Party Attachment in Great Britain: Five Decades of Dealignment

Abstract

The 2015 election brought one of the largest changes to the UK party system that Britain has ever seen. But how did this play out at the individual level? Was there an unprecedentedly large shift in voters’ preferences? This note uses British Election Study Panels from 1966 to 2015 to look at the volatility of voters’ choices across elections. I find that the 2015 election was the latest part of a long-running trend of increasing individual level vote volatility. While this volatility was expressed in much larger aggregate changes than we have seen in previous elections, there has been steadily increasing vote churn below the surface.

Keywords: Voter Volatility