Class dealignment and the neighbourhood effect :  Miller Revisited 

 -  2001 
<br/><br/> The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-are census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristic of voters`local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided int ofive equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more lekely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the hig-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative expalantions are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for whichfurther research is necessary to identify the processes involved