Partisanship and Policy Choice: Issue Preferences in the British Electorate, February 1974

Abstract

Inherent in many models of voting, as well as in defences of representative democracy, is the assumption that the voting public has knowledge of and opinions about public policy issues. In recent years in the United States a stream of scholarly articles has been devoted to assessing not just the extent to which issue knowledge and opinions exist but also the extent to which they influence electoral decisions. This new literature suggests that issue-related perceptions and attitudes are rather more important in the electoral process than earlier studies had suggested. This increased focus on issues appears to reflect both methodological changes in the analysis of them and also real changes in the importance of policy issues in American electoral politics. By contrast, students of British electoral behaviour have made few systematic attempts to assess the fit between popular attitudes and knowledge of party policy positions on issues. Instead, the conventional wisdom is repeated which holds that ‘a majority of people are either ignorant of, or disagree with, the specific policies of the party they support’. The implication of this seems to be that electors' familiarity with issues is so low, and the holding of policy attitudes by them so uncommon, that rigorous analysis of issues in the context of electoral politics is unnecessary.