Generational Replacement and Partisan Dealignment in Britain and the United States

Ivor Crewe, Bo Särlvik and James Alt (‘Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964–1974’, this Journal, VII (1977), 129–90) have made a major contribution to our understanding of partisan change in Britain. Whereas the declining share of the Conservative and Labour party vote can be documented through electoral statistics, Crewe and his colleagues focused on individual-level change in attitudes toward the parties, and thus provided valuable insights that help explain the dealignment that has occurred. One of their major findings was that the strength of party loyalties has declined among the British electorate. Building a measure of mean partisan strength that captures the distribution of ‘very strong’ identifiers, ‘fairly strong’ identifiers, ‘not very strong’ identifiers, and non-identifiers, they show a continuous decline in the strength of partisan loyalties between 1964 and October 1974. In 1964 the partisan strength of the electorate was 2·19; by October 1974 it had fallen to 1·90 (pp. 162–4). This overall decline is quite substantial, given that their measure of mean partisan strength ranges from 0·0 to 3·0.