Abstract
The role played by the parties in giving shape and direction to the behavior of voters is so taken for granted that its importance is easily missed. Without it, however, the mass of the people could scarcely participate in regular transfers of power. The individual elector accepts the parties as leading actors on the political stage and sees in partisan terms the meaning of the choices which the universal franchise puts before him. British government would be fundamentally changed if parties were absent from the voter’s mind.
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Notes
G. A. Almond and S. Verba, The Civic Culture, Princeton, 1963. The question “Have you ever done anything to try to influence an act of Parliament?” elicited these replies: “often” (0.8 per cent); “once or twice” or “a few times” (5 per cent), “never” (92 per cent); and “don’t know” (2 per cent).
The proportion of the American public that can reliably say which party is in control of the Congress has at times been less than half. See D. E. Stokes and W. E. Miller, “Party Government and the Saliency of Congress,” Public Opinion Quarterly, 26 (1962), 531–46.
Exceedingly suggestive studies of factors of this kind are H. J. Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics, London, 1954.
R. E. Lane, Political Ideology, New York, 1962
A. F. Davies, Private Politics, Melbourne, 1955
For an interesting alternative theoretical argument, see W. H. Riker and P. C. Ordeshook, “A Theory of the Calculus of Voting,” American Political Science Review, 62 (1968), 25–42.
H. Valen and D. Katz, Political Parties in Norway, Olso, 1964, p. 187
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© 1971 David Butler and Donald Stokes
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Butler, D., Stokes, D. (1971). Parties in the Voter’s Mind. In: Political Change in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00140-8_2
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