Little work has been done on long-term trends in support for British political parties because of the absence of comparable data over more than four elections. Using a dataset of estimated vote percentages for each party over fifteen elections for a constant set of 641 ‘pseudo-constituencies' (based on those used for the 1997 and 2001 general elections) this paper uses a recently developed inductive procedure for identifying spatially varying temporal trends to identify variations in party support since 1950, enabling hypotheses regarding their nature to be formally tested. Whereas varying trends in Conservative support were predominantly regional—supporting the concept of a north–south divide—there was greater variation by functional type than geographical region in the patterning of support trends for the other two parties.
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