The Study of Political Generations

Abstract

The electorate is by no means a constant, unchanging mass. Individual voters die and are replaced by new ones, perhaps fifty years younger, whose ideas and preferences may be quite unlike those their elders carried to the grave. There are also voters who leave the country, and others who come into it from the Commonwealth or other parts of the world. The scale of these demographic changes is sufficient to yield a 10 per cent turnover of the electorate within a five-year Parliament.