Most research on voting behaviour and elections has focused on cross-sectional analysis of particular elections. This technique is very useful in telling us about the influences on individual voter decision making. Less commonly research has focused on short-term electoral change, and has tried to explain specific election results with respect to one another, or in relation to long-term trends.

When the SDP was founded in March 1981 it was a product of two main strands of opinion embodied in the persons of Roy Jenkins on the one hand and the ‘Gang of Three’ (David Owen, Shirley Williams and William Rodgers) on the other. Jenkins was the first of the four to talk openly of the desirability of ‘breaking the mould’ of British politics by the formation of a new centre party. During his time as President of the European Commission he had become convinced that a realignment of British parties was necessary and he argued this in the Dimbleby Lecture in November 1979. Initially the ‘Gang of Three’ were hostile to the idea of a new party. They remained deeply involved in the Labour party until the end of 1980, leading the battle against the constitutional and policy changes favoured by the left. When they eventually resigned from the Labour party the ‘Gang’ claimed that this was because the party had changed, not them.

It is widely supposed that the level of popular support for governments depends on those governments' success in handling the economy. Some recent studies have attempted to test this idea by estimating the statistical relationship between the government's popularity in the opinion polls and various indicators of the state of the economy such as unemployment rates, inflation rates, growth rates and so on. A general finding of these studies is that popularity is significantly correlated with all these indicators of the standard of living. All of them, however, operate on the assumption that the voters behave as if they had perfect knowledge of the state of the economy as set out for example by the Government Statistical Service. Whether this assumption does, in fact, approximate to the truth will, however, depend in large part on how the popular media present economic trends and economic relationships to their public. If there are gaps and biases in the information which is presented to many voters, then those voters will be responding to a picture of the economy which may differ dramatically from the picture offered by publications such as Economic Trends and the government will be selling its policies in a highly imperfect market. The purpose of this paper is to mount a preliminary investigation into the picture of the economy which has been presented by one important medium of communication, namely mass-circulation newspapers. The aim is to show how firstly the scope and secondly the interpretation of the economic data presented by the popular press developed over the period 1960–80. The limitations of this method should be spelled out. We are not considering all the sources from which people derive information about the economy (personal communications, radio, television, newspapers), but only the last and possibly the most partisan of these. This Note offers, therefore, in no sense ‘the ordinary man in the street's perception of the economy’ but simply the picture of the economy which one influential medium of communication presented.

In much of the comparative literature on social structure and party choice, housing occupies an anomalous position. In Britain, its electoral consequences are undoubted, yet in other advanced industrial societies its impact is negligible. For example, in Britain Butler and Stokes go so far as to suggest that ‘housing has more to do with defining the sub-cultures of social class than all else but occupation itself’. Moreover, recent evidence has indicated that the electoral importance of housing may actually be increasing in Britain, rather than declining along with other traditional class predictors of voting. By contrast, in Australia and the United States, both societies with similarly sized home-owning and rental sectors, housing has never been advanced as a significant determinant of partisan choice.

Since 1945, industrial societies have experienced rapid socio-economic change. Occupational structures have altered to accommodate the new technological skills demanded by many new industries. These newer, smaller and more flexible industries have, in their turn, fostered unparalleled economic growth. Concomitantly, access to education has risen dramatically for all social groups, while the development of mass communications has enabled large amounts of information to be disseminated more rapidly to ever-increasing numbers of people. There is now persuasive and cumulative evidence to show that these profound changes have had two significant consequences for Western societies. Firstly, the values of Western mass publics have altered to place less emphasis on the material aspects of life and a greater priority on aesthetic and intellectual goals. Secondly, there has been a widespread upsurge in popular support for minority nationalist movements advocating some degree of territorial autonomy within their host state or separation from it.

To make the theory of games plausible as a representation of behaviour – be it economic or political or social – we must introduce some of the sense of structure and continuity that characterizes our actual lives. Real people do not pair up, play a single game and depart, never to meet again. On the contrary, much of life is made up of continuing interactions with the same small cast of characters. And that, in turn, makes some dramatic differences in the way games are played. Making an unsecured loan to an itinerant is obviously out of the question. But if it is someone who has to deal with you over and over again in a variety of contexts, then the future itself can be your hostage.

It has already been demonstrated that part of the success of the Liverpool Liberals in local elections can be attributed to split-ticket voting by Liverpool electors. In May 1979, when city council and Westminster elections took place simultaneously, substantial proportions of voters went into a polling booth and voted for different parties at local and national level. This note attempts a further investigation of the basis of Liberal support in Liverpool local elections. Its main purpose is to test two hypotheses.

1. ‘Liberal voting displays a weaker causal linkage to the socio-economic structure of Liverpool wards than does voting for the other two parties.’

2. ‘Liberal voting is much more directly related to ward turnout than is voting for the other two parties.’

One point of interest about the period of the Labour government from October 1974 to May 1979 is the short-term surge and subsequent decline between these dates of electoral support for the National Front (NF). This episode of NF voting raises a number of questions. Some of these are simple empirical ones. What, for example, were the political origins, in terms of voting behaviour in the October 1974 general election, of this body of NF voters? What were their political destinations in May 1979? What characterized the various groups of voters who between 1974 and 1979 had different voting trajectories, all of which none the less included at least a period of support for the NF? This research note presents data on the numerical size of these different groups and it analyses some of their aggregate social and attitudinal characteristics.