Dealignment

Dealignment, in political science, is a trend or process whereby a large portion of the electorate abandons its previous partisan (political party) affiliation, without developing a new one to replace it. It is contrasted with political realignment.

Many scholars argue that the trends in elections in the United States over the last several decades are best characterized as dealignment. It is also believed the United Kingdom has become dealigned from social class over the past three decades.

Partisan dealignment

The last decades, since the 1970s, have seen an increase in the process of partisan dealignment in many countries as voters become less connected to their political party.[1] This process can result in fewer votes for the major parties, such as in the UK, or an increase in voters that vote for the opposite party due to their loss of partisanship. This dealignment shows that short term factors might play a larger role than usual in whether a candidate receives a vote from someone of their party. Several factors can be attributed to partisan dealignment, such as a greater political awareness and socialisation, intensive mass media coverage and decline of deference; disillusionment both with parties and politicians, and most importantly, the poor performance of government. Voters have also become more inclined to vote based on specific issues such as Brexit, immigration or the economy rather than voting based on a partisan attachment.

Prior to the 1970s there had been clear examples of partisan dealignment in the UK. For example, in the three elections which the Conservatives won in the 1950s, they received nearly 50% of the vote in those elections.[2] However, in recent years loyalties towards the UK's main parties - the Labour Party and the Conservative Party - has reduced. This was seen in the 2019 general election when Labour lost votes to the Conservatives over the issue of Brexit.[3]

Class dealignment

Class dealignment is a process in which members of a social class no longer vote for the party that their class is aligned with. In the UK, traditionally, working class voters support Labour and middle class voters support the Conservatives. Therefore, an example of class dealignment would be if the working class began to view themselves as lower middle class.

Class dealignment took place in Britain post-1960s, when people were more likely to pursue tertiary education, have professional jobs and consequently more affluence. As a result, working-class voters who would traditionally have voted Labour may instead vote Conservative or Liberal Democrat. This happens as people lose their traditional class loyalties to a particular party. An example of this would be the Barking and Dagenham results in the 2006 local elections, in which a traditional Labour area voted for the extreme-right British National Party.

A recent example of class dealignment was during the 2019 UK general election in which the "Red Wall", a term first used by James Kanagasooriam in relation to the traditional Labour seats in the North of England,[4] no longer voted along class lines. The result was that traditional Labour seats, such as Great Grimsby, voted to elect a Conservative MP for the first time in decades.[5] In addition, in 2019 the Conservative received the highest amount of votes across every social class, including 41% of DE voters who traditionally voted Labour.[6] This illustrates that people in the UK no longer vote in accordance to their class.

An example of there being class realignment is in the US where, in the 2020 Presidential Election, Donald Trump, a Republican, lost support amongst wealthy fiscally conservative and socially moderate voters in the suburbs, but made huge gains with latino voters nationwide especially in Miami Dade County Florida,the Rio Grande Valley in South Texas, in Los Angeles, in the imperial valley in California,in the latino heavy areas of New York City, and the Latino heavy areas of Chicago and Cook County. [7]

See also

References
  1. Hermann Schmitt. "Partisanship in nine western democracies." Political Parties and Partisanship: Social Identity and Individual Attitudes. Routledge. (11 June 2014). pp. 75. ISBN 978-1-134-04428-3.
  2. Crewe, I (1977). Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964 - 1974. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  3. Ford, Robert (2020). Brexit Land. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 302.
  4. Mattinson, Deborah (2020). Beyond the Red Wall: Why Labour Lost, How the Conservatives Won and What Will Happen Next?. London: Biteback Publishing Limited. p. 4.
  5. Burtenshaw, Ronan (2020). "Why We Lost". Tribune (Winter 2020).
  6. MORI, IpSOS. "How the voters voted in the 2019 election" (PDF). Ipsos MORI. Retrieved 8 January 2021.
  7. Zhang, Christine. "By numbers: how the US voted in 2020". Financial Times. Retrieved 24 January 2021.
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