ABSTRACT
This article uses survey data gathered in two national survey research projects conducted in the 1990s to investigate the stability of party identification in contemporary Britain. Time series analyses reveal substantial aggregate-level instability in party identification, with the Labour Party gaining a sizeable number of new partisans at the expense of the Conservatives. Binary and multinomial logit analyses of panel survey data indicate that individual-level movements in party identification have been prompted by voters’ party and party leader images, as well as by their economic and social policy evaluations, and their attitudes towards Britain’s role in the European Union. Mixed Markov Latent Class (MMLC) analyses xvconfirm the presence of a large number of unstable identifiers in the 1990s. Additional MMLC analyses indicate that this situation is not novel; largescale partisan instability also characterized the British electorate in the 1960s.
