Class Politics and Political Context in Britain, 1964–1997: Have Voters Become More Individualized?

We assess the impact of social class and local context on individual vote in Britain from 1964 to 1997. Multilevel multinomial logit models are fit to British Election Survey data for eight elections and constituency-level data on social class composition and election spending by the major political parties. We find no evidence for a process of individualization of the voter. Our findings suggest that both individual and contextual social class effects on vote have remained fairly stable over time. Moreover, although we find an increase in the impact of campaign spending over time, this increase was similar among all social classes. Were the individualization thesis to hold, changes would have been most notable among the working class. These findings suggest that the declining salience of social class for electoral outcomes better reflects changes in class structure and party platforms rather than a lessening of importance of social class as a social identity.