Predicting the Labour Vote in 1983: Social Backgrounds versus Subjective Evaluations

Abstract

Labour's electoral performance in the 1983 General Election is examined in the light of a theoretical model of voting behaviour, originally developed to explain the 1979 election. In this model, voting behaviour is seen as a product of the individual's social attributes and his or her subjective evaluations of the Labour Party. The evidence indicates that subjective evaluations, particularly affective and retrospective evaluations, were far more important than social attributes in predicting the Labour vote in 1983. Moreover the latter were only weakly related to the former, which suggests that purely sociological accounts of electoral choice are becoming increasingly obsolescent in explaining and predicting electoral behaviour in Britain.