Aspects of the interrelationships of attitudes and behaviour as illustrated by a longitudinal study of British adults: 1. Interactions among attitudes and changing^voting intentions

Abstract. Most models of people's voting intentions suggest that the choice of party to support is a function not only of external influences in the individual's home, neighbourhood, and workplace but also of their attitudes—their perspectives on society, their goals and values, their opinions on contemporary social and political issues, and their degree of attachment (if any) to the political parties and their programmes. Those models have been tested in Great Britain on many occasions, though the data employed rarely allow detailed exploration of all aspects of the many interrelationships suggested. In particular, the great majority of studies are cross-sectionalin nature, and although most produce the same general findings, indicating stability in attitudes and their links to behaviour at the aggregate level, they do not allow study of whether such stability is also characteristic of individuals. With data provided by the first four waves of a large panel study of British adults (the British Household Panel Survey) this first paper in a series exploring the stability of attitude-behaviour links over time tests five hypotheses regarding the interrelations among attitudes, party identification, and voting (or voting intention) during the period 1991-94, and finds very strong support for all five. It is a widely held assumption in the social and environmental sciences, sustained by a large number of empirical studies, that mass behaviour and people's attitudes are closel