Tendency Separation Among British Labour and Conservative Europeanist Partisans: Implications for Party Leadership Strategies Toward European Integration, 1978-1995

Abstract

As Britain's future relationship within the European Union has become increasingly a more salient issue not only among the political elites, but also among the general electorate, it is not very surprising that many students of British politics have sought new, improved theories to explain the dynamics of party politics coloring the debate over Europe. Building on these studies, we offer an alternative model for understanding the degree of tendency separation among the partisan electoral base of Britain's two major parties-the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. We integrate four bodies of literature and devise two different models-the nominal model and the evaluative model-for analyzing the issue of the European Union within the partisan electorate of the Conservative and Labour parties. Using Eurobarometer data drawn from surveys between 1978-1995, our analysis demonstrates that partisan dispositions toward the European union within the British electorate are forged by key values that must also be assumed to bind a voter to a specific party. In particular, we distinguish between two sets of values - core values, or those values that determine one's dispositions to the broader political-economy of both Britain and an emerging European Union, and system values, or those values which orient a person to a specific system-performance values. Our evaluative model focuses on estimated tendency separations among the Europeanists within the electoral base of the Labour and Conservative parties. Concentrating upon segregated Europeanist True-Partisans with the electorate of each of the two major British parties, we specify the spatial locations of three separate Weighted Europeanist Tendency Groups along the general issue dimension of the European Union. To better gauge the existing divisions over the issue of Europe, we use two distinct measures of separation - the issue valence and the degree of issue expressiveness. We conclude that the degree of separation among the tendencies has an immediate practical implications on party leadership strategies.