Abstract
Voting behaviour in Britain since the Second World War (1939–45) has been characterised mainly by the tendency of the electorate at General Elections to divide between two main parties, namely the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. There have been occasions in recent history, however, when the formation of a three-party — or in Wales and especially in Scotland a four-party — system seemed to be imminent. For example, in the early 1970s there was a revival in the fortunes both of the Liberal Party and of the Nationalist parties, with the Liberal Party taking 19.3 per cent and 18.3 per cent of the national vote in the February and October 1974 General Elections respectively, with the Scottish Nationalists receiving 30.4 per cent of the vote in Scotland and Plaid Cymru 10.8 per cent of the vote in Wales in October 1974. Although the talk was of multi-party politics, by 1979 the fortunes of the minor parties had declined.
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Further reading
Butler, D. E., and Jowett, P., Party Strategies in Britain: a study of the 1984 European elections (London Macmillan, 1985).
Butler, D. E., and Kavanagh, D., The British General Election of 1992 (London: Macmillan, 1992).
Franklin, M., The Decline of Class Voting in Britain (London: University Press, 1985).
Goldthorpe, J. H., Social Mobility and Class Structure in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Heath, A., et al., Understanding Political Change: the British voter 1964–1987 (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1991).
Heath, A. et al., How Britain Votes (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1985).
Himmelweit, H. T., et al., How Voters Decide (London: Academic Press, 1981).
Miller, W. L., et al., How Voters Change (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).
Robertson, D., Class and the British Electorate (Oxford: Martin Robertson, 1983).
Rose, E., and McAlister, I., Voters Begin to Choose (London: Sage, 1986).
Sarlvik, B., and Crewe, I., Decade of Dealignment (London: University Press, 1983).
Scarborough, E., Political Ideology and Voting (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
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© 1996 F. N. Forman and N. D. J. Baldwin
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Forman, F.N., Baldwin, N.D.J. (1996). Voting behaviour. In: Mastering British Politics. Macmillan Master Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13493-9_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13493-9_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
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