Challenges and Responses in British Party Politics

This paper addresses the question of why parties decline in electoral support and examines particularly the recent dealignment in Great Britain. The general theme is that dealignment depends on the nature of the demands placed upon the parties by the electorate and the response of the parties to those demands, An analysis of the key issues of the sixties and seventies shows that there were changes in the agenda of British politics, particularly in the form of increasingly salient economic problems and the emergence of several cross-cutting issues like immigration and devolution. It is argued that to some extent the intrinsic complexity of these issues and the demands they placed upon the parties should be blamed for the dealignment of support from the major parties during this period. At the same time, there is evidence that the response of the parties to these problems also contributed to their current predicament both in the sense that self-interested vote maximization led to voter alienation and that the institutionalization of support made adaptation and change more difficult.