ABSTRACT
Electoral studies from the 1950s until the early 1970s were carried out almost from a single perspective. This political science orthodoxy, the party identification model, was first challenged by an economic or public-choice theory of voting and, at the end of the 1970s, by the emergence of a radical-structural explanation. Two major empirical changes in the 1960s and 1970s evoked these challenges. The first was the declining association between occupational or social class position and political loyalty, a process known as class dealignment. The second was the weakening relationship between support for a political party and agreement with its policy positions, a process known as partisan dealignment. Neither phenomenon could be easily explained by the mainstream approach to electoral studies. The economic model sees partisan dealignment and the associated growth of third-party support as the crucial trend that requires explanation, whereas the radical view argues that understanding class dealignment is the critical problem. For each of these approaches we discuss the model's core propositions, the relationship between voters and political leaders, and the explanations given of class dealignment and partisan dealignment.
