Miles Fairburn

The Rise of the Left and Working-Class Voting Behavior in New Zealand: New Methods

The extent to which mainstream left-wing parties attracted working-class votes during the first half of the twentieth century is exceptionally difficult to establish and explain. All of the various methods applied to the subject, including ecological regression of aggregate data, have had their problems, especially the ecological fallacy. A novel solution to these problems, in the context of New Zealand, takes occupational and party voting data at street level as its observations for ten towns from 1911 to 1951, and correlates the data treating each town for each year as a case. The working-class component in the total vote for the Labour Party varied surprisingly by town and followed unexpected trends.

Cleavage within the Working Class?: The Working-class Vote for the Labour Party in New Zealand, 1911-51

A convention in New Zealand historiography is that the electoral fortunes of the Labour Party in the first half of the twentieth century were tightly constrained by a particular structure of cleavage. Although by 1919 or 1922 Labour had won the support of the vast majority of urban working-class voters in the leading towns, it could not win office with their support alone. This was demonstrated in the 1930s when it gained electoral domination by winning over small farmers and the urban middle classes; and after the late 1930s when the support of non-manuals ebbed away and it lost office in 1949. This article tests the convention. It takes the ten largest provincial towns, determines the class composition of their streets in 11 general elections, estimates the distribution of the votes for each party in each street in each town for every year, and correlates the estimated percentages of Labour vote with percentage of working class. The results are the inverse of the trends claimed by the historiography. The article then examines the social geography of the towns and finds systematic evidence of an unexpected cleavage inside the working class: skilled workers had a much weaker tendency to vote Labour than the unskilled and no tendency at all to reside in the same residential areas as the unskilled.

The Problem of Socially Constructed Evidence

It is a truism that the ideology of the dominant groups shapes their observations of the subordinate elements in a society. It is also a truism that the dominant groups consciously or unconsciously act to shape the collective beliefs of the subordinate elements, so that the subordinate elements will observe the world as the dominant want them to observe it. In one form or another, both truisms appear in all kinds of claims by social historians that the sense of reality of past people — dominant and subordinate — was ‘socially constructed’ (or culturally constructed’). The truisms pose a serious problem for our attempts to recover the actual ways of life of subordinate people. It is the object of this chapter to spell out the problem and to assess some of the methods used by practitioners to solve it.

Voter behaviour and the decline of the Liberals in Britain and New Zealand, 1911–29: some comparisons

To an outsider, what is noteworthy about the long-standing debate over the decline of the Liberals in Britain is the scant consideration it has given to parallel cases. Although the debate has been very wide ranging, its participants have never employed an obvious procedure: to look for evidence for their claims in other societies where similar periods of political transition took comparable forms. Such insularity, it should hastily be added, is reciprocated by historiographies elsewhere. Liberal parties or centrist parties in three-party situations also declined in other societies, yet their historians have made little attempt to test explanations for these declines by determining whether they fit the British case. The reluctance to engage in comparisons is understandable, of course, since the variables are notoriously difficult to control. However, this does not mean that the procedure is never worth trying. Furthermore, the chances of producing such results can be lessened with an appropriate research design, ensuring among other things that the cases are treated in ways that are as similar as possible. On the face of it, there is good reason to believe that the New Zealand case provides a suitable point of comparison with the British. The preconditions, key characteristics and outcomes associated with the declines of both parties have remarkable similarities – perhaps not surprisingly given that New Zealand’s constitution and political culture were derived from the British and that the two societies had such strong links. The first precondition they have

The Problem of Determining the Best Explanation

The problem of how to determine the best explanation is the final standard problem with which we will deal. The problem is obviously not general to all modes of social history, but specific to the explanatory modes, whether they be the causal, the intentional, the statistical or some combination of the three. The problem occurs when several competing explanatory theories are advanced for the same phenomena and we want to know which theory is the ‘best’; that is, which one provides the best explanans for the explananda in question.

The Problem of Establishing Important Causes

The problem of establishing important causes could also be called the problem of establishing major or significant causes. It commonly occurs when we are trying to explain such problems as why a collectivity or category changed or how it came to acquire a certain attribute and our research of the documents suggests the phenomenon was driven not just by a few but umpteen different causes. How do we establish which of all these causes were the major or important ones? We cannot assume they are equally important; therefore how do we find out which were the major ones and which were the minor? Are there any reliable and defensible criteria we can use in arriving at a decision or can the issue only be decided on a purely subjective basis?

Some Solutions for the Problem of Fragmentary Evidence

The objective of this chapter is to outline five solutions to the problem of fragmentary evidence. There is no guarantee, it needs to be emphasised, that the solutions will allow us to create truthful accounts — ones that comprehensively correspond to reality. They will, however, give us the capacity (all things being equal) to produce accounts that are more reliable than those based solely on fragmentary evidence or on fragmentary evidence used in conjunction with the testimonies of contemporary experts and/or our own common-sense beliefs. Although I have distinguished the solutions for the purposes of discussion and clarity, they can in fact by employed in whatever combination the practitioner finds appropriate.

The Problem of Appropriate Concepts

Presentism — anachronism — is usually taken as a mark of bad history.1 We engage in it when we think, talk and write about the past as if it were the same place as the present. Although most historians would concede that presentism is very difficult to avoid in practice, they nonetheless insist that it should be avoided as much as possible, and that we should strive to examine past people in their own terms, by their own lights, within their own context. Presentism is a form of ethnocentrism; the term ‘historicism’ was invented by nineteenth-century German scholars to denote the opposite of presentism.

The Problem of Establishing Similarities and Differences — of Lumping and Splitting

Few social phenomena are absolutely identical. How, then, can we tell when they are similar enough to be regarded as members of the same class of objects or dissimilar enough to be put into different classes? How, that is to say, do we draw justifiable boundaries around social phenomena which are not exactly the same?

The Problem of Absent Social Categories

As I indicated in the Introduction, the subject-matter of social history usually consists of large aggregates of people (or collectivities) and of the social categories that make up these collectivities. The term collectivity may refer to a whole society, a cluster of societies, an empire, a civilization, a large segment of people within a society, a local community, an institution and so on. The term social category refers to a subset of a collectivity. Thus the peasants in a society could be taken as a social category, as could its urban population, its men over sixty, tribes-people living by lakes, children with red hair, the top quintile of income-earners, home-owners, the people born in a certain series of years (a ‘cohort’), women who have given birth to two children and so forth and so on. I will distinguish a social category from a social group by stipulating that a category consists of people who do not necessarily know each other, interact, engage in reciprocity, have the same beliefs and values or have a common identity, whereas the people belonging to a group necessarily possess these attributes. Thus while many social categories may also have the attributes of social groups, by no means all will; a great many will be purely abstract entities, having no group life at all. Social historians do not always study large collectivities and social categories; they also study individuals as well as families and other very small groups. But when they do their purpose is generally to contribute to our knowledge of a collectivity.