I. The geography of the working class and the geography of the labour vote in England, 1983. A prefatory note to a research agenda

The role of place in the creation of a geography of voting is an unresolved issue. To some commentators, place is all-important; to others, it is what people are, not where they are, that determines their political attitudes. Using survey data from the British Election Study 1983, this note establishes the salience of the former position. Knowledge of the geography of the class structure is insufficient to account for the geography of voting in England then; using a variety of objective and subjective definitions of working class, it is demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that the propensity of the members of that class to vote Labour varies very substantially by both region and type of place.