THE CONTEMPORARY LANDSCAPE
British Society and Political Socialization
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE are features of every political system.
What makes each significant is the nature and the extent of that change.
Some systems are characterized by rapid and sometimes revolutionary change.
Others are noted for continuity with past experience and structures.
The task of the student of politics is to discern the distinctive features of that continuity and change, to generate concepts, and, if possible, to construct models and theories that will aid understanding of and serve to explain those distinctive features and the relationship among them.
The distinctive features of a political system can be recognized by comparing that system with another or, better still, with many others.
In discussing the merits of comparative politics, a student in a class of mine once objected to the whole exercise.
&quot; Every country is unique. &quot;
As others in the class were quick to respond, the only way by which one knows that a country is unique is by comparing it with others.
Just as one can know whether one is short or tall only by comparing oneself with others, so one can know whether one's own political system is &quot; short &quot; or &quot; tall &quot; only by putting it alongside other systems and noting the differences.
Space and resources preclude an exhaustive or even an extensive comparative study in this work.
Instead, I propose to illustrate the distinctive nature of the British polity by comparing it, where appropriate, with the American.
They are similar in many respects, with a shared language; advanced industrial economies; similar but not always identical political, social, and economic values; and some mutual needs.
Each has a sense of affinity with the other.
As we shall see, however, there are significant dissimilarities: dissimilarities that make a comparative exercise useful.
Such an exercise will serve not only to sensitize the American reader to the distinctive features of the British polity but also to make readers more aware of the features of their own polity.
That, at least, is the hope.
In order to understand continuity and change within the British policy, I propose to stress the significance of the political culture.
This emphasis will form the basis of the next chapter as well as the book's conclusion.
Before we proceed to an analysis of that culture, a brief sketch of the salient features of contemporary Britain is necessary.
This outline is especially pertinent for comparative purposes.
There are important dissimilarities between the United States and Britain in terms of geography, demography, and social history.
Britain is a small, crowded island, largely oriented in terms of industry and population to England (and especially the Southeast of England), with a class-based society that has superseded but by no means discarded the characteristics of a status-based feudal society.
The purpose of this chapter is to highlight those features and, for convenience, consider also the media of political socialization in Britain.
Such a study is a prerequisite for a consideration of the political culture and the institutions and processes that culture nurtures.
Looked at from the perspective of land distribution and usage, Great Britain could be described as a predominantly agricultural kingdom based on the three countries of England, Scotland, and Wales.
(The United Kingdom comprises these three countries plus Northern Ireland: see Map.
1.1.)
In terms of the distribution and activities of the population, it is predominantly English, nonagricultural, and town- or suburban-based.
CONTEMPORARY BRITAIN
Land and Population
Great Britain occupies a total area of 88,798 square miles.
This compares with an area of 3,615,123 square miles for the United States.
(The USSR occupies more than 8 million square miles.
The small principality of Monaco, by contrast, comprises but a modest 368 acres.)
Within the United States, 10 states each have a greater land area than Britain: Alaska (586,412 square miles), Texas (267,339 square miles), and California (158,693) being the most notable.
England has approximately the same land area as New York State, Scotland the same area as South Carolina, and Wales the same as Massachusetts.
The disparity in population size is not quite so extreme.
In 1980, the United Kingdom population was 56 million, up from 19.7 million at the turn of the century.
The United States population in 1980 was 226 million, up from just under 76 million in 1900 (see Table 1.1).
There is a more significant difference, however, in population growth.
In the 1970s, the United Kingdom population increased by a mere 0.5%, a figure matched only by West Germany.
The increase in the United States was one of 10.4%.
In the USSR it was 8.8% in China 13.9%, and in Brazil, nearly 30%.
When the population is put in the context of land size, Britain emerges clearly as a crowded island.
The number of people per square kilometer in 1980 was 229.
By European standards, this is not exceptional: Belgium, the Netherlands, and West Germany are even more densely populated.
The number of people per square kilometer in the United States in 1980 was a modest 24.
By worldwide standards, this is a low but not exceptional density.
The USSR, Brazil, New Zealand, Australia, and Canada were among the nations with lower population density.
In Australia and Canada there were 2 people per square kilometer.
Within the United Kingdom, the population is heavily concentrated in one country.
In 1980, more than 46.5 million people lived in England, compared with a little over 5 million in Scotland, 3 million in Wales and 1.7 million in Northern Ireland.
The number of people per square kilometer in England in 1980 was 356  the highest population density of European countries and greater even than that of Japan.
Within England, the greatest concentration of inhabitants was in the southeast of the country (that is, Greater London and the surrounding counties), with a population of nearly 17 million.
The population resides predominantly in areas classed as urban for local government purposes.
Nearly 80% of the population in England, and more than 70% in Scotland and Wales, live in urban areas.
The shift from rural to urban areas has been marked in England, the proportion of the population living in nonurban areas declining from a little over 35% in 1951 to not much more than 20% 20 years later.
Although more than three-quarters of the land surface is used for agriculture, very few people are employed in the agricultural industry.
There has been a persistent drift from land work since industrialization in the eighteenth sand nineteenth centuries, a trend that continues.
More than 700,000 people were employed in agriculture, forestry, and fishing in 1961.
By 1979, the figure was down to 367,000.
Increased efficiency and greater mechanization have in part facilitated this development.
(Britain has one of the heaviest tractor densities in the world).
There are more than 250,000 &quot; statistically significant farming units &quot; in Britain, with three-fifths of the full-time farms being devoted mainly to dairying or beef cattle and sheep.
Farms devoted to arable crops are predominant in the eastern part of England.
Sheep and cattle rearing is a feature of the hills and moorland areas of Scotland, Wales, and northern and southwest England.
Despite the importance and extent of agriculture, nearly half of Britain's food supply has to be imported.
Indeed, Britain is heavily dependent on imports for its raw materials.
Compared with other large industrialized (and some developing) nations, Britain is notably lacking in natural resources.
It is largely self-sufficient in coal, chemicals, and fish, and the recent discovery and exploitation of oil in the North Sea has made it a net exporter of the substance.
Other than that, though, it is dependent on other nations either wholly or in part for products such as bauxite, copper, lead, tungsten, tin, nickel, phosphates, potash, rice, corn, cotton, silk, coffee, tobacco, and forestry products, among others.
The United States, by contrast, is self-sufficient in most of these products, with surplus supply in several cases.
Only in coffee and silk is it wholly dependent on imports.
The USSR is even better served in its natural supply of raw materials.
France, Germany, Canada, Japan, and India are also more self-sufficient than Britain.
This lack of raw materials not only is important for an understanding of British industry but also provides a partial explanation for some of Britain's internationalist and imperial history.
Britain was the first major nation to experience industrialization.
Most of the population moved from the land to find jobs in manufacturing industries in the towns and cities.
Most of the economically active population came to be employed in primary industries and manufacturing.
In the twentieth century and especially in the period since 1945, more and more workers have moved into service industries.
In the 1980s, Britain can be described as having a service economy.
Of the people in employment in 1979, over 13 million worked in service industries, compared with 7 million in manufacturing; 1 million in construction; 367,000 in agriculture, fisheries, and forestry; 346,000 in mining and quarrying; and 346,000 in the gas, electricity, and water industries.
Table 1.2 shows the changes that have taken place in the period since 1961.
Employment
In all the categories other than the service industries, male employees outnumber females.
In the service industries, more than half the workers are women.
In terms of sector, 7.4 million workers were employed in the public sector in 1980, compared with 17.3 million in the private sector.
As to employment, the service industries clearly represent the growth industries.
The other main area of growth is in unemployment.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, very few workers were unemployed.
In 1961 only 1.5% of the workforce was registered as unemployed, but by 1971 it had risen to 3.5%  a total of 792,000 people.
The figure increased throughout the decade, reaching 7.4% in 1980.
The following year, the figure exceeded 10% and in 1982, 12.3% of the workforce was unemployed  over 3 million individuals in all.
Critics of official statistics argued that not all those out of work were registered as unemployed and that the real figure was therefore higher than that given by the Department of Employment, which is responsible for compiling the data.
Within the United Kingdom, the extent of unemployment is greater the further one moves from London and the Southeast.
In 1980, the percentage of the workforce out of work in the Southeast was 4.8%.
In the North of England it was 10.9%, in Wales it was 10.3%, in Scotland 10.0%, and in Northern Ireland, traditionally the place with the highest level of unemployment, nearly 14%.
Within the workforce, unemployment was greater among immigrants from the New Commonwealth and Pakistan than it was among native-born citizens or those from other European countries.
It was also most marked among the younger age groups, those aged under 24 years.
There was also a marked increase during the 1980s in the number of long-term unemployed.
In April 1972, the proportion unemployed for more than a year accounted for one-sixth of the total unemployed; by April 1981, the proportion had risen to one-fifth.
The level of unemployment in Britain is high in both absolute and comparative terms.
In 1982, the United Kingdom had the highest level of unemployment among the seven major countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Britain's unemployment rate of 12.3% compared with 11% for Canada, 9.5% for the United States, 9.3% for Italy, 8.5% for France, 7% for Germany, and 2.3% for Japan.
The average among other OECD countries was 10%.
In 1983, the governing Conservative Party in Britain was keen to point out that the rate of increase in unemployment from 1982 to 1983 was higher in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada than it was in the United Kingdom (a 23.1% increase in the United States compared with 11.8% in the United Kingdom) and that unemployment would be higher in other countries were it not in some cases for conscription and a retirement age for men of 60.
Britain does not have conscription (compulsory national service in the armed services was ended in 1961), and the retirement age for men is 65.
The population is predominantly English in birth as well as residence.
It is concomitantly white and English-speaking.
However, it is not totally homogeneous.
Not only is there a division among the English, the Scottish, and the Welsh; there is also a division between Gaelic-speaking Scots and those who do not speak Gaelic, and between those who do and do not speak the Welsh language in Wales.
In both cases, those who speak the old traditional language are in a small minority.
In 1971, only 19.8% of the inhabitants of Wales could speak the Welsh language (down from 27.5% in 1951) and only 1.7% of Scots could speak Gaelic, most of the Gaelic speakers being concentrated in the Scottish highlands and islands.
There is a further division when one includes Northern Ireland, where the community is divided along mutually exclusive lines (see Chapter 9): a few families in the province still speak the Irish form of Gaelic.
The influx of immigrants into Britain, especially in the 1950s and early 1960s, has also added to the diversity of the population and to linguistic differences.
Linguistic and Racial Differences
The number of people in Britain who are from, or whose parents are from, the New Commonwealth countries and Pakistan  a category close to but not quite identical to that of the black population  is just over 2 million, just under 4% of the population.
The number has increased gradually from 1,087,000 in 1968, though natural increase (excess of births over death) accounted for more than half the rise in 1979-1980, the last year for which figures are available.
The problem of racial tension in Britain has been exacerbated by the fact that, though the total black population is small, it is largely concentrated in certain urban areas, notably London, Leicester, Birmingham, and various West Midlands towns.
By contrast, the United States has experienced analogous problems of concentration but has a much larger black population.
In 1970, blacks accounted for well in excess of 10% of the American population (22.5 million out of 203 million); other nonwhite races accounted for nearly a further 3 million citizens.
Unlike Britain, the black population in the United States is as indigenous as the white.
The United States also has a far greater ethnic mix than Britain.
The hyphen in American society (German-Americans, Polish-Americans) has no significant equivalent in Britain.
The United States does not have a feudal history.
The significance of this fact was well drawn out by Louis Hartz in his incisive work on the Lockean basis of American society.
Britain, by contrast, most certainly does have a feudal past.
Furthermore, unlike some of its European neighbors with feudal histories, it has witnessed no revolutionary break with past experience.
As a result, the class patterns of a capitalist society have been superimposed on the hierarchical social structure of a departing feudal society.
Class
Status derives from the tendency of people to accord positive and negative values to human attributes and to distribute respect accordingly.
In feudal society, a superior status was accorded to the land-owning aristocracy and gentry.
They were deemed to have breeding and to be the best people to run the land.
They were accorded deference as a socially superior body.
It was a status that was passed on by inheritance, not one that could be acquired by merit or work.
Whereas status is essentially the product of social structure, class is the product of the economic.
Defining the concept of class is not an easy task.
Marx distinguished two classes, bourgeois and proletarian, based on the ownership of the means of production.
This is not a particularly useful definition given the significant distinction between ownership and control.
The problem is compounded by the fact that the term means different things to different people.
How social scientists define class and how others perceive it (not least in terms of self-ascription) are often far from congruent.
The most useful definition is that of groups formed on the basis of occupational difference.
In Britain, there are essentially two classes, the middle and the working (a characteristically British distinction, as A. H. Halsey has observed).
Within each, there are further divisions.
Table 1.3 provides a simple delineation of them.
Class grew out of industrialization and the development of a capitalist economy.
It did not displace status, it usurped it.
In the nineteenth century, the upper class comprised the traditional landed aristocracy, but it was an aristocracy that had absorbed largely if not wholly the new men of wealth who had made their money out of trade and industry.
These new men were drawn into the new class until eventually, they overwhelmed it.
This combination of class and status was carried into the twentieth century.
In recent decades, however, it has been weakened.
Some of the features of a status society, such as peerages, can be passed from father to son: the inheritance is founded in law.
Class can be inherited but it is an inheritance based on the market.
The market is less predictable than the law.
Recent years have witnessed a growing social mobility.
The children of many working-class parents have been upwardly mobile socially.
The children of some middle-class parents have taken up working-class occupations.
Indeed, a few members of that institutional survivor of a feudal era, the House of Lords, pursue manual occupations.
Writes Halsey, &quot; Men and women, moving and marrying between different occupational levels, both over the generations and also within their own working lives or careers, have become an increasingly common feature of British social life in the past half century. &quot;
The general pattern of change has been one of upward mobility.
Greater mobility and affluence have eroded the claims to status.
Mobility deprives one of claims to breeding.
Acceptance of the principle of meritoracy is discordant with claims of inherited worth.
Status remains important but it is no longer the central feature of British society that it was in preceding centuries.
The importance of class in contemporary society was confirmed by Butler and Stokes in their study of political change in Britain.
In a 1970 survey, they asked respondents to name the main social classes and the class to which they would ascribe themselves.
They found that &quot; virtually every-one accepted the conventional class dichotomy between middle and working class. &quot;
In terms of self-ascription, 77% spontaneously described themselves as middle- or working-class, while a further 5% added only a slight qualification such as &quot; upper-middle class.
All but 1% of the remainder were willing to assign to themselves, when prompted, a middle- or working-class label.
As Butler and Stokes point out, &quot; It is difficult not to see this as evidence of the acceptance of the view that British society is divided into two primary classes.
This is much more than sociologist's simplification; it seems to be deeply rooted in the mind of the ordinary British citizen. &quot;
Most respondents characterized class as being based on occupation, and most (Table 1.4) identified themselves as being in the class suggested by the occupation of the head of their household.
The importance of class is political as well as social.
For most of the twentieth century, there has been a significant relationship between class and politics.
The Labour party has attracted largely but not wholly the support of the working class, and the Conservative party that of the middle class.
The significance of the class-party nexus will be explored in more detail shortly.
In recent years, there is some evidence of decline in class identifications and in the correlation between class and party.
Such decline, though, has been relative.
Class remains a principal feature of British society.
Most Britons continue to ascribe themselves to a particular class.
Politicians analyze their support in class terms, and sociologists would be lost without it.
Education in Britain is best seen in pyramidal terms.
All children receive a primary and secondary school education.
Thereafter, only a minority proceed to institutions of further education and but a small percentage enter university.
For children receiving education at private schools, the structure is less pyramidal: A greater proportion of those educated at private schools proceed to university than those attending state schools.
Education
After entering primary school at the age of 5, children in England receive a common education until the age of 11, when they enter secondary schools.
Most pupils now attend what are termed comprehensive schools, schools whose enrollment criteria are geographic rather than academic.
In the two decades following the Second World War, secondary schools were divided into grammar and secondary modern schools.
In the former, scholastic skills were stressed, with a large proportion of students staying beyond the minimum school-leaving age (then 15) and proceeding to university.
In the latter, emphasis was placed on practical skills such as technical drawing and woodwork, with some pupils going on to some form of technical college but with most leaving at 15 years of age and few if any achieving university entrance.
Selection for grammar schools was based on an intelligence test known as the &quot; Eleven-plus &quot; examination, taken, as the name suggests, when primary schoolchildren reached the age of 11, i.e., at the end of their primary education.
Labour party politicians came to view this examination and the consequent dichotomy between grammar and secondary modern schools as educationally questionable and socially divisive: those attending secondary modern schools were seen as &quot; failures &quot; and their subsequent job opportunities limited by virtue of their education.
Grammar school pupils were drawn disproportionately from middle-class families.
In 1965, the then Labour government introduced a scheme of reform requiring local authorities to take steps to dispense with the Eleven-plus and introduce a scheme of comprehensive education.
Many authorities responded reluctantly, some resisting the government's wishes, and only in the 1970s did the number of pupils in comprehensive schools exceed the number attending selective schools.
In 1971, only 38% of secondary school-children attended comprehensive schools; in 1980, the proportion was 83%.
From school, a small proportion proceed to institutions of further and higher education.
Only a small fraction of pupils achieve the two Advanced Level (A-Levels) examination passes that constitute the minimum requirement for university entrance.
In 1979-1980, fewer than 30% of girls leaving school and under 20% of boys entered full-time further education.
Fewer than 10% (8.6% of boys, 6.5% of girls) went on to study full-time for a degree.
Although secondary education is compulsory, parents are not required to send their children to state schools.
They can opt instead to send children to private schools.
Here the enrollment criterion is more financial than geographic.
Private schools tend to stress scholastic skills and concentrate on developing the capacity to pass examinations and on building self-confidence.
Believing their children will receive a better and more disciplined education, with a greater prospect of university entry than from a state school, many parents who can afford it send their children to such private institutions, known (confusingly) as &quot; public schools. &quot;
Fees at such schools will vary, depending on the status of the school.
The more prestigious such as Eton, Harrow and Winchester can afford to charge annual fees in excess of 4,000 (more than $6,000 in 1983 terms), whereas some less prestigious day schools may charge less than 1,000 per year.
In 1980, fewer than 6% of the total school population were attending assisted and independent schools  yet more than a quarter of University entrants continued to be drawn from private schools.
There are various forms of higher and further education.
There are various technical colleges and colleges of further education, as well as the institutions at the top of the pyramid  polytechnics and universities.
Polytechnics stress more vocational, practical subjects, often providing sandwich courses (part teaching, part practical job experience), while universities tend to stress more academic subjects.
Relative to the United States, there are few universities in the United Kingdom: a total of 46.
Of these, 20 have been founded since 1960.
The most prestigious tend to be the oldest: Oxford, Cambridge, and, in Scotland, St. Andrew 's.
The Open University is notable for being a nonresidential university, providing tuition by correspondence and though special television and radio progams; it is the only university that required no formal academic qualifications in order to enroll.
The newest university, at Buckingham, is the only one to receive no support from public funds  it is the only wholly private university.
Of the more than half-million students in full-time higher education in 1980, fewer than 200,000 were at a university.
A university education continues to provide occupational advantage.
Of graduates, more than 80% have ended up in the professional and managerial classes.
As such, they constitute fewer than one-third of those in these classes, but it is these classes that will provide more children than any other for university entry.
The professional and managerial classes made up 18% of the population in 1971: their children formed 51% of university entrants in 1975 and 54% in 1979.
The distribution of marketable wealth among the population is skewed in favor of a minority.
Marketable wealth comprises stocks and shares, cash, bank deposits, consumer durables, buildings, trade assets, land, and dwellings net of mortgage debt.
In 1971, approximately one-third of the total marketable wealth in Britain was owned by 1% of the population.
Two-thirds was owned by the most wealthy 10%.
These figures showed a decline during the next three years (the result of a decline in the price of stocks and shares) and little change thereafter.
In 1979, just under 25% of the marketable wealth was owned by 1% of the population, and 59% was owned by 10% of the population.
Personal Wealth and Taxation
When occupational and state pension rights are added to marketable wealth, there is a change in the pattern of distribution (see Table 1.5).
In 1979, only 13% of this aggregate wealth was owned by 1% of the population and 37% by 10% of the population.
Over the 1970s, there was a shift in the distribution of wealth in favor of slightly more equality, though most wealth clearly remains in the hands of the minority.
In income, approximately two-thirds of the total household income before tax comes from wages and salaries.
In 1980, the average gross weekly earnings of a male manual employee was 112 (approximately $175 at 1983 exchange rates) and of a nonmanual employee, 141 (about $220).
The equivalent figures for female workers were 68 and 83 respectively.
Given the progressive nature of taxation, the proportion of earnings paid in direct taxation varies.
In 1980-81 the highest 10% of earners paid approximately one-quarter of their earnings in direct taxation.
Those who were in the lowest 10% of earners paid fifteen per cent.
Expressed as a percentage of the gross national product (GNP), total taxes in Britain in 1978 accounted for 39% of the GNP.
Compared with other countries in the OECD, this was not an exceptional proportion.
It was unusual compared with the other countries in that it actually represented a decline (of 2%) from the 1971 figure.
In 1978, total taxes as a percentage of the GNP exceeded 40% in Germany, France, and the Scandinavian countries (it was 60% in Sweden).
They were less than 40% in Canada, the USA (34%), Italy, Japan, and Switzerland.
A slightly different relationship emerges when only direct taxes are expressed as a proportion of the GNP.
Britain moves further down the table.
In 1978, direct taxes represented 23% of the GNP.
This was a lower percentage than in Germany, France, the Scandinavian countries (44% in Sweden's case), Italy, Switzerland, and the United States (24%).
Japan and Canada were the only major OECD countries with percentages lower than that for Britain.
The various values and beliefs that coalesce to maintain, reinforce, or sometimes modify the political culture are not generated in a vacuum; they are acquired through a process of socialization.
In that process the most important influences are usually family, education, occupation, and geographic location.
Such influences serve to instill an awareness of one's place in or relationship to society and the political system.
POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION
Although much influence is placed on the individual, the family remains the most important social unit in Britain.
Most households in Britain comprise married couples with dependent children.
The second largest proportion comprise married couples with no children, then married couples with independent children.
In 1980, only 8% of people lived on their own (double the percentage in 1961), though this does not signify social detachment from a family.
For many people living on their own, their social world may revolve around visits from or to relatives.
Family units are also provided by couples living together but not married.
In 1979, the General Household Survey found that 10% of nonmarried women were cohabiting.
(The question was addressed only to women.)
Although marriages are becoming less stable in that divorce rates continue to rise, many divorcees remarry or cohabit with another partner.
In 1979, one-third of all marriages constituted remarriages for one or both partners.
Of divorced or separated women, 18% were cohabiting.
Family
It is from parents that children inherit social and political values.
Indeed, children often acquire less class orientation from parents not only in taught but also in practical terms.
Children are more likely to obtain jobs in the class bracket of their fathers than they are to be socially mobile.
In the Butler and Stokes survey of 1970, most working-class respondents came from families in which the father was also working-class.
Fewer than one-fifth of respondents had experienced upward mobility and slightly fewer than one-tenth had experienced downward mobility.
A study of the earnings of children in York in the 1970s compared with their fathers' earnings in the 1950s found a coefficient of earnings of nearly 0.5.
That this should be so is not surprising.
Children raised in a middle-class family in which the parents and grandparents were university-educated are likely to be brought up in an environment in which reading and learning are stressed and going to university is encouraged.
A university education is likely to result in a better-paying job than is a nonuniversity education.
Hence, graduates are more likely to obtain middle-class occupations than are nongraduates.
Working-class families, by contrast, are less likely to provide an environment that encourages scholastic skills.
This may not be out of unwillingness but rather ignorance on the part of parents: they do not know how to go about encouraging such skills.
In some cases they may not wish to.
The need to supplement the family income motivates some parents to encourage children to go out and earn a wage as soon as possible.
Years spent at university are financially unrewarding from the parents' perspective.
An attachment to class may also limit the ambitions of both parents and children.
Existing in a working-class milieu reinforced by the still-existing perception of status can create a cocooning effect: it provides a sense of the familiar and the comfortable (in psychological if not financial terms).
To leave a working-class environment is to head for the unknown.
From parents, children can acquire habits and tastes that are peculiar if not exclusive to a particular class.
Certain sports are working-class sports (for example, darts), others middle-class (squash, for instance).
Such tastes are passed from one generation to the other, reinforced by the environment in which a family exists.
Among the habits and values passed from parent to child are political ones.
Children are more likely to be politically interested and active if their parents have been similarly interested or active.
Most important, children tend to inherit their parents' partisan preferences.
Butler and Stokes write, &quot; Partisanship over the individual's lifetime has some of the quality of a photographic reproduction that deteriorates with time: it is a fairly sharp copy of the parents' original at the beginning of political awareness, but over the years it becomes somewhat blurred, although remaining easily recognizable. &quot;
The influence of parents is strongest when both parents share the same partisan preference.
In Butler and Stokes' survey, of children whose parents had both been Conservative, 89% expressed a first preference for the Conservative party.
This partisanship is reinforced when parents' preferences are congruent with the influences to be identified below.
There is evidence that this parent-party nexus is declining.
In the 1983 general election, nearly 8 million people voted for a political ticket (Liberal/Social Democratic Party Alliance) for which their parents could not previously have voted.
Nonetheless, family remains the most important primary influence in the process of political socialization.
Divergent influences may modify or dispel values imbued as a result of parental influence.
But in seeking to make sense of the social and political environment in which he or she lives, an individual's first and foremost point of reference is provided by father (in terms of partisan preference, more likely father) and mother.
Formal education is important in political socialization, less for its effect on partisan support (family remains the predominant influence) than for helping shape awareness of the political system and explicitly or, more often, implicitly, the values that underpin it.
Education
In their study of the civic culture, Almond and Verba found that there were differences in attitude toward government between those with different levels of education, and between those who had received some formal education and those who had received none.
The more extensive the education, up to university level, the greater the perceived significance of government action.
Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of those with some formal education, primary or above, considered that national government had some effect.
In the countries studied in which a proportion of the population had received no formal education (Italy and Mexico), only a small proportion of those without an education felt that national government had some effect.
(The proportion of those with a formal education ascribing influence to the government was lower than that in the United States and in Britain, albeit still a majority among the university-educated).
From this, one may infer the importance of education for the purposes of political socialization.
The correlation between education and political socialization in Britain is not greatly dissimilar to that in the United States.
Those with higher levels of education are more likely than those with only a primary education to attach significance to the action of government, to believe that they can have some influence on government, to pay attention to politics and election campaigns, to take the view (though not necessarily to practice it) that citizens should be active in their local community, to hold opinions on a wide range of political subjects, and to be actively involved in politics.
In Britain, a little over 3% of the adult population have degrees.
Of the members of Parliament (MPs) who sat in the Parliament of 1979-1983, over 62% were graduates.
Where Britain and the United States differ is in the way that the subject of politics is taught.
In Britain, manifest teaching of the subject, insofar as it is manifest, can best be described as subtle.
There is little emphasis on symbolic acts (there is no obvious English equivalent to saluting the flag) and little formal teaching of politics as such.
The media of other subjects are employed.
Stradling writes, &quot; Until comparatively recently the prevailing view on political education in England was either that it was already adequately taken care of through History, Geography, Social or General Studies or that it was a wholly unsuitable subject for the school curriculum. &quot;
Only recently has the opportunity to study politics as a distinct and legitimate subject been expanded within secondary schools.
Relative to other disciplines, it remains a little-taught subject.
However, the implications of this are not as great as might be thought.
Almond and Verba found that having been taught about government increases a sense of subjective political competence.
Against this, some studies in the United States, where formal study of &quot; civics &quot; is more extensive than in Britain, found that taking such courses had little impact on political knowledge and attitudes.
Similar findings have resulted from a recent survey of British school pupils.
What is more important is the length of period in education.
In the British study, pupils staying on at school until the age of 18 achieved much higher scores on political knowledge than did those leaving school at 16.
From this, one might hypothesize that education is important in developing the intellectual skills necessary to absorb and make sense of political material communicated by other media.
Attendance at school, and particularly at certain schools, can be important also in providing an environment that can serve to reinforce certain norms and traditions.
At leading public schools, most notably Eton, there is a tradition of providing MPs, government ministers, and prime ministers.
At such schools, a pupil is more likely to consider pursuing a political career than is the case with pupils attending an inner-city comprehensive school with no such tradition.
In most cases, the school environment tends to reinforce the influence of the home background.
Occupation and class, as we have seen, are closely related.
The former is usually employed as the primary criterion for assessing the latter.
Both are important in the context of political socialization.
Occupation and Class
Certain occupations are important in terms not only of class but also of status.
A doctor of medicine is in the same social class as a company director but is more likely than the director to be accorded some degree of deference by the local community.
Holding a position of responsibility gives one standing in the community.
Holding jobs that are well paying and/or rewarding in terms of personal self-satisfaction may increase one's contentment with the society in which one exists.
Conversely, pursuing a mundane, poorly paid job or no job at all may provoke a sense of alienation from society.
Certain jobs by their nature may lead to greater social awareness or to a greater degree of social intercourse than others.
Class is an abstraction and the concept acquires meaning only as a result of the socialization process just outlines.
From one's parents, education, occupation, and associated life-style one acquires an awareness of social class.
Such awareness becomes important in helping clarify one's place in society and, thus, one's relationship to others in that society.
It serves to give some meaning and shape to one's social existence.
There is an important but not complete relationship between class and partisan support.
That this should be so is not surprising.
Those in middle-class occupations are more likely to be better paid and pursue a preferred life-style than those in working-class occupations (though the emphasis should be on the likelihood, not the certainty).
Hence, one might expect the middle class to opt for the political party most likely to conserve the existing state of affairs.
Those in working-class jobs and those with no jobs at all might be expected to opt for a party that offers some degree of social change and appears more empathic toward the &quot; have-nots &quot; than toward the &quot; haves. &quot;
This hypothesis is largely but not wholly borne out by the empirical evidence.
Middle-class voters have tended to support the Conservative party in Britain, and working-class voters the Labour party.
The relationship has never been a complete one.
Some middle-class voters have supported the Labour Party and about one-third of working-class voters have traditionally cast their ballots for Conservative candidates.
In recent years, the significance of the class-party tie has declined.
Nonetheless, as we shall see, class provides the most important indicator of partisan support.
No other indicator has proved so reliable.
Location can be important in the process of political socialization in a number of senses.
The location of one's residence is important.
Living in an area of expensive detached houses can serve to reinforce one's sense of being middle-class.
The area provides a social milieu that reinforces that awareness.
Conversely, living in an area of less expensive terraced accommodation or of council houses (estates composed of houses rented from the local authority are common) reinforces one's identification with the working class.
Within such areas, there is often a particular lifestyle.
Location
The independent influence of location is borne out when correlated with partisan support.
Voters who live in class-specific communities are more likely to vote for the relevant class-specific party than are those not living in such communities.
As Rose observes, &quot; Working-class voters in safe Labour seats are much more likely to vote Labour than those in the same class, but living in a marginal or Conservative constituency.
Environment affects middle-class voters in Conservative areas, but the effect is not so strong. &quot;
Moving into such specific areas, with changes in the pattern of home ownership, can effect a change in partisan support.
There is also a correlation between partisan support and urban versus rural location.
This pattern became more pronounced in the 1960s and 1970s, as did the division between North and South.
Increasingly, the Labour party became the dominant party of the North of England, and the Conservative party that of the South.
That this should be so is not surprising, given changes in employment and demographic patterns.
In 1980, Curtice and Steed pointed out that &quot; the peripheral areas of Britain, with their higher unemployment, and the declining inner parts of conurbations, have become steadily more Labour; while the expanding, more prosperous areas have become more Conservative. &quot;
In the 1983 general election, the Labour vote declined in all regions by between 6% and 12%.
The lowest regional decline took place in Scotland.
In urban areas, the swing against Labour was half what it was in rural and mixed areas.
Labour, as one analysis showed, remained the party of the traditional working class of the council estates, of Scotland, and of the North.
The mass media of communication are also important.
They are significant not only as media for transmitting material, television now being the main source of political information for most people, but also for the choice of what material to transmit.
By choosing to transmit some stories rather than others, those in control of television and newspapers can have some impact on political perceptions and values.
In Britain, the national orientation of the broadcasting media and of newspapers is important.
The size of the country and the dual position of London as the nation's capital and its largest city has facilitated a national orientation  primarily a London orientation  not possible in the United States.
The Mass Media
The partisan influence of the media in Britain is unclear.
The broadcasting media are statutorily required to be impartial.
Newspapers can and do express partisan preferences.
Newspapers with a significant political reporting are not widely read, whereas television news programs are often among the most-watched programs.
Research into the impact of the media in Britain is not extensive.
What research has been done on their effects, especially in the United States, suggests that their importance is primarily as a reinforcing rather than a realigning agent.
The significance of this role should not be underestimated.
The process by which a individual becomes politically socialized is a complex one.
The influences just outlined are in most cases the more important ones but they are by no means the only ones  nor are they exclusive.
They clearly interact with one another, as has been obvious from the foregoing.
It has been virtually impossible to discuss one influence without drawing out the impact of another.
Also, these influences are far from static.
Changes in family structures, the educational system, the nature of employment, and demographic and housing patterns may affect the socialization process.
As we have seen, children staying longer in formal education appear to acquire more political knowledge than those leaving school earlier.
More children than before are now acquiring a formal education beyond the minimum school-leaving age.
Unemployment may generate a sense of political alienation.
As we have seen, unemployment has risen steeply in Britain in recent years.
A Complex Mix
The importance of some of these changes will be touched on later in this work, particularly in the context of partisan support.
However, such changes are relative.
In terms of the basic values being transmitted in the process of political socialization, the most significant feature is not change but rather continuity.
The media for political socialization in Britain are not dissimilar to those in the United States and many other polities.
To know this is useful, but to identify those media is to identify the means for transmitting the values and beliefs that coalesce to form the political culture, and not to identify the political culture itself.
That is a separate exercise, undertaken in the next chapter.
Having identified some of the salient features of contemporary Britain and, as a prerequisite, the process of political socialization, we can now progress to the more analytically useful study of the British political culture.
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE
The British Political Culture
CONTINUITY AND CHANGE, as we have observed, are features of every political system.
In order to understand the extent and nature of that change one has to generate some analytically useful framework.
What the opening chapter did was to provide largely descriptive material of the society with which we are concerned.
It did not generate a framework that would help us understand the nature of continuity and change in Britain.
The purpose of this chapter is to provide such a framework.
The emphasis of the chapter will be on the political culture.
As I shall seek to show, however, that culture can not be divorced from the constraints of history and of physical and spatial resources.
Each has had a significant impact on the other.
The impact has not been in one direction only: the political culture has served to shape political perceptions and actions, and hence to influence the nation's political history.
Conversely, those actions have been constrained by the experiences of history.
They have also been constrained by Britain's geographic location and limited resources.
A number of problems have to be borne in mind.
As we shall see, there are problems inherent in trying to give shape to such an abstract concept as political culture.
There is the danger of tautology and of failing to distinguish between how a system operates and the way in which people believe it should operate.
There is the problem also of attempting to discern the cause-and-effect relationships among culture, history, and resources.
The problem here is analogous to that embodies in the familiar conundrum &quot; Which came first, the chicken or the egg? &quot;
The existence of a stable political culture in Britain has been ascribed by some to the effectiveness of government.
But what has enabled government to be effective?
Has it been a distinctive political culture, citizens being prepared to acquiesce in and, when called on, to support the demands made of them by government?
If so, what explains the existence of such a political culture?
Is not a partial explanation the effectiveness of government?
The problem is an acute one in the case of Britain, given the absence of any clear point of departure.
Where does English, Scottish, or Welsh history begin?
At what point is a political culture discernible?
The problem is largely an insuperable one, and all we can do at this stage is to bear it in mind.
Fortunately, it does not present an insurmountable obstacle; as I shall seek to show, the importance of the relationship is one of mutual reinforcement.
What, then, is the British political culture?
How important have been the constraints of history and of resources?
How does it compare with other polities?
And is it, as some writers have suggested, in a state of collapse?
Political culture is a vague abstract concept that has been subject to various definitions.
In its simplest form, it may be described as denoting the emotional and attitudinal environment within which a political system operates.
Various political scientists have sought to define and identify different types of political culture.
Almond and Verba, for example, identified three ideal types: participant, subject, and parochial.
Others have sought to generate criteria by which to assess the distinctive features of a political culture.
THE POLITICAL CULTURE
In his work on political oppositions in western democracies, Robert Dahl observed that patterns of opposition may have something to do with widely shared cultural premises.
He noted that four kinds of culturally derived orientations toward politics seem to have a bearing on the pattern of opposition.
Those four orientations can usefully be employed to help understand and explain attitudes not just toward political opposition in Britain but to the political culture as a whole.
They enable one to draw out the distinctive features of that culture, in a more useful manner than does the framework provided by others, and to consider the impact of both history and resources.
Those four orientations, listed not in the order provided by Dahl but in the order I believe to be most significant to an understanding to British political culture, are toward (1) problem-solving, (2) the political system, (3) cooperation and individuality, and (4) other people.
Orientation toward Problem-Solving Giovanni Sartori has distinguished two approaches to problem-solving: the empirical and the rational.
The empirical approach is concerned with what is and what can be seen and touched, proceeding on the basis of testing and retesting and largely rejecting dogma and abstract or coherent grand designs for change.
The rationalist approach, by contrast, is concerned with abstraction rather than facts, stressing the need for deductive consistency and tending to be dogmatic and definitive.
Dahl states: &quot; While the empirical approach takes the attitude that if a program does not work in practice there must be something wrong about the theory, the rationalist will retort that what is true in theory must also be true in practice  that it is the practice, not the theory, that is wrong. &quot;
France has been identified as employing a rationalist approach.
Germany and Italy, to some extent, tend also to find such an approach useful.
Britain and the United States, by contrast, are seen as the exemplars of an empirical approach.
Indeed, it is my contention that this approach is most marked in the British case and that it constitutes the most significant aspect of British political culture.
Although more oriented toward an empirical approach, the United States has exhibited some elements of the rationalist.
While tempered by experience and (according to Beard) self-interest, the framers of the United States Constitution were informed by Lockean values and sought to impose a political framework in line with a Lockean conception of society.
Those values and that conception of society have permeated the American consciousness, so much so that they have largely gone unstated.
They have been so pervasive and so self-evident that there has been little point in articulating them.
Hence, the United States might be described as being oriented toward a mix of the empirical and the rationalist, albeit with the former being clearly the more dominant of the two.
Britain, by contrast, has a distinct orientation toward the empirical approach.
Even the political system, however strong the attachment to it, tends to be justified in pragmatic terms.
Democracy, having been implemented in largely pragmatic fashion, has been lauded on the grounds that &quot; it works. &quot;
The point has been well put by Vivien Hart in comparing American and British approaches: &quot; In America, &quot; she wrote, &quot; the emphasis has been on what democracy is and should be, while Britain has been characterised by a more pragmatic and less urgent emphasis on what democracy is and can be. &quot;
Empiricism seems appropriate to the English consciousness.
Instinct, trial and error, and incremental change are the essence of the English approach to problem-solving.
&quot; I believe in the instinctive wisdom of our well-tried democracy, &quot; declared Churchill in 1945  shortly before going down to election defeat.
Such an orientation to problem-solving has been a distinctive feature of English political culture for many centuries, discernible, I would suggest, since at least the thirteenth century.
It is an approach that has informed political actions and hence the political history of the country.
An empirical orientation has in turn been reinforced by the experience of history  it is the approach that has always been employed and no external constraints have managed to force themselves on the nation to generate conditions in which a rationalist approach would be possible.
In the wake of the War of Independence, Americans were able to sit down and generate a political system from first principles.
Invasions by foreign powers and subsequent liberation (or absence of liberation) have put other states in similar positions.
England, by contrast, has never been faced with or sought such an opportunity.
The closest it came was during the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell in the seventeenth century.
When that failed, the country resorted as far as possible to the conditions prevailing prior to its creation.
English history is scattered with philosophers generating theories that have failed to find congenial soil in the nation's consciousness.
Ideologies have been either discarded or else molded to fit with the experience of history.
Prevailing theories, once they no longer seem appropriate, have been dispensed with.
The act of dispensing with them has not always met with common assent nor has it always been smooth  the English historical landscape is scattered with periods of violence and upheaval  but once the dispensing process is achieved, it has largely been accepted.
Hankering after the old order is congenial to some minds, but seeking to revert by force or civil unrest to the status quo ante is not.
In the English perception, empiricism is both a descriptive and a prescriptive term.
To the Englishman, it is both what is and what he believes always has been.
Orientation toward the political system may be classified as allegiant when attitudes, feelings, and evaluations are favorable to the political system; apathetic or detached when feelings and evaluations are neutral; and alienated when such feelings and evaluations are unfavorable.
Italy and France have been cited as examples of political cultures that generate alienation and a large measure of apathy.
West Germany has been put forward as having a culture that generates detachment.
In contrast, Britain and the United States are among those countries cited as exhibiting a strong allegiant orientation.
Orientation toward the Political System
Almond and Verba found that evaluation of the political system in Britain was the product of a mix of participant and deferential orientations.
A participant orientation was developed in Britain (citizens being oriented to the input as well as the output side of the political system, believing that they enjoyed access to it), but it was one adapted to an existing deference to the independent authority of government.
The participant orientation in Britain, unlike that in the United States, did not displace the deferential, it remained important.
The participant orientation finds expression in citizens' beliefs that they can influence government at both the national and local level.
Although Almond and Verba found few people in their survey who actually sought to exert such influence, the proportion who believed that they could exert influence was significant.
Of British respondents, 57% said that they could influence national and local government.
(The figure for the United States was 67%.)
Only 19% of those questioned felt that they had no influence at national and local levels.
(The figure for the United States was 15 per cent.)
By contrast, of Germans, Italians, and Mexicans interviewed, more believed they had no influence at national and local level than believed that they had.
Only 25% of Italians, for example, believed that they could influence national and local government, and 47% said they had no such influence.
Deference to the authority of government has found expression in a number of ways.
It has been shown in a voluntary compliance with basic political laws.
Criminal acts tend to be antisocial rather than conscious acts against &quot; the state. &quot;
(Indeed, the concept of &quot; the state &quot; is one that is not well entrenched in English consciousness.)
There has been little overt opposition to the parliamentary form of government in Britain.
Some may want to modify its form but do not challenge the principle of it, nor do they seek to change its form through unlawful and certainly not violent means.
When government authority has been challenged citizens have expressed themselves in favor of maintaining that authority.
When called on by government to act in time of war, citizens have been prepared to respond.
Such deference has often been seen as allied with a social deference, citizens according certain skills of government to those drawn from a particular group.
Walter Bageho, in his classic work The English Constitution, identified England as a &quot; deferential nation, &quot; one that had a structure of its own.
&quot; Certain persons, &quot; he wrote, &quot; are by common consent agreed to be wiser than others, and their opinion is, by consent, to rank for much more than its numerical value. &quot;
Such deference, though possibly weakened, survived into the era of mass suffrage and the democratic ideal.
It has been seen as a significant feature of contemporary Britain and has been variously offered as a partial explanation of the continuing success of the Conservative party and its socially atypical leadership.
Such deference, though, has been contingent rather than certain.
It has been based on a reciprocity between governors and governed.
The populace has deferred to the independent authority of government and to those who occupy government in return for the satisfaction of expectations.
Those expectations have covered the substance of policies (improving material well-being, for example) as well as the form of government.
Almond and Verba, for example, found that an overwhelming majority of Britons expected equal treatment from politicians and from bureaucrats.
Conversely, those to whom citizens accord deference have been characterized by having an in-bred sense of duty.
A stress on responsibilities as well as rights has been a significant and long-standing feature of the British culture and has been well imbued by a large part of the nation's political elite.
A paternalistic concern for the well-being of the nation has been a feature of most if not all monarchs and has been associated with a particular and often predominant tradition within the Conservative party.
As long as the political system has been able to maintain the capacity to meet the demands and expectations of citizens, an allegiant orientation has been demonstrated by citizens.
The longer the system has been able to do this and the longer people have been socialized into accepting the efficacy of the system, the stronger and more enduring the allegiance has been.
In Almond and verba's survey, more Britons expressed pride in their governmental and political institutions than in any other feature of the nation that was mentioned.
The same pride was found in Americans, on a larger scale.
(Of Americans, 85% expressed pride in their institutions, compared with 46% of Britons.)
In stark contrast, only 7% of Germans expressed pride in their governmental and political institutions, and the figure for Italians was 3%.
Some cultures emphasize the values of cooperating with others, conciliating opposing views, and being prepared to compromise and submerge one's own ideas in a broader and more popularly acceptable solution.
Others, by contrast, stress the virtues of maintaining the distinctiveness, ideas, and integrity of the individual, such virtues being considered superior to those of compromise and cooperation.
Orientation toward Cooperation and Individuality
France and Italy have been cited as examples of countries in which the maintenance of group and individual integrity is stressed in both the general culture and in political life.
Britain and the United States are included among those countries in which the political culture emphasizes the virtues of compromise and conciliation, without threatening personal integrity.
The Anglo-American perception was well expressed by Edmund Burke in 1775.
&quot; All government, indeed every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue, and every prudent act, &quot; he declared, &quot; is founded on compromise and barter. &quot;
In Britain there is an almost instinctive distaste for conflict, both in personal relationships and in political life.
The formal political framework facilitates an adversary relationship among political parties, but the underlying reality is a quest for compromise.
Parties play according to the rules of the constitutional game.
Similar observations can be made about groups in industry and in society generally.
There is a penchant, almost, for resolving disputes by discussion, by sitting around a table and ironing out one's differences.
It is an orientation compatible with the others already identified and it is eminently congenial to a society that stresses the responsibilities as well as the rights of the individual.
It remains an orientation that Britons not only find congenial but also take as the source of a certain pride.
A belief that one can have faith and confidence in others has been put forward as a culturally rooted phenomenon, with potentially important implications for political life.
Research by Morris Rosenberg has shown that &quot; faith in people &quot; is related to democratic and internationalist values and attitudes.
In their study, Almond and Verba found that the Americans and the British &quot; tend to be consistently most positive about the safety and responsiveness of the human environment. &quot;
The Germans and the Italians, by contrast, were found to be more negative, and the Mexicans inconsistent.
Orientation toward Other People
Trust in one's fellow countrymen remains a significant feature of contemporary British society.
A Gallup Poll in 1980 found that 85% of respondents considered other Britons to be very or fairly trustworthy.
The experience of history may have helped to consolidate such a sense of trust.
Britons have stood successfully shoulder-to-shoulder in order to win battles abroad and to repel foreign invaders from their shores.
During the Second World War, the nation did not have to contend with a significant fifth column or with the equivalent of Vichy collaborators.
There is little or nothing in recent history that would give Britons cause to distrust their compatriots.
Similarly, the experience of history, island isolation, and shared values may serve to explain differing levels of trust that Britons have in other people.
Britons tend to retain trust in the inhabitants of countries in which Britain has had or retains colonial interests; countries that share a common language, values, and (in some cases) ancestry; and countries that have stood together in times of crisis.
There are strong emotional ties to old Commonwealth countries such as New Zealand, Canada, and Australia.
There is also a strong sense of closeness to the United States.
Of respondents in the Gallup Poll in 1980, 70% regarded Americans as very or fairly trustworthy.
(Only the Swiss and the Dutch received marginally higher ratings.)
Another poll a year later asked respondents the extent to which they thought they could trust certain countries as allies in the event of war.
The proportion responding that they thought they could trust the United Sates &quot; a great deal &quot; was 62% (up from 45% in 1975), a figure not matched by any other country: the closest was Norway, which 37% thought they could trust to the same extent.
The two polls revealed lower levels of trust in those countries and people that historically have been Britain's enemies.
To the island inhabitants of Britain, such peoples remain distant (though the English Channel constitutes now more a psychological than a physical barrier), with alien cultures, different interests, and different thought processes.
Englishmen and Scotsmen, as Anthony King observed, have tended not to think like Europeans nor to think of themselves as Europeans.
In the 1980 Gallup Poll, only 32% of the Britons questioned regarded the French as very or fairly trustworthy.
The Russians scored 18%.
(The West Germans, perhaps surprisingly, scored 60%.)
Only 6% of those questioned would trust the French a great deal as allies in time of war, 4% would trust the Spanish, 4% the Italians, and only 3% the Turks.
Again, the Germans did better, 22% being prepared to trust them a great deal.
Finally, 47% said they would trust the Italians &quot; not at all, &quot; and 45% gave a similar response for the French.
Despite British membership of the European Communities, there is an important sense in which Britain and certainly the British still look westward across the Atlantic rather than eastward over the English channel.
And despite the travails of recent times, trust in one's fellow countrymen and a discriminating, possibly confident, perception of other people remain significant features of the British political culture.
The political culture of Britain may then be characterized, in broad terms, as having the four orientations identified: empirical in terms of problem-solving and change, allegiant in terms of the political system, cooperative in making decisions, and trusting with relation to fellow countrymen and allies.
These, it is important to stress, are generalizations  there are always individuals or subcultures that may not have such orientations.
What is important is that they are and remain the orientations of most Britons, both at the mass and the elite level.
A DECLINING CULTURE?
The strength of the culture may be said to lie in the convergence of these orientations  that is, they are compatible with and reinforce one another, and similarly are compatible with and are reinforced by the experience of history.
The stress on cooperation and compromise, an emphasis compatible with an empirical approach to change, has facilitated the integration of groups and individuals into the political system.
Such integration may be seen as reinforcing an allegiant rather than a neutral or alienated orientation to the political system.
History, as we have mentioned, has been kind: the country has staved off invasion by its enemies, and the resources have been available for government to make and meet commitments in response to changing demands and expectations.
As a result, it has been possible to interpret the experience of history as justifying or reinforcing an attachment to empirical problem-solving and to the virtues of cooperation and trust.
The interplay of these variables generated what Almond and Verba characterized as &quot; the civic culture, &quot; &quot; a pluralistic culture based on communication and persuasion, a culture of consensus and diversity, a culture that permitted change but moderated it. &quot;
What of the civic culture today?
My argument is simply stated: Although subject to modification, the civic culture remains.
What has been the subject of radical, almost revolutionary, change over the past decade or so has not been the civic culture but the perceptions of that culture.
In short, it has not changed as much as observers think it has.
I do not argue that the political culture of Britain remains unchanged.
The culture not only allows for change, usually incremental but occasionally radical, but itself can and does change.
In good British fashion, however, that change has tended to be piecemeal rather than comprehensive.
Some values, attitudes and emotions have been subject to modification over time, but the essential orientations outlined above have not been discarded.
They remain the orientations that converge to form the predominant element of the British political culture.
What has changed, and changed radically over the period from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, has been the perception of that culture.
Analyses of the British political culture have swung, pendulum fashion, from one extreme to the other.
At times of apparent stability, contentment, and political success, there has been a tendency to see the political culture in idealized terms, to hold it aloft and laud it as a culture to be admired and possibly even envied.
Although Almond and Verba drew attention to some of the inconsistencies and problems inherent in the civic culture, it was nonetheless difficult not to ascribe positive connotations to that culture.
There are a number of problems inherent in the political culture.
A disposition to incremental change can deflect one from considering or even comprehending wider and more fundamental problems.
The combination of an empirical orientation and historical continuity has produced a political system that is complex and disparate.
While the American federal system has been likened to a marble cake, the British political system can be likened to a patchwork quilt.
It may look to some extent like the original, it may even retain traces of the original, but the many pieces that make the whole were added at different times and have been the subject of change and much repair work.
It includes structures that (according to some observers) have facilitated policy discontinuity  a discontinuity not incompatible with an empirical orientation to change  yet comprises such an interdependent complex of political bodies that it has become increasingly difficult for government to govern and to initiate radical and comprehensive change.
Such difficulty has been exacerbated by the desire to resolve problems by compromise.
Problems that can not be resolved by reasoned debate have tended to be ignored in the hope that they will go away.
Such inherent problems tend to be discounted, ignored, or even interpreted in a favorable light at times when the political system appears to be successfully meeting the demands and expectations of the populace.
When the system appears to be malfunctional, usually at times of economic difficulty for the country, some commentators identify such inherent problems as providing at least a partial explanation for the system's poor showing.
In the latter half of the 1970s, for example, policy discontinuity arising from an electoral and political system that encouraged an &quot; adversary style &quot; of politics was offered as a partial explanation for Britain's poor economic performance.
Other commentators have sought to identify the nation's problems not in terms of the effect of some aspects of the political culture but as agents generating and reflecting a decline in the culture itself.
In the 1970s and early 1980s, a number of observers began to chart a decline in the civic culture.
In 1982, on the basis of some survey evidence, Samuel Beer concluded that &quot; it is no exaggeration to speak of the decline in the civic culture as a &quot; collapse &quot; &quot;.
He argued that as old institutions failed to meet new expectations, so legitimacy in government would falter and trust in its equity and effectiveness would decline.
He hypothesized and sought to show that the consequences of this included a greater self-assertion by participants, a decline of leadership, a weakening of party government, and a loosening of the nexus of class and party.
&quot; In an ironic sense, &quot; Beer declared, &quot; Britain is maintaining its leadership.
As it once showed the way toward democratic success, today it blazes the trail toward democratic failure. &quot;
While Beer's hypothesis is plausible as to the effect of institutions that fail to meet new expectations on legitimacy in government, it is arguable as to the extent to which such a failure to meet expectations has taken place.
This is a point to which I shall return in the concluding chapter.
Although government capacity to meet expectations has declined, its capacity to meet expectations in the past built up a body of diffuse support, support that now exists independently of particular failures to meet demands.
Furthermore, there is evidence that the expectations themselves may be changing, converging more with the capacity of the system to meet them.
Certainly, it will be my case that the political culture has neither declined nor been threatened to the extent suggested by Beer and other Jeremiahs.
Certain institutions may be under threat (as subsequent chapters will show) but not in a manner inconsistent with the existing political culture.
The civic culture may be weakened but it has not collapsed.
Its position is similar to that of Mark Twain: reports of its death would be greatly exaggerated.
As I shall seek to show, the political culture remains predominantly an allegiant one, and the important question to be addressed is not &quot; why has there been a decline in the civic culture? &quot; but rather &quot; why has that decline not been greater? &quot;
PAST AND PRESENT
Historical Perspective and Contemporary Problems
A NUMBER OF INTRODUCTION TEXTS on British politics do not have chapters devoted specifically to political history.
The omission is a surprising one.
When the proposal for this book was under consideration by the publishers, a number of American professors were asked for their comments.
One responded with this advice: &quot; Make sure you incorporate as much historical detail as possible.
American students don't know much about British history. &quot;
It was a shrewd response.
The need for such detail, however, is not confined to Americans interested in the subject; it encompasses all those who seek to make some sense of the institutions and complex relationships that form the British polity in the 1980s.
There has been no point in British history at which the prevailing method of government has been completely swept away, allowing those in power to sit down and create from first principles a new and clearly delineated form of government.
The country has witnessed continuous and sometimes dramatic change.
In the past 300 years alone, the nation has experienced industrialization, the advent of democracy, and the introduction and growth of the welfare state  yet the changes have never been such as to be described as revolutionary.
They have been built upon and have adapted that which already existed.
The body politic may have undergone radical surgery and it may have aged considerably, but it has continued to endure.
What then, are the significant features of British history that help us understand the contemporary political system and the political culture.
Limitations of space preclude a lengthy dissertation on what is a vast subject.
That vastness is apparent when put in comparative perspective.
The Magna Carta, for instance, was signed more than two centuries before Christopher Columbus set sail.
A Parliament was summoned more than 500 years before the United States Congress first assembled.
And an American president, unlike a British monarch, can not trace his presidential forebears back more than 1,000 years.
Nonetheless, it is possible to provide a brief but structured sketch that furthers our understanding of contemporary British politics.
This can be done under two headings: one is the emergence of parliamentary government, and the other is the development of the welfare state and the managed economy.
The structure and relationships of the contemporary organs of government can be understood only in historical context.
A study of the emergence of the welfare state highlights the increased demands and responsibilities borne by government.
Both studies provide a necessary background to understanding some of the problems now faced by government.
They serve also to highlight certain features of the political culture.
One of the essential features of the British Constitution is a parliamentary government under a limited, or symbolic, monarchy.
The formal elements of this type of government will be more fully outlined in the next chapter.
For the moment, what concerns us is that this government is the product of change extending over several centuries, coming to fruition only in the past century.
Its development has sometimes been characterized as being evolutionary, but in practice, it is the outgrowth of piecemeal change.
HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
The Emergence of Parliamentary Government
Let us begin in the thirteenth century.
Traditionally, the sovereign power in England resided in the monarch.
Nonetheless, the king was expected to consult with his tenants-in-chief (the earls, barons, and leading churchmen of the kingdom) in order to discover and declare the law and to have their counsel before any levies of extraordinary taxation were made.
This expectation was to find documented expression in the Magna Carta of 1215, by which the King recognized it as a right of his subjects &quot; to have the Common Council of the Kingdom &quot; for the assessment of extraordinary aids  that is, taxation.
Such consultation was undertaken through a Great Council, from which evolved what was to be recognized as a parlement or Parliament.
The Great Council itself was essentially the precursor of the House of Lords.
The House of Commons evolved from the summoning to council, in the latter half of the thirteenth century on a somewhat sporadic basis, of knights and burgesses as representatives of the counties and towns.
At various times in the fourteenth century the Commons deliberated separately from the Lords, and there developed a formal separation of the two bodies.
During the period of the Tudor monarchs in the sixteenth century, Parliament acquired enhanced status.
It was generally supportive of the monarch but became more powerful because of the dependence upon it for that support, especially during the reign of Elizabeth I. The relationship between Crown and Parliament under the subsequent Stuart dynasty was one of conflict.
The early Stuart kings James I and Charles I sought to assert the doctrine of the divine right of kings and to deny many of the privileges acquired or asserted by Parliament.
This conflict was to lead to the civil war and the beheading of Charles I in 1642.
With the abolition of the monarchy came a brief period of rule by a Council of State elected by what was termed the Rump Parliament.
(Some attempts were actually made to formulate a form of written constitution, but they came to nothing.)
Rule by the Council of State was succeeded by Oliver Cromwell's unsuccessful military dictatorship, and in 1660 Charles' son returned to assume the throne as Charles II.
The period between 1642 and 1660 proved an aberration in British history.
The Restoration witnessed an attempt to return, unconditionally, to the country's position as it was at the beginning of 1642.
Through this attempt the Restoration lent itself to a repetition of the earlier struggle between King and Commons.
Relations between the two gradually deteriorated during the reign of Charles II and became severe in the reign of his successor, James II.
James sought to reassert the divine right of kings, and Parliament combined against him.
In 1688 James fled the country.
At the invitation of Parliament, the throne was taken by William and Mary of Orange, James' son-in-law and daughter.
The new occupants of the throne owed their position to Parliament, and the new relationship between them was asserted by statute in the Bill of Rights.
Although the Bill of Rights was important for enumerating various &quot; Liberties of this Kingdom &quot; (Some of which were to be similarly expressed during the following century in the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution), its essential purpose was to assert the position of Parliament in relation to the Crown.
The raising of taxes or the dispensing of laws without the assent of Parliament was declared to be illegal.
The monarch was expected to govern, but to do so only with the consent of Parliament.
The Act of Settlement of 1701, which determined the succession to the throne, affirmed that the laws of England &quot; are the Birthright of the People thereof and all the Kings and Queens who shall ascend the Throne of this Realm ought to administer the Government of the same according to the said Laws and all their Officers and Ministers ought to serve them respectively according to the same. &quot;
The monarch thus became formally dependent on Parliament for consent to the raising of taxes and for the passage of legislation.
In practice, he or she became increasingly dependent also on ministers for advice.
The importance of ministers grew especially in the eighteenth century.
The Hanoverian kings were not uninterested in political life but they had difficulty comprehending the complexities of domestic and foreign affairs.
According to the historian J. H. Plumb, both George I and George II were &quot; crassly stupid &quot; and &quot; incapable, totally incapable, of forming a policy. &quot;
During the period of their reigns, the leading body of the king's ministers, generally known as the cabinet, began to meet without the king being present.
The period also witnessed the emergence of a minister who was to become popularly known as the prime minister.
(Not until the twentieth century was the office of prime minister to be mentioned in a statute.)
The relationship among Crown, ministers, and Parliament in that century was one in which the king relied on his ministers to help formulate policy.
Those ministers were chosen by the king on the basis of his personal confidence in them, and they remained responsible to him.
They also were responsible to Parliament in order to achieve their ends, a fact recognized by both the king and his ministers.
Nonetheless, parliamentary support was not difficult to obtain; the king and his ministers had sufficient patronage and position usually to ensure such support.
A ministry that enjoyed royal confidence could generally take the House of Lords for grated, and provided it did not prove incompetent or seek to impose excessive taxation, &quot; its position was unassailable in the Commons. &quot;
The position was to change significantly in the nineteenth century.
Britain underwent what has been popularly referred to as an industrial revolution in the period from the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth.
Seymour Martin Lipset has characterized the United States as the &quot; first new nation, &quot; but Britain has been described as &quot; the first industrial nation. &quot;
Industry became more mechanized, improvements took place in agricultural production techniques, and there were improvements in transport and in the organization of trade and banking.
There was a notable growth in the size of cities, particularly in the early part of the nineteenth century.
Men of industry and commerce began to emerge as men of some wealth.
In 1813, Robert Owen referred to the &quot; working class, &quot; a term brought into common speech by Lord Brougham.
By the 1830s, a nonlanded middle class, artisans, and an industrial workforce were important constituents of the country's population.
Parliament remained dominated by the aristocracy and by the landed gentry.
Representation in the House of Commons was heavily weighted in favor of the rural counties.
Some parliamentary constituencies had only a handful of electors: known as &quot; rotten boroughs, &quot; they were often in the pocket of an aristocrat or local landowner.
Pressure for some parliamentary reform, with a redistribution of seats and a widening of the franchise, began to develop.
It was argued that a Parliament full of men of wealth and property was unlikely to view industry, trade, and agriculture from the point of view of the laboring classes.
Rotten boroughs were criticized as being used by the ministry to help maintain a majority.
Unrest in a number of areas, both agricultural and industrial, and the French Revolution of 1830 (a spur to radical action) increased the pressure for change.
One political group in particular, the Whigs, who had been the &quot; outs &quot; in politics for the 25 years prior to 1830, began to see the need for some response to this pressure.
The concession of some parliamentary reform was seen as necessary in order to prevent worse happenings.
The result was to be the Reform Act of 1832.
The Reform Act, introduced, ironically, by the most aristocratic government of the century, reorganized parliamentary constituencies and extended the franchise.
The electorate increased in size from a little under 500,000 to 813,000 electors.
Although much remained the same as before  the new electorate constituted but one-thirtieth of the population, 31 boroughs still had fewer than 300 electors in each, voting remained by open ballot (secret ballots were considered rather un-English), and the aristocracy still held great sway politically  the act precipitated important changes both within and outside the House of Commons.
The redistribution of seats and the extension of the franchise helped loosen the grip of the aristocracy and of ministers on the House of Commons.
The size of the new electorate encouraged the embryonic development of political organizations.
Members of Parliament (MPs) became less dependent on aristocratic patrons without acquiring too great a dependence on the growing party organizations.
The result was to be a House of Commons with a greater legitimacy in the eyes of MPs and electors and one with an ability to assert itself in its relationship with government.
The House proved willing to amend or reject legislation put before it as well as to remove individual ministers and on the occasion the government itself.
In his classic work on the constitution, Walter Bagehot attached much importance to this &quot; elective function &quot;; The House of Commons, he declared, was &quot; a real choosing body: it elects the people it likes.
And it dismisses whom it likes too. &quot;
Debates in the House really counted for something and, with the exception of the period from 1841 to 1846, party cohesion was almost unknown.
The House of Commons did not itself govern, but government was carried on within the confines of its guidance and approval.
The period after 1832 witnessed also important changes in the relationships within and among the different elements of Crown, government, and Parliament.
The monarch retained the formal prerogative power to appoint the prime minister, but the changed political circumstances essentially dictated that the person chosen should be able to command a majority in the House of Commons.
Royal favor ceased to be an essential condition for forming the Government.
Within Parliament, the relationship between the two Houses also changed.
Members of the House of Lords sat by virtue of birth, holding hereditary peerages.
The acceptance of the Commons as the &quot; representative &quot; chamber undermined the authority of the peers to challenge or negate the wishes of the other House.
After the 1830s, the Lords tended to be somewhat restrained in their attacks on government measures.
&quot; This followed, &quot; writes Mackintosh, &quot; from the view that while a ministry retained the confidence of the elected representatives it was entitled to remain in office.
The peers on the whole accepted these assumptions, though many found the explicit recognition of the situation hard to bear. &quot;
The Lords' remaining authority was in practice to be removed in consequence of the 1867 Reform Act, though not until the twentieth century was the House forced formally to accept its diminished status.
Whereas the 1832 Act helped ensure the dominance of the House of Commons within the formal political process, the passage of the Reform Act of 1867 began a process of the transfer of power from Parliament to Ministers.
The act itself was the product of demands for change because of the limited impact of the 1832 Act and because of more immediate political considerations.
Its effect was to increase the size of the electorate from 1,358,000 to 2,477,000.
(The number had grown since 1832 because of increased wealth and population.)
Other significant measures followed in its wake.
Secret voting was introduced by the Ballot Act of 1870.
Other acts sought to prohibit as far as possible corrupt practices and limited the amount of money a candidate could spend on election expenses.
Single-member districts (known in Britain as constituencies) of roughly equal electoral size were prescribed as the norm.
The 1884 Representation of the People Act extended the franchise to householders and tenants and to all those who occupied land or tenements with an annual value of not less than 10 pounds.
The effect of the act was to bring into being an electorate in which working men were in a majority.
The consequence of these developments was to be party government.
The size of the new electorate meant that the voters could be reached only through some well-developed organization, and the result was to be the growth of organized and mass-membership political parties.
The Conservative National Union and the National Liberal Federation were formed in order to facilitate and encourage the support of the new electors.
However, contact with the voters was insufficient in itself to entice their support.
Not only had a large section of the population been enfranchised, it was a notably different electorate from that which had existed previously.
The new class of electors had different and greater demands than those of the existing middle-class electors.
If the votes of working men were to be obtained, the parties had to offer them something.
And the parties could fulfil their promises only if they presented a uniform program to the electorate and achieved a cohesive majority in the House of Commons to carry through that program.
What this was to produce was a shift of power away from the House of Commons to the cabinet and to the electorate, with political parties serving as the conduit for this transfer.
The electorate proved too large and too politically unsophisticated to evaluate the merits of an individual MP's behaviour.
Political parties provided the labels with which electors could identify, and elections became gladiatorial contests between parties rather than between individual candidates.
The all-or-nothing spoils of an election victory and the method of election encouraged (if it not always produced) a contest between two major parties.
And having voted for party candidates, the electors expected the members returned to Parliament to support the program offered by their leaders at the election.
Party cohesion soon became a feature of parliamentary life.
The House of Commons in effect lost two of the most important functions ascribed to it by Bagehot, those of legislation and of choosing the government: the former passed to the cabinet and the latter to the electorate.
The cabinet constituted the leaders of the party enjoying a parliamentary majority.
It assumed that initiative for the formulation and introduction of measures of national policy and became increasingly reluctant to be over-ruled by the House.
The growth in the number and complexity of bills further limited the influence of the individual MP.
Increasingly, his role became one of supporting his leaders.
The cabinet had previously rested its authority on the support of the House; now it derived its authority from the electors.
As Mackintosh states, &quot; The task of the House of Commons became one of supporting the Cabinet chosen at the polls and passing its legislation...
By the 1990s, the Cabinet dominated British government. &quot;
Further modifications and addenda took place in the first half of the twentieth century.
The House of Lords was forced by statute in 1911 to accept its diminished status.
The franchise was variously extended, most notably to half the population previously excluded because of their sex.
The monarch's political influence further receded.
The growth and increasing economic weight of groups generated more extensive and complex demands of government.
And the size of government grew as its responsibilities expanded.
Basically, though, the essential features of the political system were those established in the preceding century.
The responsibility for making public policy rested with the government, a government derived from and resting its support upon a political party.
That same party's majority in the House of Commons ensured that the government's measures were approved.
Formal and political constraints limited the effect of any opposition from the House of Lords.
The monarch gave formal assent to any legislative measure approved by the two houses.
Thus, within the formal framework of deciding public policy, the government was dominant.
The role of Parliament became largely but not wholly one of legitimating the measures put before it.
For the monarch, that became the exclusive role (that is, in respect of legislation).
Government, as we shall see, operated within a political environment that imposed important constraints, but the limitations imposed formerly by Parliament and the monarch were largely eroded.
Britain retained a parliamentary form of government, but what that meant was not government by Parliament but government through Parliament.
To comprehend some of the problems faced by British government in the 1980s it is necessary to know not only the structure and relationships of the political system but also the popular expectations and the burden of responsibilities borne by government.
Those expectations and responsibilities have not been static.
Just as the governmental structure has been modified in response to political demands, so the responsibilities of government have grown as greater social and economic demands have been made of it.
The Welfare State and the Managed Economy
Toward the end of the nineteenth century and more especially in the twentieth, the responsibilities of government expanded.
In part this was attributable to the growth of the Empire.
It was also attributable to the increasing demands and expectations of the newly enfranchised working population.
Government began to conceive its duties as extending beyond those of maintaining law and order and of defending the realm.
The statute book began to expand, with the addition of measures of social reform.
Various such measures were enacted in the years prior to 1867, though the most notable were to be enacted in the remaining decades of the century.
They included measures to limit working hours for women and children, to improve housing and public health, to make education for children compulsory, to provide for the safety of workers (including the payment of compensation by employers in the event of accidents at work), and even to extend the right to strike.
Such measures, exploited for electoral advantage, were within the capabilities of the government to provide.
They did not create too great an economic burden; they were not themselves economic measures.
The growth of expectations and the greater willingness of government to intervene in areas previously considered inviolate was to be continued and become more marked in the twentieth century.
The general election of 1906 was something of a watershed in British politics.
It was the first election to be fought essentially on national issues and it witnessed the return not only of a reforming Liberal government but also, and in some respects more significantly, of 27 Labour MPs.
The Labour party had been created for the purpose of ensuring working-class representation in Parliament, and from 1906 onward class became a significant influence in voting behavior.
The nature of electoral conflict changed as the Labour party succeeded the Liberal as the main opposition party to the Conservatives.
The franchise was further extended, notably in 1918 and 1928, and new expectations were generated by the experience of the two world wars.
During the First World War (1914-1918), socialists within the Labour party argued the case for the conscription of wealth (public ownership) to accompany the conscription of labor (the drafting of men into the armed forces).
Politicians fueled rather than played down the belief that Britain should become, in the words of one politician, &quot; a land fit for heroes &quot; once &quot; the war to end all wars &quot; was won  in other words, that provision should be made for those who had fought for King and Country.
The period of the Second World War (1939-1945) witnessed a significant shift of attitudes by a sizable fraction of the electorate.
One informed estimate was that by December 1942, about two out of every five people had changed their political outlook since the beginning of the war.
The direction in which opinion was moving was toward the left of the political spectrum.
There was a reaction against (Conservative) government unpreparedness for war in the 1930s and against those who had not done more to solve the nation's problems during the Depression.
There was support for calls for equality of sacrifice.
There was some degree of goodwill toward the Soviet Union as a wartime ally.
There was also, very importantly, the enhanced position of the Labour party.
It had entered into Coalition in 1940 (its leader, Clement Attlee, became deputy prime minister to Churchill) and had demonstrated its claim to be a capable partner in government.
As the 1940s progressed, there developed a notable movement, including within the Conservative party, for a greater degree of social and economic intervention by government.
This was to find some authoritative expression during the war years themselves and more especially in the years after 1945, when a general election resulted in the return of the first Labour government with a clear working majority in the House of Commons.
The period of the 1940s and the 1950s was to produce what Samuel Beer has referred to as the welfare state and the managed economy, or what some commentators have referred to as the period of the social democratic consensus.
The welfare state and the managed economy did not suddenly emerge full-blown in this period.
The preceding decades has not witnessed governments unresponsive to electoral expectations and the nation's problems.
The Liberal government before the First World War had made the first tentative steps in the introduction of old-age pensions (1908) and national health and unemployment insurance (1911).
The interwar years had seen the introduction of a number of significant measures of social reform, especially those associated with Neville Chamberlain as minister of health.
He proposed to the cabinet 25 measures and secured the enactment of 21 of them.
These included unemployment insurance, public health and housing, and the extension of old-age pensions.
Much of this legislation, as one biographer noted, &quot; has an important place in the development of the Welfare State. &quot;
The government also began to engage in certain measures of economic management.
It embarked on a protectionist policy and in return for the grant of a tariff to an industry, demanded that its major producers should reorganize themselves.
Such producers were encouraged to reduce capacity and maintain prices.
The gold standard was abandoned, the pound was devalued, and interest rates were lowered.
The government even proved willing to take certain industries into public ownership: broadcasting, overseas airways, and the electricity-generating industry.
By indulging in such policies, Professor Beer has contended, government was beginning to move in the direction of a managed economy.
The movement, though, was modest.
Government adhered to the prevailing orthodoxy that balanced budgets were necessary and desirable and that deficit financing was neither.
Ministers showed little desire to emulate the innovative approach adopted in the United States by Franklin Roosevelt during the period of the first New Deal.
(Indeed, Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin commented at one point that the United States Constitution had broken down and was giving way to dictatorship.)
Britain and the United States were similar, though, in that both were to be brought out of the Depression of the 1930s not by government economic policies but by rearmament and the Second World War.
Two major documents published in the war years provided the planks for the final emergence of the welfare state and managed economy.
These were the Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services by Sir william Beveridge (the so-called Beveridge Report), published in November 1942, and the White Paper on Full Employment, published in 1944.
The former proposed a comprehensive scheme of social security, one to provide &quot; social insurance against interruption and destruction of earning power and for special expenditure arising at birth, marriage or death. &quot;
The latter was significant because of its opening pledge: &quot; The Government accepts as one of their primary aims and responsibilities the maintenance of a high and stable level of employment after the war. &quot;
There was also one particularly significant measure of social reform enacted during wartime: the 1944 Education Act, pioneered by R. A. Butler.
The Act provided for the division among primary, secondary, and higher education  and, within secondary education, between secondary modern and grammar schools  that was to form the basis of the educational system for more than a generation.
The welfare state was brought to fruition by the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948, entailing the nationalization of hospitals and the provision of free medical treatment, and by the passage of the 1945 Family Allowance Act, the 1946 National Insurance Act, and the 1948 National Assistance Act.
the principle enunciated by the Beveridge Report was largely put into practice.
National insurance ensured a certain level of benefit in the event of unemployment or sickness.
For those who required special help there was &quot; national assistance, &quot; the provision of noncontributory benefits dispensed on the basis of means-testing.
There were family allowances for those with children.
The state now provided something of a protective safety net from the cradle to the grave.
It was still possible to pay for private treatment in the health service, but for most people it was a case of having treatment &quot; on the national health. &quot;
The NHS became a feature of some pride at home and of considerable interest abroad.
Acceptance and usage of techniques pioneered by the economist J. M. Keynes ushered in the managed economy.
Government accepted responsibility for keeping aggregate monetary demand at a level sufficient to ensure full employment or what was considered as far as possible to constitute full employment (an unemployment rate of 1% or 2% was considered acceptable), and the annual Budget was to be used as the main instrument of economic policy.
The Labour government proved unwilling to pursue a more overtly socialist approach; physical controls acquired during wartime were eventually discarded and those industries that were nationalized, such as steel and the railways, were basically essential and loss-making concerns.
Government was prepared to pursue a managed rather than a controlled economy.
The Conservative party was returned to office in 1951 and was to remain there until 1964.
It accepted, or appeared to accept, both the welfare state and Keynesian techniques of demand management.
Indeed, it gave the impression of making a success of both.
As heir to the Disraelian belief in elevating the condition of the people and as a party seeking to enhance its image among working class voters, the Conservative Party could claim both a principled as well as a practical motive for maintaining the innovations of its predecessor.
At the same time, it was reluctant to pursue policies that would increase the tax burden or the public sector of the economy.
Good fortune was with the government: world economic conditions improved and heralded a period of sustained growth in industrial output and trade.
Government revenue was such that not only was it possible to sustain and indeed expand expenditure on the national health serve, it was possible to do so without substantial increases in taxation.
Indeed, reductions rather than increases in tax rates were a feature of the period.
There was an extensive and successful house-building program.
Economic prosperity allowed government to maintain peace with the labor unions by allowing high wage settlements.
It was also possible finally to abandon many of the controls maintained since wartime.
Government was able to claim to have maintained full employment, an expanding economy, stable prices, and a strong pound.
Despite the agonies of withdrawing from Empire and various undulations in economic performance, the decade of the 1950s was seen more than anything as &quot; an age of affluence. &quot;
In July 1957, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was able to declare that, for most of the people, &quot; You've never had it so good. &quot;
The 1960s witnessed a downturn in economic performance and a growing realization that, in comparative terms, Britain was faring less well than many of her continental neighbors.
The Conservative government of Harold Macmillan responded with various novel proposals, including indicative economic planning and an application to join the European Economic Community.
The succeeding Labour government of Harold Wilson, returned to office in 1964, sought a more comprehensive method of national economic planning as part of its grand design of modernization.
Inflation and unemployment became more visible problems.
Despite the economic problems and some unrelated political problems of the 1960s, the country remained a relatively prosperous one.
Living conditions continued to improve.
The rise in wages exceeded the rise in inflation.
Where economic conditions impinged on the ability to maintain the welfare state, it was essentially at the margin: government imposed nominal charges for medicines obtained on NHS prescriptions.
Parties tended to argue more about means rather than ends.
The consensus that developed in the 1950s remained intact.
This brief survey not only provides some historical depth to an understanding of contemporary British government  its structure, responsibilities, and political dominance  it also serves to reinforce our grasp of the political culture and to provide in part an explanation for some of the problems now associated with government.
POLITICAL CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS
From the foregoing sketch one can recognize not only the features of the political culture outlined in the preceding chapter but also the convergence of those features and their interplay with the experience of history.
An empirical orientation to change and a conditional relationship between governors and governed are long-standing characteristics of political life.
Clearly, government has been shaped by no grand design.
Change has been piecemeal and largely incremental.
Although the governed have been largely prepared to defer to those in power, their deference has been conditional.
If presumed rights and privileges were ignored or dispensed with, the appropriate action was taken to restore them (e.g. the Magna Carta, the beheading of Charles I).
The other orientations can be identified from the experience of reform in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
History and Political Culture
The reforms of the nineteenth century were facilitated not only by an empirical orientation to change but also by the paternalism of political leaders.
Noblesse oblige (privilege entails responsibility) is a foreign phase but it embodies a very British concept.
Many of the country's aristocratic leaders believed that they had a duty to help improve the condition of the working man.
The point should not be overemphasized, since on occasion this sense of duty was not so much a cause of action but a post hoc justification of it.
Nonetheless, it was important.
It combined with need (to avoid social unrest) and political expediency (to steal the thunder of one's opponents) to produce franchise extension.
Increasingly, change was more easily accommodated as political relationships changes.
By the twentieth century, the hegemony of government in the political process ensured that measures could be carried through Parliament without too much difficulty.
Equally important, once approved by Parliament, reforms were accepted by the populace and by those at whom they were directed.
The widening of the franchise in the nineteenth century, House of Lords reform, and votes for women in the twentieth  these are issues that aroused great emotion and were fiercely opposed but on which reform was accepted once the government of the day had got the measure accepted by Parliament.
This in part reflects the orientation toward cooperation.
It also may be seen as the product of an allegiant orientation to the political system.
The widening of the franchise extended the input of citizens into the political system.
The passage of measures of social and economic reform appeared to be meeting their needs.
Equally important, Britons have been taught that the political system works.
Although the media of political socialization have changed over time, the content has not.
There has been an emphasis on, and lauding of, the continuity and stability.
Historically, as we have seen, the country has been rent by various upheavals, sometimes of a quite violent nature.
The English Civil War was far from bloodless.
The opinion of foreigners, wrote an English scholar in 1704, is &quot; that there have been more shakes and convulsions in the government of England than in that of any other nation. &quot;
There have been various shakes since  social, economic, and political.
In the popular mind, though, such convulsions have not figures largely.
&quot; What makes the history of England so eminently valuable, &quot; wrote T. H. Buckle, &quot; is that nowhere else has the national progress been so little interfered with, either for good or evil. &quot;
British government has been accepted as the product of the collected wisdom of many generations, indeed of many centuries.
It flatters the British mind, and certainly the English mind, to look upon it as the envy of the world.
The Constitution has been lauded as &quot; a living organism in a condition of perpetual growth. &quot;
George III described it as &quot; the most perfect of human formations. &quot;
Only recently, in 1981, one member of Parliament declared that, distinguished from other constitutions, &quot; our constitution is the envy of the world. &quot;
The virtues of the Westminster model of government have been widely extolled.
They became embodied in what was taught in British schools.
They became part of received wisdom, and to some extent, they remain so.
The British have not been alone in such teaching.
British parliamentary government has found its admirers abroad as well, and not least in the United States.
Especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the capacity of the party in government to enact a party program was compared with the brokered politics of the American system.
It was a comparison that generated some calls for reform; most notable among these was James MacGregor Burns in The Deadlock of Democracy published in 1963, arguing the case essentially for the equivalent in the United States of a &quot; responsible party system. &quot;
Such calls were to extend into the following decade.
Charles Hardin cited British experience in contending that &quot; party government  if it can be attained  provides the best hope that our government will be able to meet its problems. &quot;
Although not all observers wished to emulate British experience, their analyses appeared edged with a touch of envy.
In more recent years, such perceptions have waned.
In the 1970s, conditions in Britain began to change.
Economic indicators worsened considerably, and unemployment rose dramatically (see Chapter 1).
By 1973, Britain had the lowest growth rate of the major industrialized nations.
Between 1974 and 1978 there was an annual rate of increase in retail prices in excess of 17%.
Industrial disputes became more serious: there were more working days lost through such disputes in the period from 1970 to 1978 than there were in the whole of the period from 1946 to 1969.
In less than 30 years, the British economy had declined from being one of the strongest to one of the weakest in Europe.
Successive governments encountered problems in responding to the changed conditions and in raising resources to meet public expectations.
Britain was overshadowed by a body of which, until 1973, it was not a member  the European Communities.
Government was increasingly constrained by the activities of economically powerful groups, both at home and abroad (notably, in the latter case, the International Monetary Fund).
Although parliamentary government did not cease to work, it no longer appeared to be working in the way that it had in the past.
The positive picture of British government began to lose its gloss; academics who had previously written about the political system in positive terms now turned their attention to the problem inherent in that system.
British parliamentary government began to assume the status of a rejected lover.
Contemporary Ills and Analyses
The diagnoses of Britain's problems have been as varied as the problems themselves.
Some diagnoses are primarily economic.
A number of economists have placed some of the blame for poor economic performance on a failure to modernize (there has been a tendency to retain old plants and to support traditional but declining industries, such as textiles); on the emphasis given to maintaining a balance of payments surplus in order to fund overseas military spending and foreign investments, pursued at the expense of economic growth, and on a failure of postwar economic management to manipulate supply as well as demand.
Others have stressed the legacies of former international glory, attitudes, and institutions derived from the days when Britain was at the center of the world economy, acting as a barrier to necessary change.
Some diagnoses have been primarily sociological.
As we have seen (Chapter 1), class did not displace status in British society.
Preindustrial aristocratic attitudes were carried over into an industrial age.
These attitudes included looking down on the pursuit of trade and commerce as somewhat inferior socially.
Low priority was given to industry and science and, so the analysis goes, a tendency grew for those with wealth and some ability to avoid management in favor of professional pursuits such as the law.
Some blame has also been imputed to the egalitarianism of the labor movement, harboring dislike of profits and risk-taking as well as the values of thrift and self-reliance that underpin the operation of the free market.
In short, the attitudes of both the social elite and the labor movement have served to hinder economic growth.
The other diagnoses are essentially political.
They are important in the context of later chapters and hence deserve some attention.
The historical background provided in this chapter helps us understand some of these diagnoses as well as some of the prescriptions.
The three main diagnoses are those of government overload, adversary politics, and pluralist stagnation.
Prescriptions have included decentralization, electoral reform and more radical economic policies.
The thesis of government overload is that as the responsibilities of government have increased, its capacity to meet them has decreased: the combination of these two features has resulted in an overloading of government.
A government White Paper in 1970 declared that government had been attempting to do too much.
&quot; This has placed an excessive burden on industry, and on the people of the country as a whole, and has also over-loaded the government machine itself...
The weakness has shown itself in the apparatus of policy formulation and in the quality of many government decisions over the past 25 years. &quot;
Some writers have argued that the problem of overload has been made worse by the centralization of government decision-making.
Centralized government, so the argument goes, has proved too large and too far removed from the problems with which it seeks to cope.
Distance from those affected by government decisions has had the effect of increasing their indifference and sense of alienation, especially in the economically disadvantaged regions furthest from London.
Government, according to the Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1973, was viewed as being too remote.
A compatible but independent thesis is that of adversary politics.
It contends that attempts to generate institutions capable of dealing with Britain's long-term economic problems are thwarted by a political system that encourages an adversary relationship between the two main political parties, one that enables them to alternate in office so that each undoes the work of the other.
The consequence, it is argued, is policy discontinuity, making it difficult if not impossible for industrialists and investors to plan ahead.
The adversary relationship also encourages a constant escalation of promises by the parties, each seeking to out-promise the other in order to win the all-or-nothing spoils of a general election victory.
When, as happened in the 1970s, the resources are no longer available to meet the promises made, disenchantment with the political system begins to develop.
Furthermore, the parties are unable to respond adequately to such developments because of an unwillingness to tamper with a system that works to their mutual advantage.
In short, Britain has a political system that is malfunctional and not amenable to radical reform.
Pluralist stagnation suggests that the problem lies with the growth of groups in British society, each group pursuing its own interest.
Those groups have brought pressure to bear on government to provide resources or pursue policies to the benefit of their members.
Such has been the economic leverage of some groups that the role of government has become increasingly one of arbiter between the demands of groups rather than one of policy leader.
The tendency of government to wish to avoid conflict has resulted in political inertia, government being unwilling to pursue policies that would generate sustained opposition from well-entrenched groups.
The problem has been made worse, according to Samuel Beer, by the numerical growth of such groups.
Because there are so many, self-restraint in making demands of government would bring no discernible benefit to any one group.
As a result, even though recognizing the need for restraint, a group is tempted to raise its own claims.
Other groups then compete to raise theirs.
&quot; The source of the problem, &quot; argues Beer, &quot; is not a lack of knowledge, but the structure of the situation, which continues to have compelling force even when participants recognise its tendencies.
Their numerical pluralism makes it difficult, if not impossible, to make and enforce a bargain, tacit or explicit, that would achieve moderation.
If there were only a few, each could know what the others were doing and all would be aware of being watched.
But pluralism destroys the basis for such a self-enforcing social contract. &quot;
For government the problem is thus an acute one.
It has fewer benefits to dispense than previously, yet is faced with a plethora of interests, each of which is unwilling to moderate its demands in the interests of all.
These constitute the main political analyses that see the problem as a structural one.
There are others that do not see it as structural.
The two largest parties in Britain, the Conservative and Labour parties, view Britain's problems as stemming from the pursuit in the past of inadequate policies (Chapter 6).
There are other analyses that go beyond the structural or policy analyses, providing somewhat more complex explanations.
The most important of these is that provided by Professor Beer in his recent work Britain Against Itself.
He argues that there is no single causal explanation for Britain's decline; rather, it has to be seen as resulting from a convergence of pluralist stagnation, a decline of class, and a revolt against authority.
The result has been fragmentation in political life.
&quot; The outcome has been incoherence and immobilism; drift, not mastery.
It is not hyperbole to call it a paralysis of public choice. &quot;
I shall return to these analyses in appropriate chapters, responding in particular to Beer's sophisticated analysis in the conclusion.
For the moment, two concluding points need to be made.
The first, rather obviously, is that no one approach is without its detractors.
Each approach has its limitations and these I shall seek to draw out at appropriate points in the text.
The second equally obvious point is that, given the disparate analyses, a variety of prescriptions have been offered for dealing with the presumed causes of the nation's ills.
Exponents of the government overload thesis tend to favor reform of central government machinery and decentralization of government.
Those who adhere to the adversary politics thesis support, for reasons that will be explained later, a reform of the electoral system.
Pluralist stagnation, according to Beer's analysis, can be overcome only by mobilizing popular consent through restoring trust in government.
For the Conservative and Labour parties the answer lies in (different) radical economic policies.
So wide are the analyses and the prescriptions that one is tempted to wonder whether the concept of pluralist stagnation might itself be applied to the political analysis of Britain's ills.
My own argument I will draw together in the conclusion.
For the moment, suffice it to say that I take a skeptical view of the structural analyses offered.
They are unproven and overexaggerated and they miss the essential point.
The problem is not primarily a structural one  structures are dependent variables.
The independent variable on which one has to focus is the political culture.
The political culture may have helped generate problems of political structure, but Britain's problems, I will argue, are not essentially political: they are economic and social.
And the political culture is one that provides government with the breathing space necessary to address itself to those problems.
Government may not succeed, but the opportunity is there and in order to understand that one has to understand the political culture and the extent to which it endures.
The decline in the culture detected by Beer is relative.
The orientations of the political culture identified in the preceding chapter remain.
I concluded that chapter by suggesting that the important question was not &quot; why had there been a decline in the civic culture, &quot; but rather &quot; why had that decline not been greater? &quot;
The answer to that question, and the implications of it for the British polity of the 1980s, will form the basis of the final chapter.
My conclusion will not necessarily be an optimistic one  it will emphasize potential rather than expectation  but it will lack the negative connotations attached to the foregoing analyses.
It will also forgo structural change as the primary prescriptions.
What is important is attitudes, not structures.
THE UNCODIFIED CONSTITUTION
A CONSTITUTION MAY BE DEFINED as a body of laws, customs, and conventions that define the composition and powers of organs of the state and that regulate the relations of the various state organs to one another and to the private citizen.
The United States has a constitution; so does the United Kingdom.
Expressed in purely formal terms (Table 4.1) there is very little similarity between them.
Indeed, the differences are such that to the student weaned on a study of the United States Constitution, the British Constitution is nearly incomprehensible.
Even to the student of British politics it is not well understood.
Nonetheless, the differences should not be emphasized to the exclusion of certain common features.
Both Constitutions are strong ones in that they reflect and reinforce their respective political cultures.
The United States Constitution is considered by Americans to embody the principles of a higher law, to constitute &quot; in fact imperfect man's most perfect rendering of what Blackstone saluted as &quot; the eternal immutable laws of good and evil, to which the creator himself in all his dispensations conforms: and which he has enabled human reason to discover, so far as they are necessary for the conduct of human actions. &quot;
As the embodiment of a higher law, it thus not only needs to be distinguished from ordinary law but also needs to be protected from the passing whims of politicians  hence the introduction of extraordinary procedures for its amendment.
By contrast, the British Constitution is admired by Britons for reflecting the wisdom of past generations, as the product of experience  in short, a constitution that stipulates what should be on the basis of what has proved to work rather than on abstract first principles.
The empirical orientation to change that underpins such a constitution also favors flexibility in amendment: as conditions change, so some amendment may be necessary.
Formal extraordinary procedures for its amendment have not been found necessary.
The differences in political culture have thus produced somewhat different constitutions, but the attachment to them is similar in the two countries.
Also, as we shall see, there are certain similarities in sources in the means of interpretation.
New nations from the eighteenth century onward have found it both necessary and useful to codify their constitutions.
At the time that the Founding Fathers promulgated the United States Constitution in Philadelphia, a written constitution was exceptional.
Today it is the norm.
Having lacked the opportunity to create a new constitutional framework afresh from first principles, Britain now stands out as one of the few nations lacking such a document.
FORMS OF EXPRESSION
The absence of a written constitution similar to that of the United States and other nations has led to the British Constitution being described as unwritten, but such a description is misleading.
As we shall see, various elements of the Constitution find expression in forma, written enactments.
What distinguishes the British Constitution from others is not that it is unwritten, but rather that it is part-written and uncodified.
The lack of codification is of especial importance.
It makes it difficult to identify clearly and authoritatively what constitute the provisions of the Constitution.
there are certain principles that are clearly at the heart of the Constitution, parliamentary sovereignty being the prime example, but there are many provisions, be they expressed through statute law or the writings of constitutional experts, that are of constitutional significance but on which there is no clear agreement that they form part of the British Constitution.
It is this lack of codified certainty that makes a study of it so fraught with difficulty.
Because one can not have recourse to one simple authoritative document to discover the provisions of the Constitution, one has instead to research four separate sources: statute law, common law, conventions, and works of authority.
Such sources are also relevant in analyses of the United States Constitution.
Congress may pass measures of constitutional significance, for example, certain stipulations of electoral law or the War Powers Act.
Provisions of the Constitution are developed and molded by judicial decisions.
In seeking to interpret the Constitution, the courts may have recourse to works by constitutional experts.
The difference between the two countries is that in Britain such sources are primary sources, and in the United States, the primary source is the written document.
SOURCES
Of the four sources, statute law is perhaps the best understood and nowadays, the most extensive.
It provides the main source for the part-written element of the Constitution.
It comprises acts of Parliament and subordinate legislation made under the authority of the parent act.
Many acts of Parliament that have been passed clearly merit the title of constitutional law.
Acts that define the powers of the various state organs (for example, the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts) and acts that define the relationship between Crown and Parliament (notably the Bill of Rights of 1689), between the component elements of the nation (the Act of Union with Scotland of 1706, for example), between the United Kingdom and the European Communities (the 1972 European Communities Act), and between the state and the individual (as with the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679 or the Administration of Justice Act of 1960) clearly constitute important provisions of the Constitution.
They are published in authoritative, written form and, as acts of Parliament, are interpreted by the courts.
This is the most important of the four sources both in quantitative and qualitative terms.
It has increasingly displaced common law as the most extensive form of law in Britain and it is the most definitive of the four.
It takes precedence over any conflicting common law and is superior to the conventions of the Constitutions and to works of authority.
It precedence derives from the concept of parliamentary sovereignty.
Common law constitutes the law and customs of ancient lineage that have been upheld as law by the courts in cases decided before them.
Once a court has upheld a provision as being part of common law it creates a precedent to be followed by other courts.
In past centuries, when few statutes were enacted, common law constituted the main body of English law; today, it has been largely but not wholly displaced by statute law.
Certain principles derived from common law remain fundamental to the Constitution, and these include the principle of parliamentary sovereignty.
Under the heading of common law comes also prerogative powers  the powers and privileges recognized by common law as belonging to the monarch.
Although many prerogative powers have been displaced by statute, many matters at the heart of government are still determined under the authority of the prerogative.
These include the appointment of ministers, the making of treaties, and power of pardon, the dispensing of honors, and the declaration of war.
By convention, such powers are normally exercised formally by the monarch on the advice of ministers (the ministers, in practice, take the decisions).
There is no formal requirement that Parliament assent to such decisions.
This is in stark contrast to the position in the United States, where Congress alone has the formal power to declare war and the Senate's consent is necessary for the ratification of treaties and the appointment of federal public officers.
(In practice, the differences are not that great: &quot; presidential wars &quot; have been waged without a congressional declaration of war, while in Britain a government taking military action abroad will seek the consent of Parliament.)
In 1972, the Treaty of Accession to the European Communities was signed under prerogative powers.
IN 1982, a naval task force was despatched to the Falkland Islands under the same authority.
Although diminishing in number, prerogative powers clearly remain of great importance.
Generally included under the generic heading of common law is the judicial interpretation of statute law.
Unlike those in the United States, British courts have no power to hold a measure unconstitutional.
They are limited to the interpretation of provisions of acts of Parliament.
Even in exercising their power of interpretations, they are limited by rules of interpretation and by precedent.
(The exception is the House of Lords, the highest domestic court of appeal, which is not now bound by its previous decisions.)
Nonetheless, judges retain the power to distinguish cases and by their interpretation they can develop a substantial body of case law.
In interpreting acts of Parliament, they assume Parliament to have meant what, on the face of it, the words of an act appear to mean.
Unlike the United States Supreme Court, which can delve deep into the deliberations of the Founding Fathers to try to elucidate what was meant by a particular provision of the Constitution, British courts are not permitted to look at the proceedings of Parliament in order to determine what Parliament really meant.
The third and least tangible source of the Constitution is that of convention.
Conventions of the Constitution are most aptly described as rules that are considered binding by and upon those who are responsible for making the Constitution work, but rules that are not enforced by the courts or by the presiding officers in either house of Parliament.
They derive their strength from the realization that not to abide by them would make for an unworkable constitution.
They are, so to speak, the oil in the forma machinery of the Constitution.
They help fill the gap between the constitutional formality and the political reality.
For example, ministers are responsible formally to the monarch.
Because of the political changes wrought in the nineteenth century, they are by convention responsible now also to Parliament.
By convention, the government of the day resigns or requests a dissolution if a motion of no confidence is carried against it in the House of Commons.
By convention, the monarch gives the Royal Assent to all legislative measures approved by Parliament.
The last time a monarch refused assent was during the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714).
Queen Victoria in the nineteenth century contemplated refusing her assent to a measure but wiser counsels prevailed.
No formal, authoritative documents set forth these rules, and they find no embodiment in statute law.
The courts may recognize them, but the courts have no power to enforce them.
They are complied with because of the recognition of what would happen if they were not complied with.
For the Queen to refuse her assent to a measure passed by the two Houses of Parliament would draw her into the realms of political controversy, hence jeopardizing the claim of the monarch to be &quot; above politics. &quot;
A government that sought to remain in office after losing a vote of confidence in the House of Commons would find its position politically intenable: it would lack the political authority to govern.
For ministers to ignore Parliament completely would prove equally untenable.
Some conventions may be described as being stronger than others.
Some on occasion are breached, while others are adhered to without exception.
On three occasions in this century, the convention of collective ministerial responsibility has been suspended temporarily by the prime minister of the day.
In contrast, no government has sought to remain in office after losing a parliamentary vote of confidence.
The point at which a useful and necessary practice is accorded the status of a constitutional convention is not clear.
Once a practice has become well established in terms of the relationship within or between different organs of the state, finding recognition in works of authority and by those involved in its operation, then it may be said to have reached the status of a convention.
At any one time, though, there are a number of relationships that may be said to be in a constitutional haze.
Is it a convention of the Constitution that the government of the day must consult with interested bodies before formulating a legislative measure for presentation to Parliament?
Prime Minister Harold Wilson appeared to give some credence to this view in 1966 when he said in the House of Commons that it was the duty of the government to consult with the Trades Union Congress and the Confederation of British Industry.
Few other authorities have supported Jennings' assertion and it has not found acceptance by most practitioners of government.
It is usual for governments to engage in such consultation, but it is not yet a convention of the Constitution that they do so.
The fourth and final source of the Constitution is that of works of authority.
These have persuasive authority only.
What constitutes a &quot; work of authority &quot; is rarely defined.
Various early works are accorded particular standing by virtue of the absence of statutes or other written sources covering a particular area.
The statements of their writers are presumed to be evidence of judicial decisions that have been lost and are therefore accepted if not contrary to reason.
Among the most important early sources are Fitzherbert's Abridgment (1516) and Coke's Institutes of the Law of England (1628-1644).
More recent works have been called in aid on those occasions when jurists and others have sought to delineate features of the contemporary Constitution; this has been the case especially in determining the existence or otherwise of conventions.
Such conventions are prescribed neither by statute nor by judicial interpretation, so one must study instead scholarly interpretations of political behaviour and practice.
Especially important authoritative works in the nineteenth century were those by John Austin and A. V. Dicey.
Important names in the twentieth century have included Sir Ivor Jennings, Sir Kenneth Wheare, O. Hood Phillips, and E. C. S. Wade.
Given the disparate sources of the Constitution and the fact that important relationships within and between organs of the state are not laid down in any one formal or binding document, it is not surprising that one must have recourse to books by constitutional scholars to discover the extent and nature of those relationships.
Works of authority tend to be consulted more frequently in the field of constitutional law than in any other branch of English law.
Given the disparate primary sources of the Constitution and the difficulty in determining where the Constitution begins and ends, it is perhaps not surprising that there are no extraordinary procedures for its amendment.
Statute and common law of constitutional significance are subject to amendment by the same process as that employed for other legislative enactments.
Conventions can be modified by changes in behaviour or by reinterpretations of the significance of certain behaviour.
Works of authority can be rewritten or subjected to different interpretations in the same way as can other texts.
MEANS OF AMENDMENT
Much the same can be said about constitutionally significant statute law, judicial decisions, and works of authority in the United States.
Even the provisions of the formal document, the United States Constitution, may be amended by judicial decisions and custom usage.
The difference between the two countries is that the formal wording of the United States Constitution can be amended only by an extraordinary process, i.e., one that goes beyond the provisions employed for amending the ordinary law.
(Because of the extraordinary procedures necessary for amendment, the provisions of the Constitution are sometimes referred to as &quot; entrenched. &quot;)
No such formal amending procedures exist in Britain, where there is no formal document.
As may be surmised from the foregoing, there is no single body endowed with the responsibility for interpreting the provisions of the Constitution.
As in the United States, statute and common law are subject to judicial interpretation, but there is no power of judicial review, at least not as the term is understood in the United States.
The courts can not declare a legislative measure or an executive action contrary to the provisions of the Constitution.
INTERPRETATION
The courts can influence and to some extent mold certain provisions through their interpretation of statute and common law.
Indeed, their use of common law has been of especial importance in outlining and protecting certain rights of the individual.
However, at the end of the day, they are subject to the wishes of Parliament.
Judicial interpretation of statute law can be overridden by a new act of Parliament.
By virtue of the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, the act would be definitive.
The judges serve to enforce and interpret such acts: they can not strike down an act.
Identification and interpretation of conventions has little to do with the courts.
Conventions arise as a result of changes in the relationships within and between different organs of the state.
Their delineation rests with scholars, and their enforcement rests with those at whom they are aimed.
As with conventions, they are beyond the purview of the courts.
The Constitution, in short, is subject to interpretation by different bodies, the most prominent being politicians, judges, and scholars.
The same can be said of the United States Constitution, but in Britain there is no body that stands in a position analogous to that of the United States Supreme Court.
It is an important difference, reflecting the differences in political culture.
The Lockean basis of constitutional interpretation in the United States -a higher law cognizable by independent, rational magistrates operating free of outside interests  finds no parallel in Britain.
The central provisions of the Constitution are listed in Table 4.1: parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, a unitary (as opposed to a federal) system, and what I have termed parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy.
Although there is some dispute as to whether it should remain so, the preeminent provision is that of parliamentary sovereignty.
In the nineteenth century, the great constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey identified it as being one of the two main pillars of the Constitution, the other being that of the rule of law.
Dicey's work has had a major and lasting impact.
Despite subsequent criticisms, the two pillars identified by Dicey still stand.
While some critics have considered them weak and unnecessary pillars, supporting a crumbing edifice, they remain crucial to an understanding of the British Constitution.
MAIN PROVISIONS
The most succinct definition of parliamentary sovereignty was offered by Dicey.
Parliamentary sovereignty, he wrote, meant that Parliament had &quot; the right to make or unmake any law whatever; and, further, that no person or body is recognized by the law of England as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament. &quot;
An act passed by Parliament would be enforced by the courts, the courts recognizing no body other than Parliament as having authority to override such an act.
Parliament itself could substitute an act for an earlier one.
One of the precepts derived from the principle is that Parliament is not bound by its predecessors.
Once Parliament has passed an act, it becomes the law of the land.
It is not open to challenge before the courts on the grounds of being unconstitutional.
Although Dicey claimed more ancient lineage for it, the principle of parliamentary sovereignty became established as a judicial rule in consequence of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and subsequent Bill of Rights, which established the relationship between the Crown and Parliament (see Chapter 3).
It was the product of an alliance between Parliament and lawyers and of the intimidation of judges by the House of Commons.
Assertion of the principle served to do away with the monarch's previously claimed powers to suspend or dispense with acts of Parliament and it served to deny judges the power to strike down measures.
It came to occupy a unique place in constitutional law.
The principle finds no expression in statute or any other formal enactment.
It exists in common law but enjoys a special status beyond that enjoyed by other principles of common law.
Its underpinnings are not only legal but also political and historical.
It is now too late to challenge the principle.
Judicial obedience to it constitutes what H. W. R. Wade referred to as &quot; the ultimate political fact upon which the whole system of legislation hangs. &quot;
No statute can confer the power of parliamentary sovereignty, for that would be to confer the very power being acted upon.
It is therefore considered to be unique.
As Hood Phillips states, &quot; It may indeed be called the one fundamental law of the British Constitution. &quot;
The second pillar identified by Dicey was that of &quot; the rule of law. &quot;
Identifying what is meant by the term is extremely difficult.
Few students of the constitution would deny the important of the tenet.
Dicey himself argued that it comprised &quot; at least three distinct though kindred conceptions &quot;: &quot; That no man is punishable or can be lawfully made to suffer in body or goods except for a distinct breach of law established in the ordinary legal manner before the ordinary courts of the land &quot;; that &quot; no man is above the law [ and ] every man, whatever be his rank or condition, is subject to the ordinary law of the realm and amenable to the jurisdiction of the ordinary tribunals &quot;; and that &quot; the general principles of the constitution [ are ] the result of judicial decisions determining the rights of private persons in particular cases brought before the courts. &quot;
These three conceptions have been subject to various criticisms: that many of the discretionary powers are vested in officials and public bodies, that many officials and bodies have powers and immunities that the ordinary citizen does not have, and that certain rights have been modified by or enacted in statute.
Further it is not clear why Dicey's third conception should be considered &quot; kindred &quot; to the other two.
Some students of the Constitution find Dicey's analysis useful, ad others tend to be dismissive.
The important point for our purposes is that there is no agreed definition.
The rule of law, then, stands as a central element of the British Constitution, but no one is sure precisely what it means.
There is some common ground in that it is assumed to imply certain substantive and procedural rights, government must be subject to the law, and the judiciary must be independent.
The problem is one of determining what those rights are, how they are to be protected, and how the independence of the judiciary is to be maintained.
There is a further problem.
The concept of the rule of law is not logically compatible with that of parliamentary sovereignty.
Parliament could if it so wishes confer arbitrary powers upon government.
It could fetter the independence of the judiciary.
It could limit or remove altogether certain rights presumed to exist at common law.
The rule of law, in short, could be threatened or even dispensed with by parliamentary enactment.
Dicey himself recognized this problem and sought to resolve it.
He argued, in essence, that the rule of law prevented government from exercising arbitrary powers.
If government wanted such powers, it could obtain them only through Parliament (Parliament itself has never sought to exercise executive powers) and the granting of them could take place only after deliberation and approval by the triumvirate of monarch, Lords, and Commons.
Such an argument serves to explain potential impediments to a government intent on acquiring arbitrary powers.
It does not deny the truth of the assertion that Parliament could, if it wished, confer such powers upon government.
Indeed, many observers would argue that given the growth of cabinet government, the potential for government to seek and receive such powers is significantly greater now than was the case at the time when Dicey was writing.
For many critics of the existing Constitution, parliamentary sovereignty no longer constitutes an encouragement to the rule of law but rather exists as an impediment to its attainment.
So long as parliamentary sovereignty remains &quot; the one fundamental law &quot; of the Constitution, there is no way in which substantive rights can be entrenched and put beyond the reach of Parliament.
The third feature of the Constitution that I have listed  that the United Kingdom is a unitary state  is a less difficult one to comprehend.
The United States is a federal nation.
The power vested in the federal government is that delegated in the United States Constitution: all other powers not delegated rest with the states or the people.
In the United Kingdom, no powers are reserved to national or regional bodies.
If they were, Parliament would not be omnicompetent.
Parliament exercises legal sovereignty.
It can confer certain powers and responsibilities upon regional and local authorities, and it can also remove those powers.
The unitary nation is that of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Wales was integrated with England in 1536 by act of Parliament (the Laws in Wales Act), and Scotland and England were incorporated in 1707 by the Treaty of Union and by the Act of Union with Scotland.
Ireland entered into legislative union in 1801.
Following an armed uprising, the emergence of the Irish Free State was recognized in 1922 and given the status of a self-governing dominion.
(The Irish Constitution of 1937 declared the country to be a sovereign independent state, a position recognized by the Westminster Parliament in 1949).
Excluded from the Irish Free State were the northern six counties of Ireland, forming part of the traditional region of Ulster.
The Protestant majority in Ulster wished to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the province of Northern Ireland has so remained.
The fourth element of the constitution is one that I have described as a parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy.
It is this element that is especially important in terms of the current relationships among the different organs of the state and the one in which conventions of the Constitution are predominant.
It constitutes an assembly of different relationships and powers, the product of traditional institutions being adapted to meet changing circumstances.
The developments producing this form of government were sketched in Chapter 3.
The results, as we have seen, were parliamentary government in the sense of government through Parliament rather than government by Parliament, with a largely ceremonial head of state.
The essentials of this form of government may be adumbrated as follows.
In the relationship among government, Parliament, and the monarch, the government dominates.
Although lacking formal powers, the cabinet is recognized by convention as being at the heart of government.
It is responsible for the final determination of policy to be submitted to Parliament, for the supreme control of the national executive in accordance with the policy prescribed by Parliament, and for the continuous coordination and delimitation of the interests of the several departments of state.
It is presided over by the prime minister.
The prime minister is appointed by the monarch.
By convention, the monarch summons the leader of the party with a majority of seats in the House of Commons.
(In the event of a party having no overall majority, the monarch summons whoever he or she believed may be able to form an administration).
The prime minister then selects the members of his or her cabinet and other government ministers and submits their names to the monarch who, by convention, does not deny the prime minister's choice.
By convention, ministers are drawn from Parliament and, again by convention, predominantly from the elected house, the House of Commons.
Although the government is no longer chosen by the Commons, it nonetheless is elected through the House of Commons: there is no separate election of the executive.
There is a separation and overlap of powers between the government and the House of Commons in Britain but no equivalent separation of personnel.
Government ministers are drawn from, and remain within, Parliament.
Formally, ministers are responsible to the monarch.
By convention, they are responsible for their policies and actions to Parliament.
Ministers are responsible to Parliament through the convention of individual ministerial responsibility which assigns to them control of their departments, for which they are answerable to Parliament.
The cabinet is similarly responsible to Parliament through the convention of collective ministerial responsibility.
This convention, one scholar writes, &quot; implies that all cabinet ministers assume responsibility for cabinet decisions and actions taken to implement those decisions. &quot;
It also has begotten two other conventions.
It is a corollary of collective responsibility that any minister who disagrees publicly with a cabinet decision should resign and that a government defeat in the House of Commons on a vote of confidence necessitates either the resignation of the government or a request for a dissolution (there is no convention as to which of these alternatives the government should select).
Party cohesion ensures that the cabinet usually enjoys a parliamentary majority, but political parties remain unknown to the Constitution.
The cabinet approves government bills to be presented to Parliament.
(In drawing up measures, it is aided primarily by its officials  that is, civil servants  and will consult normally with interested bodies: such consultation, though, enjoys no formal recognition in constitutional terms.)
Within Parliament, the most important house is the Commons.
The House is expected to submit bills to sustained scrutiny and debate before giving its assent to them (or not giving its assent to them, but the influence of party usually precludes such an outcome).
Formally, the House is free to pass or reject bills as it wishes.
The House of Lords is more constrained (see Chapter 3); it was forced to accept a restricted role under the terms of the 1911 and 1949 Parliament Acts.
Under the provisions of the 1911 Act (a measure to which the Lords acquiesced under threat of being swamped with a mass of new Liberal pro-reform peers), the House could delay passage of nonmoney bills for only two successive sessions, such bills being enacted if passed by the Commons again the succeeding session.
Money bills, those certified as such by the Speaker of the House of Commons, were to receive the Royal Assent one month after leaving the Commons, whether assented to by the House of Lords or not.
The only significant power of veto retained was that over bills to prolong the life of a Parliament.
(The delaying power over nonmoney bills was reduced by a further session under the terms of the 1949 Parliament Act, itself passed under the provisions of the 1911 Act.)
In practice, it is rare for the Lords to reject government measures, and there is a gentleman's agreement among the parties in the House that a bill promised in a government's election manifesto should be given an unopposed Second Reading (see Chapter 11).
Once a bill has received the assent of both Houses it then goes to the monarch for the Royal Assent.
By convention, this assent is always forthcoming.
As already mentioned, not since Queen Anne's reign has a monarch refused assent.
Queen Victoria contemplated such refusal but was persuaded otherwise.
By convention, the Queen exercises her powers on the advice of her ministers.
In certain extreme circumstances, Her Majesty may find herself in a position in which she is called on to use her discretion in making a political decision.
Such cases are rare, though the Queen would probably prefer them to be nonexistent.
The strength and the value of the contemporary monarchy derives from being above and avoiding political decisions.
The moment a bill receives the Royal Assent it becomes an act of Parliament.
It is then enforced and upheld by the agencies of the state.
It is binding and, by virtue of the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, can not be challenged by the courts, nor can it be overridden by any other authority.
The development of a form of representative democracy in the nineteenth century led Dicey to distinguish between legal sovereignty, which continued to reside with the triumvirate of the monarch, Lords, and Commons, and political sovereignty, which he deemed to rest with the electorate.
This somewhat clumsy distinction has a certain utility.
The electorate may have the power to choose the members of the House of Commons but the will of the electorate is not something formally recognized by the courts.
The courts recognize and will enforce only acts of Parliament.
Under the provision of the 1911 Parliament Act, the maximum life of a Parliament is five years.
(Previously, the period was seven years.)
Within that period, the prime minister is free to recommend to the monarch a dissolution  in effect, to call a general election.
Unlike the United States, Britain has no fixed-term elections at a national level.
The ability of a prime minister effectively to call a general election has been regarded by some writers as the most important weapon in ensuring parliamentary support.
The prime minister can threaten to recommend a dissolution if he or she does not receive the necessary support to get a measure through.
Such a threat may constitute a bluff in that the prime minister would have more to lose if an election was called than would most MPs (the PM could lose office: most seats are safe seats and so most MPs could expect to be reelected), but nonetheless it has proved a potent influence in determining parliamentary behaviour.
It would be exceptional, albeit not unknown, for MPs of the government party to vote against their own side on a vote of confidence.
No government in the twentieth century has lost a vote of confidence as a result of dissent by its own supporters  hence the dominance of government.
In summary, then, the fourth element of the Constitution  parliamentary government under a constitutional monarch  may be seen to comprise different relationships and powers.
These relationships and powers are the product of traditional institutions being adapted to meet changing circumstances and are prescribed by a variety of measures of statute and common law and by convention.
The working of the various relationships within the framework established by law and convention is made possible by the operation of bodies not formally recognized by the Constitution, namely political parties.
To understand contemporary British politics, one has to understand the constitutional framework.
As we shall see, to understand British politics fully one has also to go beyond that framework.
The shifting and complex web of relationships and powers that forms the British Constitution is not an easily discernible one.
There are some powers and relationships that recognizably fall within the rubric of the Constitution.
Others are less easy to classify.
Sometimes a feature of the Constitution is discerned as such only at the time when it has just ceased to have much relevance.
Walter Bagehot's The English Constitution, published in 1867, constituted a classic description of a Constitution that had not previously been so well sketched, yet a Constitution that was to undergo significant modifications as a result of the passage that very year of the Second Reform Act.
Bagehot's work continued to be regarded as an authoritative work long after the Constitution had undergone fundamental change.
CONCLUSION
Grasping the essentials of the Constitution at any given moment is clearly a demanding and confusing task.
It is confusing even to those charged with its interpretation and to those who seek to make it work.
To the student of the subject, the British Constitution appears complex, confusing, ill defined, and in many respects amorphous.
Such a reaction is both natural and understandable: the Constitution does exhibit those very characteristics.
At the heart of the difficulty of delineating clearly the essential features of the Constitution is its ever-changing nature.
Constitutional norms serve to influence and mold political behaviour.
Conversely, political behaviour helps influence the contours of the Constitution.
As we have seen, such changes are made possible by the assimilating influence of conventions.
&quot; The conventions of the constitution, &quot; as Professor LeMay observed, &quot; have meaning only when they are looked at against a background of continuous political change.
It is very difficult to say with certainty what they were at any particular moment.
Above all, they can not be understood &quot; with the politics left out. &quot; &quot;
The Constitution has proved adaptable to changing political conditions.
In recent years, however, its relevance has been questioned.
The patchwork quilt of powers and relationships stipulated by the Constitution has been criticized for being neither useful nor relevant in the political environment of the 1970s and 1980s.
There is, as we shall see, pressure from many influential sources for the Constitution not only to be further amended but also to be radically altered.
In some cases there are calls for a new constitutional settlement.
It is this pressure for change and its implications that subsequent chapters will explore.
THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM
Fair and Workable?
IN THE UNITED STATES, citizens are presented with the opportunity to go to the polls at frequent and fixed intervals to elect at national, state, and local levels a host of legislators, executive heads, councilpersons, officials, and even, in some states, judges.
It has been estimated that there are approximately 1 million elective offices to be filled.
In any given year there may be 120,000 or 130,000 elections held, most of them for local school boards.
Before polling day, the citizen is faced with a lengthy election campaign: there are primary campaigns, the primary elections, the general election campaign, and the general election itself.
The presidential election campaign lasts for nearly a year; with all the preplanning, advance publicity, and fund raising it lasts for much longer.
Given the short interval between elections, campaigns for the United States House of Representatives are virtually continuous.
Once in the polling booth, the voter is faced with a daunting array of candidates: given the number of offices to be filled and the number of people seeking to fill them, the number of names may be a three-figure one.
Voting and its subsequent tabulation is much eased by the use of voting machines.
Choosing between Republican and Democratic candidates is not always an easy task, and ticket splitting is a well-recognized phenomenon.
Such characteristics of United States elections are well known.
They have little in common with those of British elections.
In the United Kingdom, a citizen may have the opportunity to vote in a national election only once every five years.
That election is for the House of Commons and the House of Commons alone.
The members of the House of Lords are not elected: they serve by virtue of birth or, for life peers, by appointment for life.
There is no separate election of the executive: the leader of the party with a majority of seats in the House of Commons is invited to form a government.
(The choice of party leaders is a matter for the parties themselves.)
The date of an election is now known until a few weeks before the event, when the prime minister recommends a dissolution of Parliament to the Queen.
Although there is much anticipatory planning, the election campaign proper extends over approximately three weeks.
There are no primaries: candidate selection is an internal matter for the parties.
As we shall see, there are also significant differences in registration procedures.
The campaign is fought on a national, and party, basis.
Funding and organization in the constituencies as well as nationally is undertaken by the established parties, not by individual candidates or campaign organizations created by the candidates.
The amount of money spent on electioneering during this period is strictly limited by law.
On polling day, the elector is faced with a small ballot slip on which are printed the names usually of only three or four candidates (Six or more candidates standing in any one constituency would be unusual.)
The voter places his or her cross besides the name of one of them.
With each elector having only one vote to cast for only one candidate there is no such thing as ticket splitting.
At the close of polling, the votes are collected in one central area in each constituency and counted by hand.
The process of counting is a proficient one and a sufficient number of results are usually announced within a few hours of the close of the polls to know which party has won the election.
If the party in office has lost the prime minister goes to Buckingham Palace to tender his or her resignation.
The leader of the party newly returned with a majority of seats is then summoned.
The new cabinet and other ministerial appointments are announced within a matter of days, sometimes within a matter of hours.
Within a month of an election being called, Britain may find itself with a new government.
An elector in Britain has more opportunity to vote in local elections than in national ones.
These are fixed terms and the elector has the chance to vote for members of councils at district and county (or metropolitan) levels and sometimes at parish level as well.
However, only council members (councillors) are elected; no executive officers are subject to election.
Councils choose their own chairmen and the chief administrative officials are appointed professionals.
There is no election of any local official, be it police chief, register of wills, city auditor, or judge.
The one similarity between local elections in Britain and the United States is the turnout: it is very low, in some instances as low as 10% of eligible electors.
The essential characteristics of national elections in the United States and Britain are contrasted in Table 5.1.
Let us consider in a little more detail some of the main features of British elections (in other words, election of the House of Commons) before proceeding to a consideration of the current controversy surrounding the electoral system.
As we have seen (Chapter 3), the franchise was variously extended in the nineteenth century.
The basis on which the vote was given was that of property.
Not until 1918 was universal manhood suffrage introduced on the basis of (six months') residence.
In the same year, women aged 30 and over, if already local government electors or married to such electors, were given a vote in general elections.
The vote was extended to all women aged 21 and over in 1928.
It was extended to 18- to 20-year-olds in 1969.
The various extensions of the franchise during the course of the century, much more radical in numerical terms than the various extensions of the previous century, and the growth in population have resulted in the electorate growing from one of 6,730,935 in 1900 to one of 42,703,019 in 1983.
The 1949 Representation of the People Act effectively brought to final fruition the principle of &quot; one person one vote. &quot;
The only people excluded from the franchise are peers (they have their own House), imprisoned criminals, those of unsound mind, people convicted of certain election offences, and aliens.
THE ELECTORAL STRUCTURE
Electors
In order to exercise one's right to vote it is necessary to be on the electoral register, which is compiled annually.
Each year every household receives an electoral registration form.
The head of the household is required by law to complete it and to list all those who are resident in the dwelling on October 10 of that year and are eligible for inclusion, including those who will attain the age of 18 years during the period that the new register comes into effect.
These forms are returned by mail to the Registration Officer for the Constituency.
The register then compiled is open for inspection once compiled, which takes effect the following February, and is in force for one year.
Electors who move to another constituency during the course of the year are entitled to apply to vote by post in the constituency in which they are registered.
Compared with registration practice in most American states, the British method is both simple and effective.
Given that people die, sometimes fail to complete the registration forms correctly, or move without applying for a postal vote, the electoral register is never 100% accurate.
However, it has been estimated that it is 93% accurate when published, declining to 85% accuracy on the last day of validity.
In registration there is no procedure analogous to the American practice of registering as a Republican, Democrat, or Independent: given the absence of primary elections in Britain, there is no logical reason why one should.
The United Kingdom is divided into single-member constituencies.
There are currently 650, though the number can and does vary.
From 1974 until 1983 there were 635, and at one time earlier in this century there were over 700.
Constituencies
The drawing of boundaries is the responsibility of bodies known as boundary commissions: there is a commission each for England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Each commission is chaired by the Speaker of the House of Commons (a nonparty figure) and each has a judge as deputy chairman.
Assistant commissioners, usually lawyers, are appointed to supervize local inquiries, and the staff of the commissions includes the country's main officials dealing with population and geographic surveys.
In redrawing boundaries the commissions are guided by rules laid down by act of Parliament.
They are supposed to ensure that constituencies are as equal as possible in size of their electorates.
However, they are permitted to deviate from this if special geographic considerations (for example, the size, shape, and accessibility of a constituency) appear to render such a deviation desirable.
Other rules further complicate the position.
The commissioners are enjoined not to cross local authority boundaries in creating parliamentary constituencies.
They also have to work within the context of regional disparities.
To compensate for the absence of its own national assembly.
Scot land has a great number of constituencies allocated to it than its population strictly allows, and the same exception applies to Wales.
Hence, the electoral quota (the national electorate divided by the number of seats) is greater in England than in Scotland or Wales.
Under existing legislation, the commissioners are required to review electoral boundaries every 10-15 years.
(It used to be at more frequent intervals, but this was found to be too disruptive.)
Before making their recommendations, the commissioners consider submissions from interested bodies, primarily the local political parties.
If a proposed change has the support of the local parties, it is usual for the commissioners to accept it.
Once they have completed their work, their recommendations are presented to a government minister, the home secretary, who is then required to lay them before the House of Commons for approval.
They are rarely free of criticism, and in 1969 the Labour home secretary advised his supporters in the House to vote against the commission's recommendations, which they did.
As a result, the 1970 general election was not fought on the basis of the new boundaries recommended by the boundary commissioners.
The recommendations were implemented in the new Parliament.
The next review by the commission was completed in 1982 and challenged in the courts by the Labour party.
It contended that the commissioners had acted outside the terms of the act by giving undue weight to some of the criteria for determining boundaries as against others.
(There were some notable disparities in constituency sizes.)
The courts determined that the commissioners had exercised properly the wide discretion given them by Parliament and rejected the case.
The commission's recommendations were subsequently approved by Parliament and the 1983 general election was fought on the new boundaries.
A combination of population shifts (about three-quarters of a million people move house every year in Britain), the disparity among constituency electorates recommended by the commissioners in favor of other criteria (maintaining local government boundaries and the like), the lapse of time between reviews, ad the disparity in the number of seats allocated to the different countries in the United Kingdom has meant that there are often marked differences among the sizes of electorates.
In 1979, the electoral quota for English constituencies was a little under 70,000.
The constituency of Bromsgrove and Redditch (constituencies are given names, not numbers) had an electorate of 104,375, while Newcastle-upon-Tyne Central had an electoral register of but 23,678.
(The smallest electorate was in Scotland  Glasgow Central, with 19,826 electors.)
Even after the redrawing of boundaries in 1983, there were still some significant disparities.
Of the seats, 5% deviated from the electoral quota by 20% (though this was down from the 39% of seats that had deviated by that much on the 1982 register.)
The Isle of Wight, an English constituency, had an electorate of 94,768, while the Scottish constituency of the Western Isles, difficult to enlarge for geographic reasons, had but 22,901 electors.
Election campaigns are short, sharp, and dominated by the political parties.
In British elections, unlike those in America, the personalities of candidates (except for national leaders) and their personal wealth play but a marginal role.
The campaign is fought in practice on a national level between the two main parties, the candidates and the local campaigns serving to reinforce the national campaigns of their leaders.
Candidates are selected locally by the parties, and the parties provide the finance and the organization for the campaign.
Election expenses are limited by statute and have been since 1883.
Expenditure is permitted only where authorized by a candidate, a candidate's election agent, or a person authorized in writing by the agent.
The maximum permitted expenditure is calculated on the basis of a fixed sum plus a limited amount based on the number of electors: in an average-sized English county constituency in 1983, the ceiling was approximately 4,700 (just over $7,000).
There are certain types of expenditure that are illegal (for example, paying an elector to exhibit an election poster or paying for voters to be taken to and from the polling booths), and separate committees to promote a candidate are not permitted.
Even with the modest expenditure that is permitted, most candidates fail to spend the maximum allowed.
Some devices for keeping costs low are employed and these can, where required, provide up to an extra 20% of expenditure: a popular ploy is to purchase stationery in advance and then resell it cheaply to the candidate as second-hand stock.
Few candidates, though, are prepared to run too many risks for fear of having their elections challenged and declared void: expenses have to be declared and opponents keep a wary eye open for any infringement of election law.
Two other constraints also operate: the parties have difficulty raising sufficient money to fight campaigns (national and local appeals are common when an election is in the offing) and there is little evidence that increased expenditure in local campaigns necessarily helps win elections.
Campaigns
Each candidate is permitted one postage-free mailing of one piece of election literature.
Other literature is distributed by the unpaid party activists.
The main item of literature is the candidate's election address.
This will usually incorporate a summary of the main points of the party's national election manifesto.
The candidate will spend most the campaign making speeches throughout the constituency, not infrequently at thinly attended meetings, and canvassing door to door where possible.
He or she will be aided by volunteers who do doorstep canvassing to try to determine where supporters live: on election day they will keep a running tab on who has voted in order to ensure that support is maximized.
The main focus of the campaign is a national one.
The party leaders will make regular and well-publicized appearances throughout the country, ensuring that the national press and television reporters follow in their wake as well as holding daily press conferences.
The national party organizations increasingly make use also of press and poster advertising.
As long as expenditure can not be said to apply in support of specific candidates, national party campaigns do not fall foul of the election finance restrictions.
In the 1979 election the Labour and Conservative national party organizations are estimated to have each spent a little over 1 million pounds on the campaign, roughly the same amount expended in total by their candidates in the local campaigns.
The largest single item of expenditure was advertising.
The parties enjoyed also the benefit of free but limited television time.
Paid political advertising on television is not allowed: each party is allocated a set number of 10-minute party political broadcasts that are transmitted on all television channels.
The allocation of the number of broadcasts to the parties is a somewhat contentious one.
The broadcasts themselves are often regarded by voters as the least appetizing part of election campaigns.
The basis of the parties' appeal to the country is the election manifestos that they issue.
In recent elections, these have become increasingly lengthy and specific documents, detailing the intended policies and measures to be pursued by a party if returned to office.
They constitute a topic of some controversy.
It has been argued that very few electors usually read them and that many of the commitments made do not enjoy widespread support among voters, even among those voting for the parties that issued them.
They are also viewed by some observers as hostages for the future, parties in office being perceived as often doing the reverse of what was promised in their manifestos.
In practice, they constitute something of as guide to interested bodies ad provide a framework for the main items of legislation introduced by an incoming government in the first session or two of a new Parliament: most manifesto promises are usually implemented.
A more relevant criticism is that manifesto promises may not address themselves to the country's real problems.
Some would argue that, by virtue of the manner of their compilation and their utilization as a means of furthering the adversary relationship between the parties, manifestos add to those problems rather than offering solutions.
Any citizen aged 21 years or over is eligible to be a candidate for election to the House of Commons.
There are certain limited exceptions.
Precluded from serving in the House of Commons are those who are disqualified from voting, as well as policemen, civil servants, judges, members of the boards of nationalized industries, undischarged bankrupts, members of the armed services, and clergy of the Churches of England, Scotland, Ireland, and the Roman Catholic Church.
The exclusion of public servants has an acceptable rationale to reinforce it; they are free to resign their positions should they wish to stand for election.
The exclusion of certain clergy is less easy to justify (a relic of the time when religious disputes were at the heart of national affairs), as is the exclusion of 18- to 20-year-olds: when the voting age was lowered in 1969, the age of eligibility for candidature was not.
To be a candidate one has to obtain the signature of 10 electors in the constituency and submit a deposit of 150 (approximately $225), returnable in the event of receiving one-eighth of the votes cast.
In Britain, unlike the United States, there are no residence requirements: hence, parties enjoy a wider range of choice in the selection of candidates.
Candidates
In practice, candidates are party candidates.
As a result of an innovation introduced in 1969, this is now more formally recognized: candidates are permitted to include their party designation on the ballot paper.
It is generally assumed that an individual candidate has little influence on voting behavior: party is the decisive factor, though the candidate can have some impact.
In the 1979 and 1983 elections there were examples of locally popular candidates holding their marginal seats against the national swing.
Indeed, in the marginal constituency of Ipswich, the Labour MP was elected on both occasions despite the national swing in favor of the Conservatives.
Such instances remain rare, and party remains the primary and almost exclusive influence.
Virtually all constituencies (the exceptions are in Northern Ireland) are contested by Conservative and Labour candidates.
In the general elections of the 1970s, the Liberal party regularly contested more than 500 seats (indeed, over 600 in October 1974), and in the 1983 election the Social Democratic/Liberal Alliance fielded candidates in all 633 seats in Great Britain.
These are the only parties to each obtain several million votes in general elections.
They are also the only ones to be successful in recent years in winning seats in England.
In Scotland, there is the challenge of the Scottish National Party.
It won 11 seats in October 1974 but only 2 in 1979 and 1983, despite fighting all Scottish seats.
In Wales, there is Plaid Cymru (the party of Wales), which won 3 seats in 1974 and 2 in 1979 and 1983.
In Northern Ireland, the dominant force is that of the Ulster Unionists, though divided now into different parties: in 1983 Unionists of different hues won 15 of the 17 seats in the province.
The 1979 and 1983 elections also witnessed an increase in the number of candidates fielded by minor parties, to whom the 150 deposit (first set in 1918) no longer serves as the bar to nonserious candidates that was intended.
The Ecology party fielded 109 candidates in 1983 (up from 53 in 1979), the right-wing National Front 60 candidates (though down from its 1979 peak of 303 candidates), the British National party (a breakaway movement from the National Front) 54 candidates, and the Communist party 35 candidates.
All the candidates of these parties lost their deposits, as did a few scattered independents and other candidates standing under rather esoteric banners.
(In 1983, for example, there was a Justice for Divorced Fathers candidate, one representing Freddie's Alternative Medicine party, and another standing for Law and Order in Gotham City  a label derived from the old Batman comic book series!)
Their main impact was to lengthen the ballot paper.
In 1959, there was a total of 1,536 candidates, an average of 2.4 per seat.
In 1983, there were 2,579 candidates  an average of 4 per seat.
The candidates of the main parties are selected locally, though the national party in each case retains some veto power.
In Britain, unlike the United States, there are no primary elections and the selection of a candidate is in practice usually in the hands of a small group of party activists.
Given that most seats are safe seats for one party or another, this selection is usually tantamount to election.
Within the Conservative party, aspiring candidates have to be on a candidates list maintained by the party's national headquarters.
(A local party may choose someone not on the list, but it must obtain approval from the national party for its choice.)
A local Conservative association seeking a candidate will invite applicants, and in a safe Conservative seat, several hundred aspiring candidates can be expected to put their names forward.
The association will then appoint a selection committee, usually comprising representatives from its different branches and associated groups such as the Young Conservatives.
This committee will sift through the applications and the recommend three or more names to the executive council, the main decision-making body of the association.
The council may then recommend one name for approval to a general meeting of the association, or it may put forward more than one name and leave it to the general meeting to decide.
Candidate Selection
The researches of both Austin Ranney and Michael Rush have found that, despite the political importance of choosing a candidate, the political views of applicants are not important considerations in the selection process.
Selection committees have tended to be influenced by an applicant's knowledge of the constituency, his or her stature and delivery of speech, and whether there are the makings of a good &quot; constituency member &quot; (one who will represent diligently the interests of constituents) or, in some cases, of a national figure.
On occasions, more esoteric considerations may apply, as I can testify, having served on a selection committee.
&quot; Can't we interview him?
He has a nice name &quot; was one comment made during the selection deliberations (The response: a polite &quot; no. &quot;)
Other influences can include, in some areas, religion and quite often age and sex: local parties are reluctant to adopt women candidates (the folklore being that women voters dislike voting for them) and anyone aged under 30 or over 50 years.
There is also a tendency to prefer married men (single men over 30 are considered somewhat suspect), and wives are often asked to appear before selection committees.
Because wives are looked on a surrogates for their husbands while the latter are at Westminster, their attitudes to constituency work and their appearance are considered important.
In the selection I was involved in, one prominent candidate  a nationally known figure  suffered from the poor impression his wife gave to some of the selectors.
Arrogant or pretentious wives can sometimes kill the political ambitions of their husbands.
Although the Labour candidates selected are increasingly similar in background to Conservative candidates, the selection procedure in the Labour Party is not quite the same.
A local Labour party will seek a candidate by inviting nominations.
Nominations may be made by local ward committees, party groups such as the women's section, and by affiliated organizations, principally affiliated trade unions.
(An aspiring candidate can approach such groups to solicit a nomination.)
Once nominations are received, the executive committee, responsible for the day-to-day running of the party, will draw up a short list of candidates for interview.
The final choice is made by the governing body, the General Management Committee, comprising representatives from the different ward committees and affiliated organizations.
The candidate then requires the endorsement of the party's National Executive Committee.
In 1980, the Labour party con erence approved the principle of mandatory reselection of sitting Labour MPs.
What this meant was that sitting MPs should no longer be reselected automatically by local parties just before a general election was held.
Instead, a full selection procedure was to be gone through during the lifetime of a Parliament, thus allowing other aspiring candidates to be considered.
It was a contentious issue and was generally seen as an attempt by the party's left wing to try to remove some Labour members of whom they disapproved.
In practice, the number of members denied reselection was small (only seven by the time the 1983 general election was called), but the issue served to highlight the more overt emphasis placed by Labour activists on a candidate's political stance than was the case on the Conservative side.
In the Conservative party, there is no procedure for mandatory reselection.
In the Liberal party, selection is by the local party also, with the national party maintaining an approved list of candidates.
However, national approval has tended in the past to be given without much discussion, in large part because the number of aspirants for candidatures has not been great: the party has often had to adopt whoever was willing to stand.
The number of aspiring candidates increased in the 1970s, but so too did the number of seats fought.
In many cases during 1974, candidate selection took place just before the election campaign got under way.
Within the Social Democratic Party (SDP), candidate selection is made through the area parties.
These are organized usually on a multiconstituency basis and are responsible for organizing and choosing candidates for constituencies within their areas.
Unless the task is delegated to local (constituency) groups, candidates are chosen by a postal ballot of all members of the area party.
Candidates must be on the party's national list of approved candidates and require the endorsement of one of the party's regional committees to get on that list.
When the Alliance between the Liberals and the Social Democrats was formed in 1981 a formula was devised for allocating constituencies between the two parties.
Negotiating the allocation encountered problems (some entrenched Liberal candidates were unwilling to step down in favor of SDP candidates) but, once achieved, the local party responsible for fielding a candidate made its choice and that candidate was then endorsed by the other party.
There were no joint selection procedures.
There was numerical parity in the distribution of seats (though not necessarily in the distribution of seats considered winnable), and in the 1983 election, each party fielded more than 300 candidates.
Only in two seats (one in Liverpool, one in London), where there was some feuding between the two Alliance partners, were Liberal and SDP candidates to be found contesting the same seats.
The candidates selected by the parties tend on the whole to be middle-aged, male, and white.
Female and nonwhite candidates are exceptional.
The successful candidates more than the unsuccessful ones tend to be middle-aged, university-educated (as well as public school-educated, in the case of Conservatives), and drawn from the ranks of business and the professions.
In postwar years there has been a tendency for MPs to be even more middle-class than they were hitherto.
Past years, according to some analysts, have witnessed the emergence of a more professional member of Parliament.
In each of the 650 single-member constituencies, the method of election employed is the plurality or &quot; first-past-the-post &quot; method.
What this means is that the candidate receiving more votes than any other candidate is declared elected.
It is the same method as that employed in Senate and House elections in the United States.
Examples of constituency results from the 1983 general election are given in Table 5.3.
Elections
In practice, most seats are considered to be safe seats for one or other of the two main parties  that is, the winning candidate has been returned with a majority that represents 10% or more of the votes cast.
In the safest seats, the majority may constitute as much as 40% or 50% of the votes cast.
The constituency of Blaenau Gwent (Table 5.3) serves as a good example.
Turnover in seats is relatively modest.
Fewer than 5% of seats changed hands in the 1970 general election.
Even in 1983, with the challenge of the Social Democrat/Liberal Alliance and a major redistribution of constituency boundaries, fewer than 16% of the seats changed hands among the various competing parties.
The results from the 650 constituencies, as already mentioned, determine which party will form the government.
In all but one of the elections since 1945, one party has won a absolute majority of the seats and the leader of that party has formed a government.
The Labour party achieved an overall majority in five elections, on two occasions by slim margins, and formed the government following the February 1974 election, in which it had more seats than any other party but not an absolute majority (See Table 5.4).
The Conservatives have won overall majorities, by clear margins, in six elections since 1945, including the most recent.
Three generalizations can be drawn about voting behaviour in the four general elections held in the period from 1950 to 1959:
VOTING BEHAVIOUR
1.
There was a high turnout of electors; 2.
Of those who voted, virtually all voted for either the Conservative or Labour parties; 3.
The most significant predictor of party voting was class.
The first two generalizations are borne out by the data in Table 5.2.
More than three-quarters of those on the electoral register turned out on each occasion to cast their vote and, of those who did so, more than 90% voted usually for either the Conservative or Labour candidate.
In the 1950 election, turnout reached 84%.
In the 1951 election, almost 97% of those who voted cast their ballots for one or other of the two main parties.
The third generalization is drawn from survey data.
Gallup Poll data showed that in these four elections, 79% or more of upper-middle-class voters and 69% or more of middle-class voters cast their votes for the Conservative party, while more than 50% of working-class and very poor voters voted for the Labour party.
Class clearly was not an exclusive predictor nor was the relationship between class and party symmetrical: the middle class was more Conservative than the working class was Labour.
One-third of working-class voters regularly voted Conservative.
Nonetheless, class remained the most important predictor of how an elector might vote.
In the 1960s and since, these generalizations have lost some of their force.
Between 1964 and 1983, turnout in general elections failed to reach 80%, falling below 73% in 1970, October 1974, and 1983.
More notably, there was a relative desertion by voters of the two main parties.
In the two elections of 1974, 75% of those who voted cast their ballots for one or other of the main parties.
In 1983 the figure was 70%.
The class-party nexus also began to wane.
The survey by Butler and Stokes detected a weakening of the class alignment among younger voters in the 1960s.
Further analysis of their data and of additional data for the period from 1970 to 1975 showed that, though the vote for the two main parties had declined in the 1960s, major party identification had not: in other words, electors  whatever they may have done in the polling booths  continued to express a sense of affiliation with one of the two main parties.
However, partisan identification declined abruptly in 1974, though the decline was relative: many &quot; very strong &quot; identifiers switched to being &quot; fairly strong &quot; identifiers.
the authors speculated that this partisan dealignment reflected a continuing erosion of the class-party tie.
By October 1974, barely half of the electorate identified (let alone voted) with their &quot; natural &quot; class party.
The relative decline in the importance of class is borne out by a survey of voters in the 1983 election (Table 5.5).
Support for the SDP/Liberal Alliance was drawn evenly from different social classes.
The Labour party failed to achieve even half the votes of working-class and unemployed voters.
The gap between its share of the manual and nonmanual votes was only 21%, compared with 27% in 1979 and 40% in 1959.
The Conservatives made no significant inroads among their traditional class supporters, though attracting the votes of almost one in three of trade unionists.
(Most trade unions are affiliated to the Labour party.)
Although social class continues to structure party choice, it is no longer as reliable a predictor as it was in the 1950s and 1960s.
What other variables, independent of class, can be identified as being correlated to voting behaviour?
Age, religion, gender, region, population density, and home ownership are among the most significant to have been identified.
Some of these have become more pronounced as a result of the weakening of the class-party relationship; others are of declining significance.
Age and gender are among those variables of declining significance.
In the 1983 general election, the older age groups were marginally more Conservative than the younger ones, but the difference was small.
Among those aged over 65 years, 48% voted Conservative (a 15% lead over the proportion voting Labour), whereas among those aged 18 to 22 years, 41% voted Conservative (a 12% lead over Labour voters).
Conservative support among the over-65s was lower than in 1979, indeed dropping by more than the national average.
This decline could support the generational cohort theory developed by Butler and Stokes: that is, that it is not age as such that influences voting behaviour but the period at which one becomes politically aware.
Thus, the over-65s in 1983 were the generation of the 1930s and of the Second World War (see Chapter 3).
As one analyst puts it, &quot; Some of the Labour loyalty induced in their formative years will have lasted until today. &quot;
As a predictor of voting behaviour, though, age is of marginal utility, and so too is gender.
Traditionally, women have been somewhat more likely than men to vote Conservative.
In most postwar elections, more men have voted Labour than have voted Conservative, whereas more women have voted Conservative than have voted Labour.
However, the bias was a slight one.
According to the Gallup Poll, it disappeared in the 1983 election, the Conservatives drawing more support from men than from women (46% to 43%), thus replicating similar developments in the United States and Scandinavia during the 1970s.
However, according to a Market and Opinion Research International (MORI) poll, the Conservatives continued to draw more support from female than from male voters (Table 5.6).
The disparity in the data highlights the marginal significance now of gender as a predictor of voting behaviour.
Religion is another variable of limited importance.
It was significant in the nineteenth century but declined rapidly in the twentieth, as class became more important.
Butler and Stokes found the relationship between religion and party of declining relevance with each generation.
However, in some areas where religious loyalties remain strong, such loyalties can still alter the pattern of class voting.
An obvious example is Northern Ireland (see Chapter 9), though mainland examples can be found in certain cities, notably Glasgow.
In such cities there is a sizable Irish Catholic vote, and this swells the Labour vote in elections.
Elsewhere, the impact of religion is small, though those who are not members of the Church of england are less likely than others in their class to support the Conservatives.
The marginality of religion in influencing voting behaviour is reflected in the fact that it did not figure in analyses published in the wake of the 1983 election.
More significant predictors, especially in recent elections, have been location and home ownership.
Increasingly, Labour and Conservative support has become polarized between North and South and between urban and rural areas.
It is also becoming polarized between those who own and those who rent their houses.
The Conservative party, in terms of its voting support, has always been the party of England and, indeed, of a particular part of England.
That concentration has become marked in recent elections.
In a good postwar election year, the Conservatives would normally expect to pick up a respectable number of seats in Northern England and to some extent in Scotland.
This is no longer the case.
The party's regional strength has become more pronounced.
Mrs. Thatcher carried her party to victory in 1979 largely on the votes of the electorate in the southern half of England, below a line drawn from the River Severn to the Wash (see Map 5.1).
The swing to the Conservatives in the election was highest in the southern half of the country (and in Wales), lowest in the northern parts of the country and in Scotland.
Compared with the 1955 election, the party had 20 fewer seats in the North and 14 fewer in Scotland, conversely, it had 34 more in the South and the Midlands and 5 more in Wales.
This concentration became even more pronounced in 1983.
In the southern half of the country, the Labour party won only three seats outside of Greater London and was largely displaced as the main challenger to the Conservatives by the Liberal/SDP Alliance (see Table 5.7).
The Labour vote declined least in Scotland, while the Conservative vote declined most in the Northwest of England.
The wide margin between support for the Conservatives in the South of England and Labour in the North and Scotland is shown in Table 5.7 and in Map 5.1.
Scotland the North of England is more working-class than the South of England, but this is not sufficient to explain the disparity.
A MORI poll conducted in 1981 found that among skilled workers in the North of England, Labour had a 32% lead over the Conservatives.
Among the same group in the South, the Labour lead was only 6%.
Not only is the North-South divide becoming more pronounced in terms of Labour-Conservative polarization, so too is the divide between urban and rural areas.
Conservative support in the larger cities has been declining for more than 25 years.
In the 1983 election, the party won less than half the number of seats it had won in the larger cities in 1959, the last election when it was returned with a three-figure majority.
In some cities, the decline in support has been dramatic.
In 1959 in the three cities of Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester, the Conservatives won a total of 15 seats.
In the same three cities in 1983, they won 1.
There are now no Conservative-held seats in Glasgow or Liverpool.
Conversely, the rural areas have moved further away from Labour.
In 1983, the swing away from Labour in rural and mixed areas was twice what it was in urban areas: not one rural constituency in the South of England was won by Labour.
These changes have been attributed to changing economic patterns.
&quot; The peripheral areas of Britain, &quot; write two analysts, &quot; with their higher unemployment, and the declining inner parts of conurbations, have become steadily more Labour; while the expanding, more prosperous areas have become more Conservative. &quot;
Prosperity would also appear relevant to the increasing importance of home ownership.
In 1983, the Labour vote held up well among those who rented their homes from the local authorities (Table 5.7).
Among those who owned their own homes the party trailed third behind the Conservatives and the Liberal/SDP Alliance.
Working-class home-owners were more likely to vote Conservative than working-class council-house tenants.
The problem for the Labour party is that the latter category is declining in size: more workers are buying their own homes.
Increasingly, then, the Conservative party is becoming a party that draws its support predominantly from the South of England, from the rural and suburban constituencies, and from home-owners.
Labour, in contrast, is becoming a party confined to the North of England, Scotland, and the urban areas, especially the inner cities.
As for the Liberal/SDP Alliance, it appears to draw its support fairly evenly from the different classes (Table 5.5), from different parts of the country (though marginally more from the South than from the North and Scotland), and from owner-occupiers as well as council-house tenants (Table 5.7).
Anyone seeking to find a reliable predictor of Alliance voting would be hard pressed to find one.
Are there any other correlations to be drawn?
Education remains important, independent of class.
Voters with above the minimum of education are more likely than those who have only a minimum of education to vote Conservative.
Where the British equivalents of Continental peasants (crofters, lumbermen, isolated agriculturalists) are gathered, there is a tendency for voters to deviate from overall patterns of class voting, a tendency in Scotland and Wales favoring the Liberals (and, in 1983, the SDP) as well as the Nationalist parties.
The presence of nonwhite voters in certain urban constituencies may cause further deviations from the class pattern, but the evidence on this is mixed.
Issue voting, which one might expect to have increased in significance given the decline in class voting, appears to remain extremely limited.
The images that the parties convey are important, more so than their stance on specific issues.
In the 1983 election, more electors thought the Conservatives had the better policies than actually voted for the party.
The most important issue was considered by electors to be that of unemployment, an issue on which more preferred the Labour position to that of the Conservatives.
Against this, the Conservatives were preferred by far greater margins on the issues of defense and prices.
Negative voting was also a significant feature of the election, 59% of all voters disliking the other party (or parties) more than they liked their own.
There is little evidence to suggest voters voting for a particular party because of its stand on a particular issue.
Electoral changes and their relationship to the political parties have been the subject of much recent analysis and debate.
A review of this debate is more appropriate following a consideration of the political parties in Britain and hence is covered in the following chapter.
Here I propose to confine my discussion to the contemporary debate surrounding the electoral system as an electoral system.
By the middle of the twentieth century, Britain had developed an electoral system the basic characteristics of which have been delineated above: single-member constituencies, first-past-the-post election to determine the winner in each, and each adult citizen having the right to cast a vote.
That system was both perceived and expected to perform three related functions: through election to the House of Commons it was expected to produce a government; through a purportedly democratic franchise and mode of election, it was expected to confer legitimacy upon the government to govern, subject to the approval of Parliament; and, through facilitating a choice between parties propounding specific programs, it was expected to influence public policy, the party in government carrying through the promises embodies in its election manifesto.
In the 1950s such expectations were assumed to have been met.
Governments were returned with overall majorities.
There were few complaints about the mode of election.
Governments appeared to carry out their promises.
The electoral system appeared to form an intrinsic part of a stable polity.
THE CURRENT DEBATE
In the 1970s, and especially in the wake of the two general elections of 1974, the extent to which the electoral system was capable of fulfilling such functions became a matter of controversy.
In the February 1974 election, no party was returned to office with an overall majority of seats.
In the election of October of the same year, the Labour party achieved an overall majority of only three seats: as a consequence of by-election losses and defections, it lost its majority in April 1976, and by the end of the Parliament was in a minority by 17 seats.
The Conservative party achieved a swing of 5.2% in its favor in the May 1979 election, being returned with a majority of 43 seats.
In previous decades a similar swing would have produced a much higher majority.
Shifts in the distribution of party support within the country were, according to one important study, likely to increase the likelihood of &quot; hung &quot; Parliaments, no one party being returned with an overall majority.
The ability of the electoral system to produce a government in the way previously expected of it was thus called into question.
Furthermore, the system also came under attack as being unfair  hence undermining consent by calling into doubt the legitimacy of both the mode of election and the government produced by it  and for facilitating the adversary relationship between the parties, a relationship that significantly influenced public policy, but did so in a manner harmful to the interests of the country.
the effects of this adversary relationship on public policy in terms of both continuity and substance was considered to threaten rather than enhance the effectiveness of government
The accusation that the electoral system is an unfair one is not new.
It has been advanced for some time by both the Liberal party and the Electoral Reform Society.
It gained ground as a result of the election results of the 1970s and the development of the adversary politics thesis.
The first-past-the-post plurality method of election in single-member constituencies, it was argued, did not allow realization of the principle of &quot; one person, one vote, one value. &quot;
Each adult citizen may have one vote but each vote was not of equal value.
The disparity in the size of constituency electorates meant that a vote cast in a constituency with a small electorate such as Glasgow Central was worth more than one cast in, say, Bromsgrove and Redditch.
Furthermore, the extensive number of safe seats meant that many electors cast &quot; wasted &quot; votes.
What was the point of voting Conservative in a constituency such as Blaenau Gwent, for example, where the Labour candidate had a majority in excess of 20,000 at the previous election?
An elector consistently voting Conservative in the constituency would never contribute towards the election of an MP.
The two most central criticisms, though, have been directed at the aggregate effects of such a method of election.
Given the difference in the spread of support between the parties, it is possible for one party to get more votes than its opponent party but receive fewer seats.
For example, party A could win two marginal seats by the barest of margins while party B won one seat with an overwhelming majority; the aggregate vote for party B in the three seats could well exceed that of party A, but party A has won twice as many seats.
(A similar spread of support among states in the United States presidential elections may result in a president obtaining a majority in the electoral college without obtaining a majority of the popular vote.)
On two occasions in postwar elections, such a situation actually occurred.
In the 1951 general election, the Conservatives won a majority of seats but the Labour party won more votes (see Table 5.2).
In the February 1974 election, the position was reversed, the Conservatives winning more votes nationally than Labour but Labour winning more seats.
In terms of forming a government, it is the number of seats that count: the Conservatives formed the government in 1951, the Labour party in 1974.
The other major and related criticism, the one emphasized most often, is that the plurality system of voting works against national third parties.
Those who benefit most from such a system are the two largest parties and those with regionally concentrated support.
This is as true in the United States as it is in Britain.
In presidential elections, a third-party candidate with concentrated support, such as George Wallace in 1968, can carry some states and hence win some electoral college votes.
A candidate with support that is broad but not deep, such as John Anderson in 1980, can amass several million votes but carry no state at all.
The system favors the Republican and Democratic parties.
Similarly in Britain, a party can win several thousand votes in each constituency yet not come out top of the poll in any; in consequence, it amasses a large popular vote but no seats in Parliament.
This is almost the position in which the Liberal party has found itself in recent elections (see Table 5.2).
In 1979, for example, it won in excess of 4 million votes yet topped the poll in only 11 seats, less than 2% of the total.
This phenomenon is even more marked in the case of the SDP/Liberal Alliance: in 1983 it achieved more than a quarter of the votes cast in the general election, yet won only 3.5% of the seats in Parliament.
The largest party, by contrast, can top the poll in most constituencies with, say, 40% of the poll, the remaining votes split among the other party candidates (see the example of Leicester South in Table 5.3), thus achieving a majority of seats without receiving an absolute majority of the votes cast.
Indeed, at no election since 1935 has a party obtained more than 50% of the votes cast, yet at only one election since that time has a government been returned without a majority of seats.
In the election of October 1974, the Labour party obtained a bare majority of seats for fewer than 40% of the votes cast.
Not surprisingly, the Liberal and Social Democratic parties are in the vanguard in arguing for a reform of the electoral system to eliminate such anomalies.
The Conservative and Labour parties, by contrast, retain a preference for the existing system
The other more recent criticisms of the electoral system has derived from the characterization of the existing political system as an adversary one.
The &quot; adversary politics &quot; thesis was developed following the 1974 elections by a number of academics, led by S. E. Finer.
The essence of their argument was that the electoral system encouraged a polarized contest between two parties for the winner-take-all spoils of a general election.
One party would be returned to office with an overall majority and implement its manifesto program, a program neither known nor supported by most electors and one drawn up on the basis more of party dogma than of a dispassionate and well-informed analysis of Britain's problems.
The other party would then win at a subsequent election, enter office and largely undo the work of its predecessor, implementing instead its own program.
Given that the two parties were perceived as representing different poles of the political spectrum, government policy would lurch from being right of the political center under one adminstration to being left of center under another.
The results, in short, were unrepresentative governments  pursuing policies more politically extreme than those favored by the more centrist electorate  and policy discontinuity.
Policy discontinuity frustrated industrialists and investors who wished to engage in forward planning: they could not anticipate stability in government programs.
Adversary politics and changes in government may make for &quot; exciting politics, &quot; but they produce &quot; low-credibility Government strategies, whichever party is in power. &quot;
Indeed, the conditions created by the electoral system were seen as being the heart of Britain's current problems.
In order to win an election, a party would make extravagant promises, doing so in order to outbid the other party.
In office, it would find it could no longer raise the resources to meet those promises.
It therefore had to change tack, further adding to confusion in governmental policy-making.
However, it also had to act in a way that would not jeopardize its chance of winning the next election.
Hence it was reluctant to take the unpopular measures deemed by some to be necessary to tackle Britain's long-term problems.
The result, in short, was a vicious circle.
The solution, or at least a partial one, to the problem was perceived by these critics as the introduction of a new electoral system, one that introduced a method of proportional representation.
Proportional representation (PR), it was argued, would be fairer than the existing electoral system, ensuring that a party received the share of parliamentary seats equivalent to its national vote.
Furthermore, giving existing voting behaviour, it would deprive any one party of an overall majority of seats.
To form a government with an overall parliamentary majority would thus necessitate a coalition.
this would likely involve one of the main parties having &quot; to co-operate with a party or parties taking a more central stance. &quot;
hence leading to greater moderation in policy.
Given that such a coalition would enjoy the support of more than 50% of electors and that the turnover of seats under PR is small (Professor Finer estimated that a swing of 1% would result in the loss of only six seats), it would most likely remain in office for the foreseeable future and hence be in a position to ensure a degree of policy continuity.
The overall effect of PR would thus be to put an end to the worst features of adversary politics and its unfortunate consequences.
Of the systems of proportional representation, the one favored by the Liberal Party and the Electoral Reform Society is the single transferable vote (STV) system.
It is the method of election currently employed in the Republic of Ireland, in Tasmania, and in Malta and for elections to the Australian Senate.
Under STV there are multimember constituencies, with each elector able to indicate a preference on the ballot paper, putting the number 1 beside the name of the candidate most preferred, number 2 against the name of the elector's second choice, and so on.
A quota is established by the formula of dividing the number of valid ballots cast by the number of seats, plus one; to the resulting figure, one is added.
Thus in a five-member constituency in which 120,000 ballots are cast, the formula would be [formula] Hence the quota (the number of ballots required to elect one member) would be 20,001.
Any candidate receiving this number of votes is declared elected.
The second preferences of any of the candidate's surplus votes, plus those of the candidate at the bottom of the poll, are then redistributed, and so on until the necessary number of candidates reach the quota.
The other main system that has been advocated is the additional member system, similar to that employed in West Germany.
Under this system single-member constituencies would be retained with the first-past-the-post method of election retained in each  in other words, the same as at present.
However, there would be additional seats allocated to parties on a regional basis, a minimum of 5% of the vote in any area of allocation being necessary to obtain any additional seats.
Additional seats would go proportionately to the parties on the basis of the proportion of votes received in the region.
Under a scheme proposed by the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, there would be 480 single-member constituencies and 160 seats allocated on a regional basis.
Proponents of this system and of STV argue that the effect would be a representative House of Commons, the proportion of seats going to parties being the same as the proportion of the votes won in the election.
Support for a new electoral system has developed since the mid-1970s, encompassing academics and politicians.
The Conservative and Labour par ties have witnessed the creation of bodies within their own ranks favoring such reform.
The Liberal party has an important ally in its partner, the Social Democratic party: both are strongly committed to electoral reform.
Various attempts were made in the 1974-1979 Parliament to introduce PR throughout the United Kingdom for elections to the European Parliament and for elections to the proposed assemblies in Scotland and Wales.
The attempts failed, but they helped keep the issue of electoral reform on the agenda of political debate.
The outcome of the 1983 election added a further spur to the reform movement.
Despite this pressure for reform, the existing system retains its supporters.
A majority of both the Conservative and Labour parliamentary parties prefer the first-past-the-post method of election.
One keen defender is the present prime minister, Mrs. Thatcher.
The arguments deployed against the reformers' case are varied.
The essential line of argument is that a reformed electoral system could constitute a greater threat to the maintenance of political authority than any defects of the existing system.
The STV system, it is argued, could threaten the essential link between an elector and his MP given that it would necessitate in rural areas constituencies of massive size.
Given the reformers' argument that PR would enhance the likelihood of coalition government, consent could be undermined if government was to result from post-election bargaining between parties; by a small center party holding the balance of power and hence wielding undue influence over government policy; and by the alienation of voters who support a party excluded on a long-term basis from becoming a partner in coalition.
Such rebuttals are based on accepting the assumptions made by PR advocates about the likely consequences of electoral reform.
Some observers have drawn attention to the fact that such assumptions themselves rest on flimsy foundations.
The reformers argue their case on the assumption that voting behaviour experienced under the current mode of election would most likely continue under a new mode: this is, as Geoffrey Alderman has pointed out, a most unlikely hypothesis.
Arguments that PR works well in countries such as West Germany are countered by pointing to the experience of italy, where turnover in governments is rapid and a significant fraction of the population vote for a party that is consistently excluded from government.
Given the different political cultures that exist, seeking to anticipate what would happen in Britain on the basis of experience abroad is an undertaking of limited usefulness.
The adversary politics thesis developed by the reformers has also been variously challenged.
There are two mutually exclusive arguments deployed against it.
One line of argument accepts the notion of an adversary relationship between the parties but considers this a beneficial rather than a harmful process.
If offers a clear choice to the electorate and it results in one party with a mandate from the people getting on with the job of governing.
If the electorate disapproves of the policies or their outcomes, it has the opportunity to replace the government at the next election.
There may be some discontinuity in policy occasioned by governments of different political persuasions pursuing different paths, but that is the price  an acceptable price  one has to pay for the advantages offered by the existing system.
Proportional representation, it is feared, would facilitate a blurring of the choice before the electorate and prevent a party being returned with a mandate clearly approved by the people.
Such a line of argument is pursued especially by the two largest parties.
It is in their own interest to do so: each wants to pursue its own policies, which it believed to be in the best interests of the country, without having those policies tempered or abandoned because of the need to enter into alliance with another party.
For a brief period of one year, 1977-1978, the Labour government of James Callaghan entered into a Pact with the Liberal parliamentary party: in return for voting support in the House of Commons (necessary to maintain its majority), the government modified certain policies of its own and introduced certain measures favored by the Liberals.
The experience was not one much enjoyed by the Labour party, certain sections of which were extremely hostile to the arrangement.
Both the Conservative and Labour parties appeared to draw the conclusion that it was an experience to be avoided, not one to be encouraged.
The other argument deployed against the adversary politics thesis calls into doubt the relevance of the notion itself.
The rhetoric of adversary politics, it is argued, hides a more consensual substance.
In terms of government legislation, empirical research has indicated that a consensual model is indeed more applicable.
In this view, parties are seen as being not quite as central to formulation of public money as both reformers and the politicians themselves believe.
The external demands on government are such that it can often act only as arbiter between competing demands and respond, under guidance from civil servants, to international events and trends over which it has no direct influence.
Whichever party is in power makes some but not a great deal of difference.
Elections may help produce the personnel at the apex of government but they tell us little about likely public policy.
The electoral system, in summary, has again become a subject of politi-cal debate.
In terms of the political system, it can be said to provide the means by which a government is chosen but, despite the results of the 1983 general election, the extent to which it will continue to be capable of providing a government (at least in the way it has previously done) remains under question.
It operates on the principle of &quot; one person, one vote, &quot; but there is now some dispute as to its legitimacy and that of the government it produces on the grounds that the principle of &quot; one person, one vote, one value &quot; has not been fully realized.
And there is debate and notable disagreement about the consequences that elections not only do have but should have for public policy.
The debate is very much a current one.
It revolves around arguments for and against a reform of the electoral system.
Whether Britain will witness electoral reform in the next decade or so rests on the outcome of that debate.
The 1983 general election result fueled rather than ended the controversy.
