Tory Trends: Party Identification and the Dynamics of Conservative Support Since 1992

In the study of politics, as in political life, ‘plus ça change’ is not always an accurate description. Recent models of the interelection dynamics of support for British governing parties illustrate the point. Unlike their traditional rivals that accorded pride of place to macroeconomic indicators, especially inflation and unemployment rates, the new models have focused on the effects of voters' subjective evaluations of economic conditions and their assessments of the performance of the prime minister. By incorporating these variables, analysts have articulated aggregate party support models more closely to the micro-analytical literature on voting behaviour and election outcomes. To date, however, another variable, party identification, that has been the subject of longstanding controversies in that literature, has been neglected because of a lack of appropriate time-series data. Such data are now available, and they enable one to investigate the dynamics and determinants of British ‘macropartisanship’, and to incorporate party identification variables in vote intention and prime ministerial approval models. This Note does so in a study of Conservative party support over the January 1992–November 1995 period. For references to a number of the more recent studies, see Harold D. Clarke and Marianne C. Stewart, ‘Economic Evaluations, Prime Ministerial Approval and Governing Party Support: Rival Models Reconsidered’, British Journal of Political Science, 25 (1995), 597–622. For more comprehensive literature reviews, see, for example, Michael S. Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988); William L. Miller, ‘Studying How the Economy Affects Public Attitudes and Behavior: Problems and Prospects’, in Harold D. Clarke, Marianne C. Stewart and Gary Zuk, eds, Economic Decline and Political Change: Canada, Great Britain, the United States (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989); Helmut Norpoth, Confidence Regained: Economics, Mrs Thatcher, and the British Voter (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). ‘MacKuen, Erikson and Stimson introduced the term ‘macropartisanship’ in their study of the aggregate dynamics of party identification in the United States. See Michael B. MacKuen, Robert S. Erikson and James A. Stimson, ‘Macropartisanship’, American Political Science Review, 83 (1989), 1125–42.