How do primacy (long-term) factors affect voting behaviour?

Although the link between class and voting behaviour has weakened since the 1940s (class dealignment), it was still noticeable in the 2015 general election.
The Conservative Party still received the majority of its support from upper middle class and middle-class voters, while Labour received mostly working class votes. .
Although 41% of classes ‘DE’ voted Labour, there were still 27% who voted Conservative and 19% who voted UKIP.
An equal percentage of 32% of skilled workers voted either Conservative or Labour, showing little alignment with either party.
There are many reasons to explain this trend, such as improved social mobility, the decline of traditional working class industries and rise of white-collar jobs, and conscious efforts by New Labour and the Conservatives to broaden their appeal by moving to the political centre.

Until the 2005 General Election, women were more likely to vote Conservative.
But, in 2005, New Labour received the majority of their vote from women.
It has been suggested that women tended to vote Conservative because they were less likely to be employed, or members of trade unions.
In 2010, David Cameron worked to increase the number of female Conservative MPs.
In 2015, Labour’s Woman to Woman pink minibus visited 75 constituencies, targeting women who did not vote in the previous election.
In 2017, Labour committed to conducting a gender impact assessment on all policies and legislation.
In 2015, the Conservatives recieved 37% female and Labour 33%.
Even though the gap in male support was slightly wider with 38% voting Conservative and 30% voting Labour, it is still difficult to predict voting behaviour based solely on gender.
The clear divisions between Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May over international relation and nuclear power and weapons perhaps explain the Conservative victory with male voters and why they remained the largest party in Westminster in 2017

Past elections have shown that older voters are more likely to vote Conservative.
Older voters likely have different family concerns and financial responsibilities, that the Conservative Party appeals to with policies on taxes and crime.
While 27% of voters aged 18-24 voted Conservative, 47% of voters aged 65+ voted Conservative in 2015.
This was reversed for the Labour Party, with 43% of voters aged 18-24 and 23% aged 65+ voting Labour.
The trend, upheld in the 2010 election, of a strong link between young voters and the liberal Democrats was broken in 2015, with their percentage of voters aged 18-24 dropping from 30% to 5%.
This is may be partly attributable to the controversy over University tuition fees under the Coalition.
There was a significant increase in the turnout of the under-30s in 2017, but more importantly, Labour was able to win a significantly higher percentage of the under-30 vote (2/3), which the Conservatives couldn’t quite match with the 50-70 age bracket.

Historically there has also been a link between ethnicity and voting behaviour, with ethnic minorities tending to support the Labour Party.
It has been suggested that this was due to Labour passing major legislation to advance and protect the rights of ethnic minorities, such as the Race Relations Acts, and due to the Conservatives taking a firmer stance on immigration.
However, the vote of ethnic minorities can also be affected by class and particular salient issues, for example the drop in Labour support in 2005 that may have resulted from the Iraq War.
The link was again present in 2015 when 65% of ethnic minorities voted Labour, while only 23% voted Conservative.

There exists a clear north-south divide in voting behaviour, in which southern voters more commonly vote Conservative, while many northern and Welsh voters support Labour.
In Scotland, 50% supported the SNP in 2015, and the Northern Irish vote was divided solely across Irish parties.
The divide can also be seen between rural and suburban areas (Conservative) and urban cities (Labour).
These divisions are linked strongly with social class, as, while historically the north had many industrial jobs, such as coal mining, the south had many wealthy rural areas and high paid professional jobs.
These divisions could be seen in the 2015 election, where the Conservatives were most successful in southern England while Labour dominated northern constituencies and London.
These divisions also strongly reflect the relative wealth of northern and southern constituencies.

Much like class, partisanship has become a less predictable indicator of voting behaviour.
It can be most clearly seen in the declining membership figures of the main political parties. In 2015, only 1.0% of the electorate was a member of the Labour, Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties.
Where the Labour Party had over a million members in the 1950s, by 2015 it had approximately 270,000. Similarly, the Conservative Party had almost 3 million members in the 1950s, compared to around 149,800 in 2013.
The parties have lost a substantial amount of their predictable ‘core vote’.
Many voters are now classed as ‘floating voters’, and the percentage of voters who have no party identification has more than doubled from 8% in 1987 to 19% in 2014, according to the 2015 British Social Attitudes Survey.
In May 2015, polling by Ipsos Mori showed that 27% of voters identified as Conservative supporters, 31% as Labour and 9% as Liberal Democrat.
With the Conservatives receiving 36.9% of the vote, it suggests they were able to win over a number of floating voters.