ABSTRACT
In this chapter we explore the patterning of voter alignments at the 1983 election by social influences, by the jobs that people do, by the nature of their work-place, by the tenure of the housing in which they live, and so on. Our perspective is essentially that of the radical model set out in Chapter 1 but we draw attention as appropriate to the interpretations and sorts of evidence that would be important for other approaches. Naturally, with the fairly limited resources available to us, our survey could not cover all aspects of the complex structure of modern British society. Some of those elements that we could not cover here, such as differences in voting between white and black people, are discussed in Chapter 8 using aggregate-level data on constituency voting. Here, however, we concentrate on five major issues about the social bases of politics where we profoundly dissent from most of the existing work in the field. These are: choosing a set of ‘class’ categories with which to analyse voting behaviour; the impact of gender and household situation on people's voting; the importance of such work-place features as sectoral location and trade union membership; the role of consumption sectors in influencing alignments; and lastly, the political effects of unemployment or dependence upon state benefits.
