Individual and Contextual Variables in British Voting Behavior: An Exploratory Note

This note reports the results of an initial exploration into the significance of the social environments (“contexts†) in which people live in the shaping of their individual political behavior. Many scholars have argued that social scientists should pay more serious attention to contextual variables when they go about constructing social theories. But there have been few systematic efforts to demonstrate empirically the overall importance of contextual variables as predictors of individual behaviors, especially relative to the importance of personal (“individual†) predictors. Here the relative potency of two sets of predictors—one individual and one contextual—is investigated for a sample of British voters by means of a well-known multivariate search strategy, “tree analysis.†The results suggest that contextual variables have little to add to explanations of voting behavior based on individual variables—at least for these data.