Electoral Change in Britain: The Campaign Reassessed

Studies of patterns of voting change during the election campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s generally arrived at two conclusions: (1) the electorate is highly stable in its voting choice so that few votes change over the course of the campaign; and (2) those votes that do change are more or less random in their net impact on the distribution of party support. Butler and Stokes' more recent study of the national campaigns in 1964 and 1966 showed that the British electorate continued to be highly stable in its voting choice and that the most that could be said about the overall pattern of voting change was that it marginally benefited the opposition rather than government party. The authors then gave no further consideration to the campaign period and, emphasizing its practical and theoretical lack of importance, dropped the section on the national campaign from the second edition of their book. Thus, the campaign continued to be most noteworthy for the stability of aggregate voting patterns and was neglected in more recent studies of electoral change.