Political Choice in Britain

Extract

Political Choice in Britain. By Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul F. Whiteley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 392p. $95.00 cloth, $39.95 paper.

This book is a useful contribution to the psephology of British elections, using the 2001 British general election as its test bed. The authors examine the history of “sociological” and “economic” models of voting behavior, test and find them wanting, explaining that movement to issue, party, and leader perception (Worcester 1991) coupled with economic performance assessment (Sanders et al. 2001) is found to be more effective.