ABSTRACT
Many of those who write about democracy often suppose that individual vote decisions and aggregate election outcomes owe something to ideological considerations. Elections are, therefore, regularly scrutinised for what they tell us about the appeal of ‘ideas’, whether in the form of ideational wholes (‘isms’) or general solutions to social problems. In the mid-1980s, for example, the Conservative Party’s three successive victories were often supposed to owe something to the appeal of ‘Thatcherism’ or policies that ‘rolled back the frontiers of the state’. At the same time, Ronald Reagan’s landslide victories were widely interpreted as signalling a demand for more ‘conservative’ policies or marking a ‘shift the right’ (Shanks and Miller, 1990). Indeed, elections at all times and in all places are interpreted in ‘ideological’ terms (Stokes, 1963).
