| Summary/Abstract |
Forty years ago, proponents of the ‘class dealignment’ thesis—such as Ivor Crewe and his collaborators—began to diagnose the declining salience of class in affecting electoral outcomes in the UK. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, sociologists resisted this claim by insisting that if a rigorous model of class was used, and that if relative rather than absolute differences were examined, there was no decline, but only ‘trendless fluctuation’ in the class–vote relationship. A key intervention here was the adoption of John Goldthorpe's class schema, which distinguished between classes according to employment relationships, rather than a crude divide between manual and non-manual workers. Goldthorpe's approach proved much more discriminating, for instance in highlighting how business owners were more prone to support the Conservative party, and his thinking led to the National Statistic Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) which was adopted by the Office of National Statistics.
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