Referendum Voting Behavior

The Norwegian and British Referenda on Membership in the European Community

Dados Bibliográficos

ID7608443
AutoresRoy Pierce, Henry Valen, Ola Listhaug
Ano1983
Volume27
Fascículo1
Páginas43
Data de publicação1983-02-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoAmerican Journal of Political Science (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0092-5853 • E-ISSN: 1540-5907
EditoraJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2111052
OpenAlexW2312896553
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas25
Referências citadas8

left-right locations do not have much political meaning for British voters (Butler and Stokes, 1969), even though comparatively large numbers of them will assign themselves an abstract left-right location when asked to do so (Inglehart and Klingemann, 1976; Barnes and Kaase, 1979). Norwegians have never been asked to locate themselves on a purely left-right scale, although at Norwegian electoral study of 1977 they were asked to rate themselves on a Conservative-Radical dimension, and almost 85 percent of respondents did so. Our approach to assigning left-right locations to voters in our samples did not involve such direct questioning. Instead, we employed method already used by Valen (1973) in his analysis of Norwegian prereferendum survey data. Respondents at British and Norwegian postreferendum surveys were asked three questions, posed in Likertscale format, relating to conventional elite-level interpretations of left-right dimension. TWo of questions concerned government control of economy and third concerned equality of income.8 The responses to three questions intercorrelated more strongly in Britain than in Norway, but three items formed a single cluster for each country when subjected, along with other items, to factor analysis. Not IThe questions asked respondents to react on a five-point agree-disagree scale to following statements: (1) Unless government controls private business, industrialists will have too much influence; (2) It is easier to keep full employment in Britain [Norway] if government has control over private business; and (3) should be far greater equality of wage and salary levels in Britain [Norway]. These questions were first used in Norway and translated into their closest renditions in English for 1975 British survey. For Britain, in order to maximize case numbers from our comparatively small sample, missing data were coded at midpoint of response categories. For Norway, we only included respondents who replied to three questions; this excluded, at most, three percent of Norwegian respondents. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.60 on Thu, 21 Apr 2016 07:36:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms REFERENDUM VOTING BEHAVIOR 49 surprisingly, two items that explicitly referred to government control loaded more heavily than item relating to income equality, but three items reflect a common factor. We constructed a simple additive scale for each country based on replies to three questions. The scales are identical in range (from 3 to 15) and, we presume, identical in meaning. Given nature of questions on which scales are based, we interpret them to be a version of Downs' tentative formulation of left-right dimension, reducing all political questions to their bearing upon one crucial issue: how much government intervention in economy should there be? (Downs, 1957, p. 116). Moreover, items faithfully reflect, at least partially, issues on which left and right, as conventionally perceived at elite level in both countries, differ in routine political debate and action.9 The distributions of our British and Norwegian respondents on this contrived left-right dimension appear in Figure 1. Of course, there, is considerable overlap between left-right locations and affiliation with parties conventionally considered leftist or rightist. In both countries thie contribution of people affiliated with Labor Party (and, in case of Norway, Socialist People's Party) is greatest at extreme left and diminishes gradually as one moves right, while contribution of Conservative Party supporters is just reverse. On other hand, patterns for British Liberal Party, and for Norwegian Christian, Center, and Liberal parties, are almost invariant across spectrum. There is only a slight peaking at center, with some modest falloff at extremities. For those voters, left-right locations are essentially irrelevant to their partisan attachments. That does not necessarily mean, however, that their left-right locations are also irrelevant to their attitudes toward EC. The Relevance of Left-Right Attitudes The policy content of our left-right scale is theoretically related to expected attitudes toward EC. Although leftist political movements have historically emphasized internationalist themes, such a posture raises serious concrete problems for a leftist government in power. To extent that a government emphasizes central control over economy, there is a risk that obligations of membership in international organi90ne caveat, cited by Downs, is that the parties designated as right-wing extremists in real world are for fascist control of economy rather than free markets (Downs, 1957, p. 116). This ambiguity is at work in connection with British attitudes toward EC as well, inasmuch as certain groups regularly regarded as extreme rightist were opposed to British membership. The left-right dimension implicitly applied to those groups has little to do with government intervention in economy but rather refers to such matters as racial attitudes or attitudes toward foreigners. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.60 on Thu, 21 Apr 2016 07:36:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms I / //~~~~/ g e_--I ! v i z

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