Class and the General Election

How can social scientists get a representative sample of the population and gauge the outcome of the General Election? Newsnight has some ideas and so do we.

As you will see from the Newsnight article which the link above takes you to, market researchers think that a small segment of the population can give us an indication into how the key marginal seats will fare in a General Election.

Researchers use the idea of sampling to save themselves having to ask every single member of a population a question and derive meaningful data. Taking a sample is a good labour saving technique.

I think what is interesting here though is how much more complex voting patterns are now than back in the 1970s and 80s. Back then we were always taught about the fairly clear class pattern in voting, with most of the working class supporting Labour and most of the middle classes voting Conservative.

Nowadays sociologists and political scientists would consider a much broader range of factors. But what’s happened to class?

Social scientists talk about class dealignment - the breaking up of the strong-ish and clear-ish relationship between class and voting. But why has that happened? One important reason is to do with the fragmenting of the class structure in Britain. It’s important to be careful about what that means though. It isn’t that class no longer exists, although you can find some sociologists and social scientists who make that sort of claim. Arguably though, the view proposed by Rosemary Crompton sums it up better. The old class structure of the mid C20 has simply fragmented. People do not have a strong class identity and nor are communities so clearly based on occupational class. The nature of work and the communities we live in have changed considerably; there are now more service sector jobs, fewer old ‘heavy’ industries and the manual jobs that went with them - predominantly for men. With all that going on, its not surprising that its much harder to see a clear link to class and voting behaviour. Which is not to say that class is no longer important in voting; just that the way in which its’ influence is felt has changed over time.