ABSTRACT
In the mid 1970s observers of British elections began to revise their assumptions about the nature of the electorate. The 1970 election, it was argued, marked the close of a quarter-century of ‘stable two party voting’; the two elections of 1974 the beginning of a new era of ‘partisan dealignment’. 1 These two labels were convenient shorthand for a series of loosely linked propositions about voting patterns and the working of the electoral system. The first referred to a relatively neat and tidy dovetailing of party, class and ideological allegiances into two electoral blocks, converted into parliamentary parties by the simple plurality electoral system. The second referred to an electorate with weaker and less cumulative allegiances which the same electoral system forced into a two-party mould only with increasing difficulty. Chart 1 summarises these two views of the British electorate.
