European integration, party politics and voting in the 2001 election

This article uses new data from the 1997-2001 British Election Panel Study, the final wave of which was carried out immediately after the 2001 election, to examine the extent to which beliefs about the desirability of EMU and European integration more generally have become more important as a source of voters party preferences, both in absolute terms and relative to the importance of other more typically central concerns facing voters. In doing so, the article tells us something about the extent to which Labours occupation of the middle ground on many economic and redistributive issues in 1997 and beyond has introduced a new era of British political competition, in which the economy and tax, for example, are no longer so divisive and in which questions relating to attitudes towards emotive, national identity issues hold centre stage. It considers, in other words, whether or not we have seen a potentially lasting realignment of the sort postulated in Evans and Norris’s (1999) thesis that the 1997 election may have represented a critical change in British politics.