A Comment on ‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’

In an ingenious piece of aggregate data analysis Stan Taylor finds a significant relationship between the percentage of the coloured population in a constituency, and the percentage voting for the National Front amongst whites, in the two general elections of 1974 (‘The Incidence of Coloured Populations and Support for the National Front’, this Journal, IX (1979), 250–5). He tests two alternative models of this relationship. The first is a linear model which postulates a white ‘backlash’ of increasing magnitude with further concentrations of coloured people; the second is a curvilinear model which postulates maximum National Front support in areas of moderate concentrations of coloured people, the argument being that people in this situation may feel most threatened by the possible future influx of coloured people. It is an elegant exercise in model building and testing, which finds the non-linear model consistent with the data for the February 1974 election, and the linear model consistent with the data for the October 1974 election.