controversy, with copious references to previous writings on the subject, is Evron M. Kirkpatrick, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System’: Political Science, Policy Science, or Pseudo-Science?” American Political Science Review, 65 (December 1971), pp. 965–90.
4. See Mark Benney, A. P. Gray, and R. H. Pear, How People Vote (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956), pp. 140–46; R. S. Milne and H. C. Mackenzie, Marginal Seat, 1955 (London: Hansard Society, 1958), pp. 117–21, 126; Mark Abrams and Richard Rose, Must Labour Lose? (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960), pp. 19–20; Jean Blondel, Voters, Parties, and Leaders, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), pp. 77–87; Peter G. J. Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections (New York: Praeger, 1967), pp. 114–15; and R. J. Benewick el al., “The Floating Voter and the Liberal View of Representation,” Political Studies, 27 (June 1969), 191–92,194.
5. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1974), pp. 296–302; 382–83,414–16.
6. Paul Foot, Immigration and Race in British Politics (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1965); Nicholas Deakin, ed., Colour and the British Electorate, 1964 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1965); David Butler and Anthony King, The British General Election of 1964 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), pp. 224–25, 296; and Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 304–05.
7. N. D. Deakin et al., “Colour and the 1966 General Election,” Race, 8 (July 1966), 17–42; David Butler and Anthony Kir.g, The British General Election of 1966 (London: Macmillan, 1966), pp. 250–53, 268–69, 289; Nicholas Deakin, “British Voters and the Immigration Issue,” Appendix VII in Sheila Patterson, Immigration and Race Relations in Britain, 1960–67 (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 417–22.
8. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 303–05.
9. Nicholas Deakin and Jenny Bourne, “Powell, the Minorities, and the 1970 Election,” Political Quarterly, 41 (October-December 1970), 399–415; David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election of 1970 (London: Macmillan, 1970), pp. 341, 405–07; Gerald Hoinville and Roger Jowell, “What Happened in the Election?” New Society, 16 (2 July 1970), 14; Ivor Crewe and Clive Payne, “Another Game with Nature: An Ecological Regression Model of the British Two-Party Vote Ratio in 1970,” British Journal of Political Science, 6 (January 1976), 68–73.
10. See Richard Crossman, “Understanding the Profusion of Shrinking Violets,” The Times, 6 September 1972; John Wood, ed., Powell and the 1970 Election (Kingswood, Surrey: Elliot Right Way Books, 1970); and Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 305–08, 415. The post-election analyses offered by Louis Harris Research and National Opinion Polls in The Polls and the 1970 Election, ed. Richard Rose (Glasgow: University of Strathclyde Survey Research Centre Occasional Paper No. 7, 1970), pp. 24–25, 39–40, indicate that the combination of the immigration issue and Powell’s personality significantly influenced voting behavior. A similar view is expressed in R. W. Johnson and Douglas Schoen, ’The ’Powell Effect’: or How One Man Can Win,” New Society, 37 (22 July 1976), 168–72.
11. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, pp. 306–08.
12. Preliminary analyses of the two British general elections in 1974 indicate that immigration was not an important factor in the outcome. See A. D. Fox, “Attitudes to Immigration: A Comparison of Data from the 1970 and 1974 General Election Surveys,” New Community, 4 (Summer 1975), 167; David Butler and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of February, 1974 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 24, 332; Community Relations Commission, Reference and Technical Services Division, Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the October General Election, 1974 (London: Community Relations Commission, 1975), pp. 33–43.
13. Details on the measurement and selection of all background variables-individual socioeconomic, social context, and political context-are available in Donley T. Studlar, “The Impact of the Colored Immigration Issue on British Electoral Politics, 1964–1970” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1975).
14. David Butler and Donald Stokes, Political Change in Britain, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), pp. 351–53; Deakin, “British Voters and the Immigration Issue,” pp. 418–19; Christopher Bagley, Social Structure and Prejudice in Five English Boroughs (London: Institute of Race Relations, 1970), p. x; Deakin, Colour and the British Electorate, 1964, pp. 163–66.
15. Great Britain, General Register Office, Census 1966: United Kingdom General and Parliamentary Constituency Tables (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1969), pp. 79–88.
16. Bivariate correlation tests for the effect of opinion were run with the abstainers and Labour voters together in one category of the dependent variable and the Conservatives in the other. The results did not differ appreciably from the same analysis with the abstainers removed. When one compares the two-party distribution of the vote in the Butler-Stokes surveys with the actual recorded distributions for the two-party vote in England for the 1964, 1966, and 1970 election, he finds that the respondents in the Butler-Stokes surveys tend toward Labour in reported voting behavior slightly more than the population at large. This discrepancy is not large, however, and except for 1966 is within the normal limits of sampling error. The gap between the surveyed and actual vote was 2.7 percent in 1964, 4.1 percent in 1966, and 0.9 percent in 1970. Richard Rose, “Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities” in Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook, ed. Richard Rose (New York: Free Press, 1974), p. 495
17. On the use of dummy variables, see Jacob Cohen, “Multiple Regression as a General Data-Analytic System,” Psychological Bulletin, 70 (1968), 426-43; Daniel B. Suits, “Use of Dummy Variables in Regression Equations,” Journal of the American Statistical Association, 52 (December 1957), 548–51; and Mark N. Franklin, Daedal: A Data Archiving, Editing, Describing and Analyzing Language (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 89–90. Treating ordinal-level variables as if they were interval is discussed in Sanford Labovitz, “Some Observations on Measurement and Statistics,” Social Forces, 46 (December 1967), 151–60; Sanford Labovitz, “The Assignment of Numbers to Rank Order Categories,” American Sociological Review, 35 (June 1970), 515–24; H. T. Reynolds, “Ordinal Partial Correlation and Causal Inferences,” in Measurement in the Social Sciences: Theories and Strategies, ed. Hubert M. Blalock, Jr. (Chicago: Aldine, 1974), pp. 399–423; H. T. Reynolds, “On Testing Causal Models with Ordinal Data” (University of Delaware, mimeographed, 1972).
18. Labovitz, “Some Observations on Measurement and Statistics,” pp. 156–58; Reynolds, “Ordinal Partial Correlation and Causal Inferences,” p. 417. points out that the overall Butler-Stokes errors in estimating the gap for Britain (exclusive of Northern Ireland) in 1964 and 1966 were 3.0 percent and 4.8 percent respectively. “While the degree of error involved in a sample survey may be crucial in forecasting which party wins a highly competitive British election, it is of very limited concern in an analysis of major social characteristics of voters.” Similar reasoning would seem to apply when a major attitudinal characteristic of voters is added to the analysis. The results for the actual population of England include the nonwhite voters, which is thought to shift the results in the direction of Labour at all three elections by a small amount. Nonwhites are not included in the survey results. Since the N for the regression runs was reduced considerably, especially in 1970, by pairwise deletion of cases, it is noteworthy that the surveyed vote for the multivariate analysis is as follows:
19. ’Other research employing this procedure includes Donald E. Stokes, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” American Political Science Review, 60 (March 1966), esp. 27–28; Jae-on Kim, John R. Petrocik, and Stephen N. Enokson, “Voter Turnout Among the American States: Systemic and Individual Components,” American Political Science Review, 69 (March 1975), 107–23. This method is also the equivalent of the dichotomization of the dependent variables employed in Multiple Classification Analysis (MCA). See Frank M. Andrews, James N. Morgan, and John A. Sonquist, Multiple Classification Analysis: A Report on a Computer Program for Multiple Regression Using Categorical Predictors (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 1967). Fred Kort argues that discriminant function analysis is preferable to multiple regression for a dichotomous dependent variable. See “Regression Analysis and Discriminant Analysis: An Application of R. A. Fisher’s Theorem to Data in Political Science,” American Political Science Review, 67 (June 1973), 555–59. His example, however, belies his argument. See also the exchange between Peter H. Lemieux and Kort in the “Communications” section of the American Political Science Review, 68 (March 1974), 202–05.
20. Hubert M. Blalock, Jr., Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964), p. 52.
21. This is the method used by Stokes to calculate attitudinal components of electoral decision in “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency.” See esp. 27–28.
22. In a multiple regression equation, the b weights and beta weights of all the independent variables can be compared to see which ones make more of an impact on the dependent variable net of the others. A small b, of course, would indicate small percentage differences among the categories and a conclusion of no effect for that particular variable. Contrariwise, a large b can be interpreted as signifying large percentage differences in Conservative vote among the categories and a conclusion of substantial impact of that variable on voting behavior. The beta weights of all the independent variables can be used to calculate the net effects of each variable in a path analysis. If the b coefficient is 1.5 times its standard error of estimate, a statistically significant path exists between two variables. This is a liberal standard for determining the significance of a path. Since this is an exploratory study incorporating more variables than previously examined in studies of this kind, it is more important to include any possibly important variables in the equations than to exclude variables in the interest of a rigorously specified theory. In this case, no rigorously specified theory would justify more stringent standards for including variables. Using only those variables found to be significantly related, one then calculates a second set of equations. The values from this second set provide estimates of the path coefficients. This procedure enables one to assess both the direct and indirect contributions of a particular variable to variation in the dependent variable. Any masking of the effects of a variable by its relation to another variable will thus be revealed. In other words, the net effect coefficients can be considered partial correlations, with multiple controls for the effects of the other independent variables. See David Knoke, “A Causal Model for the Political Party Preferences of American Men,” American Sociological Review, 35 (December 1972), 679–89; Giacomo Sani, “Determinants of Party Preference in Italy: Toward the Integration of Complementary Models,” American Journal of Political Science, 18 (May 1974), 315–29.
23. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 287–95. The first development of these conditions was in Angus Campbell el al., The American Voter, pp. 168–87.
24. Richard A. Brody and Benjamin I. Page, “Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting,” American Political Science Review, 66 (June 1972), 454–55.
25. Two exceptions to this generalization are Fishbein and Coombs, “Basis for Decision: An Attitudinal Approach Toward an Understanding of Voting Behavior,” and David Knoke, “A Causal Synthesis of Sociological and Psychological Models of American Voting Behavior,” Social Forces, 53 (September 1974), 92–101.
26. This model is a variation of the one employed by Donald R. Matthews and James W. Prothro, Negroes and the New Southern Politics (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1966), pp. 27, 323. See also Sani, “Determinants of Party Preference in Italy: Toward the Integration of Complementary Models“; Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 287–95.
27. On developmental models, see Blalock, Causal Inferences in Nonexperimental Research, pp. 85–87; Charles F. Cnudde and Donald J. McCtone, “Party Competition and Welfare Policies in the American States,” American Political Science Review, 63 (September 1969), 860–62. The causal sequence of the variables reflects a temporal order, that is, a person’s social context and individual attributes are temporally antecedent to his political context, which in turn is assumed to be antecedent to his opinion on immigration and his vote. The individual attribute variables are also modeled according to an assumed temporal order in the life of an individual:
28. The stability of findings in electoral situations is similar to that in nonelectoral situations found by Donley T. Studlar, “British Public Opinion, Colour Issues, and Enoch Powell: A Longitudinal Analysis,” British Journal of Political Science, 4 (July 1974), 371–81. Since electoral campaigns present the ordinary elector with stimuli that may cause him to behave differently than he would in electoral situations, the persistence of attitudes on immigration is worthy of emphasis. On the differential stimuli of electoral campaigns, see Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, Voting, pp. 291–96; and W. L. Miller and M. Mackie, “The Electoral Cycle and the Asymmetry of Government and Opposition Popularity: An Alternative Model of the Relationship Between Economic Conditions and Political Popularity,” Political Studies, 21 (September 1973), 263–79.
29. Accounts of the 1970 campaign and of the relative attention given in it to the immigration issue are contained in Butler and Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election of 1970, ch. 7, and George Gale, “The 1970 Election Campaign” in Powell and the 1970 Election, ed. Wood, pp. 50–82.
30. Examples of mass detachment from political events are given in Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 22–23; and Abrams and Rose, Must Labour Lose? pp. 73–74. The argument is familiar, of course, to those who have read the SRC studies of American elections. See especially Donald E. Stokes and Warren E. Miller, “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” in Campbell el al., Elections and the Political Order, pp. 194 211.
31. See the discussion of the conditions for issue voting in Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 287–95.
32. Evidence supporting this contention for elections in the United States is presented in Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, Voting, pp. 215–33, and Campbell el al., The American Voter, pp. 179–87. British findings on the same point are available in Benney, Gray, and Pear, How People Vote, pp. 140–46; Milne and Mackenzie, Marginal Seat, 1955, pp. 117–21;and Pulzer, Political Representation and Elections, pp. 114–15.
33. See Stokes, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency.“
34. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 303–05.
35. Ibid., pp. 307–08., Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain
36. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 307–08.
37. Butler and Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election if 1970, pp. 159–63; Gale, “The 1970 Election Campaign,” pp. 66–82.
38. Fox finds that by 1974 the electorate was once more confused about which party was more restrictive. This is not surprising, since the Conservative government admission of refugee Asians from Uganda in the fall of 1972 served to alter the restrictive image Powell had given the party. See Fox, “Attitudes to Immigration: A Comparison of Data from the 1970 and 1974 General Election Surveys,” 176–78. On the Uganda Asians episode, see Derek Humphry and Michael Ward, Passports and Politics (Harmondsworfh, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1974).
39. Page and Brody suggest that this test is sufficient to establish that no issue voting is taking place; however they do note that one should examine perceptions before drawing a final conclusion. They do not, however, consider that other variables should also be controlled in a multivariate design. See Benjamin I. Page and Richard A. Brody, “Policy Voting and the Electoral Process: The Vietnam War Issue, American Political Science Review, 61 (September 1972), 982.
40. This average net effect for the entire sample in each year was calculated in the following manner. The b weight for each perception category was multiplied by the N in that category. Since the “no difference” b weights were not significant, 0 was assigned as the weight for this group of respondents. The results of these three multiplications were added together. This means that the figure from the Labour perceivers, with a negative b weight, was subtracted from the figure from the Conservative perceivers, with a positive b weight. This number was then divided by the total N in the sample for that year, resulting in the average net effect for the entire sample. The average net effect was standardized according to the formula provided by Stokes, “Some Dynamic Elements of Contests for the Presidency,” 27–28, to yield the total net effect.
41. The overall R2 in all three regressions shows that this particular set of variables accounts very well for the variance in voting behavior at the 1964 British general election when compared with previous efforts, even though it is not the purpose of the study to explain the vote, but only to determine whether knowing a person’s opinion on immigration adds to the explanation. See Rose, “Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities,” pp. 525–30; C. Neal Tate, “The Utility of Contextural Variables in Predicting Left-Right Voting Choice and Social Welfare Policy Preferences: Great Britain, Norway, the Netherlands, Germany” (paper delivered at Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, 1972).
42. Studlar, “British Public Opinion, Colour Issues, and Enoch Powell: A Longitudinal Analysis“; Dilip Hiro, Black British, White British (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1971); Elinor B. Bacharach, ” ’Powell-ism’ and Political Culture: The Impact of Race Problems on British Politics” (M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1969); W. W. Daniel, Racial Discrimination in England (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968).
43. An excellent illustration of the pitfalls of attributing large changes in election results to single factors is found in Aaron B. Wildavsky, ’The Intelligent Citizen’s Guide to the Abuses of Statistics: The Kennedy Document and the Catholic Vote,” in The Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems, ed. Edward R. Tufte (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1970), pp. 37–67.
44. The phrase is that of R. B. McCallum as quoted in Richard Rose, Politics in England (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964), p. 3.
45. Deakin and Bourne, “Powell, the Minorities, and the 1970 Election,” 402–15. In general, ethnic minority voting patterns are a neglected research question, largely because of the difficulty of ascertaining trends in so small a portion of the population, even with large random samples. Three limited inquiries into this problem are Daniel Lawrence, Black Migrants: White Natives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 132–50; Community Relations Commission, Reference and Technical Services Division, Participation of Ethnic Minorities in the October General Election, 1974; and Muhammed Anwar, “Asian Participation in the 1974 Autumn Election,” New Community, 4 (Autumn 1975), 376–83.
46. Richard T. Schaefer, “Party Affiliation and Prejudice in Britain,” New Community, 2 (Summer 1973), 196–99; Richard T. Schaefer, “Correlates of Racial Prejudice,” in Sociological Theory and Survey Research, ed. Timothy Legatt (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1974), pp. 237–64;E. J. B. Rose el al., Colour and Citizenship (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 557–59.
47. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., pp. 42–47.
48. Rose, “Britain: Simple Abstractions and Complex Realities,” pp. 496–97.
49. Page and Brody give extended consideration to this phenomenon in “Comment: The Assessment of Policy Voting,” 452–58.
50. Butler and Stokes, Political Change in Britain, 2nd ed., p. 307.
51. Fox found considerable projection of the voters’ immigration views onto their chosen party in the February, 1974 election. As has been argued previously, the Uganda Asians episode blurred distinctions between party policies. In such an ambiguous situation, it would be easier for voters to project their own immigration views onto their favored party than in 1970. Furthermore, in 1974 the Conservatives increased their vote over 1970 among those favorable toward immigrants and lost votes among those unfavorable; the Labour party situation was the reverse. See Fox, “Attitudes to Immigrants: A Comparison of Data from the 1970 and 1974 General Election Surveys,” 175–78.