Abstract
The possibility of rulers Being constitutionally driven from office in a free election is relatively new in the history of government. The voters who now hold this power in the liberal democracies can, of course, exercise it only by selecting between alternatives that have been defined by competing leaders or groups. In Britain it is the political parties that provide the focus of choice. Indeed, in the longer historical view, parties antedate the mass electorate since it was they who enfranchised the voters and mobilized their support. But the public is not the creature of the parties, and the ebbs and flows of popular favor affect, often in quite unexpected ways, the whole conduct of British government.
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Notes
See W. Wilson, Congressional Government, Boston, 1885.
The election of 1964 indeed exhibited a sectional pattern of alignment hauntingly like that of 1896, although the roles of the parties had been completely reversed. See W. D. Burnham, “American Voting Behavior and the 1964 Election,” Midwest Journal of Political Science, 12 (1968), 1–40.
See, for example, A. Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy, New York, 1957, pp. 114–41
G. Tullock, Towards a Mathematics of Politics, Ann Arbor, 1967, 50–61
O. Davis and M. Hinich, ‘A Mathematical Model of Policy Formation in a Democratic Society’, in J. L. Bernd, ed., Mathematical Applications in Political Science, II, Dallas, 1966, pp. 175–208.
This trend is apparent in the closing chapters of A. Campbell, P. E. Converse, W. E. Miller and D. E. Stokes, The American Voter, New York, 1960, and even more clearly in Elections and the Political Order, New York, 1966, by the same authors.
R. B. McCallum and A. Readman, The British General Election of 1945,Oxford, 1947
H. G. Nicholas, The British General Election of 1950, London, 1951
D. E. Butler, The British General Election of 1951, London, 1952
D. E. Butler, The British General Election of 1955, London, 1955
D. E. Butler and R. Rose, The British General Election of 1959, London, 1960
D. E. Butler and A. King, The British General Election of 1964, London, 1965
D. E. Butler and A. King, The British General Election of 1966, London, 1966
David Butler and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The British General Election of 1970, London, 1971.
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Butler, D., Stokes, D. (1971). Approaches to Change. In: Political Change in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00140-8_1
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