ABSTRACT
Traditional accounts of the British electorate present a picture of long-term stability. Individual voters may be influenced at any particular election by short-term factors. But their basic loyalties are long term and fixed: party identification and political ideologies provide the anchors which hold voters' loyalties steady against short-term fluctuations. The traditional account has xiiibeen increasingly questioned, however. Longitudinal data from the British Household Panel Survey allows an analysis of the stability of these anchors annually for a four-year period in the early 1990s. Contrary to the traditional account, the results reveal substantial short-term fluctuations in individual voters' party identifications and political attitudes. If party identification and political attitudes are voters' anchors, they are embedded in very shallow sediments.
