The Case of the Silk-Stocking Socialists and the Calculating Children of the Middle Class

James E. Alt and Janet Turner

British Journal of Political Science, 1982, vol. 12, issue 2, 239-248

Abstract: Recent developments in the political behaviour of the British electorate have called into question the once-prevalent view that class was what counted when it came to voting and all else was ‘embellishment and detail’. Two streams of thought dominate the recent literature. One notes the continuing prominence of social class in the context of voting behaviour, but stresses the extent to which class is no longer expressable as a simple function of occupation (manual and non-manual), but instead requires paying attention to such aspects of lifestyle as tenancy patterns. The other, best exemplified in Dunleavy's recent work, pays less attention to individual lifestyle and emphasizes instead the extent to which changes in the occupational structure (particularly sectoral location and unionization) have altered the political meaning of workplace (‘production’) locations. The theoretical interest in sectoral location arises from the growth of public sector employment since the early 1960s and the increase in public sector labour militancy in the early 1970s. According to this view, partisan choice is influenced by sectoral location and by union membership, which is itself not a matter of lifestyle nor a simple extension of social class, but is bound up with sectoral (public/corporate/small private) location of occupation.

Date: 1982
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:bjposi:v:12:y:1982:i:02:p:239-248_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in British Journal of Political Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().