11/19/2023 0 Comments Dave butler radio![]() ![]() “David had a real need for people,” Kavanagh recalled. “He got energy from bouncing off students, colleagues, politicians, friends, family and co-authors. ![]() From 1974 Dennis Kavanagh was Butler’s co-author Kavanagh took the lead in 2005 and produced The British General Election of 2010 himself. His Governing Without a Majority: Dilemmas for Hung Parliaments in Britain (1986) was reckoned the last word on the subject.Ĭataloguing successive elections, Butler enjoyed the collaboration of colleagues and pupils including Richard Rose, John Freeman, Anthony King, Uwe Kitzinger, David Marquand, Ann Sloman and Michael Pinto-Duschinsky. In Coalitions in British Politics (1978), Butler argued that single-party government in 20th-century Britain was the exception, not the rule. He also began the British Political Facts series, and produced books on referenda and European, Australian and Indian politics. Starting with The British General Election of 1951, he produced such books for no fewer than 15 elections, dwarfing in longevity the Making of the President series by the American historian Theodore H White, who gave up after four. When in 1981 Jacques Séguéla, the publicist behind François Mitterrand’s capture of the French presidency, declared that publicity was “the art of surfing on cultural waves”, Butler asked him what research had been done to see if Mitterrand’s wave was the biggest.īutler’s academic legacy is the Nuffield Election Studies, covering the course of successive contests and, in full statistical detail, their outcomes. He was equally concerned at the increasing role played in politics by advertising and public relations people. Any of his students saying they had decided not to would receive the “lecture of a lifetime” about the value of the franchise and the importance of exercising it. In 1945 he wrote: “This measurement of ‘swing’, admittedly imperfect, does give us a broad idea of the movement of opinion from Conservative to Labour.” With regional swings then relatively uniform, it became possible in the 1950s to extrapolate from the first handful of results how the rest of the country would perform, and hence the outcome of the election.īutler believed passionately in the public exercising its right to vote. In an individual seat or nationally, the swing from one party to another is calculated by adding the percentage rise in one’s vote to the fall in the other’s, then dividing by two. He formed an impressive combination with the presenters Robin Day and Alastair Burnet, Butler’s more populist counterpart Robert McKenzie and the “swingometer” – perfected by Butler and first used by the BBC nationally in 1959.īutler did not invent the concept of swing, but he made it understandable. ![]() His quickfire and astringent delivery suited television, and from 1950 until 1979 – after which he switched to radio – he was an election-night regular. Though rigorously scientific, Butler explained complex issues in simple language which made him a natural for results programmes. He published analyses of every general election from 1945 to 2005, was a fixture on BBC election broadcasts, and refined the concept of “swing”, the amount by which support moves between parties from one election to the next. Sir David Butler, who has died aged 98, was an Oxford political science don and the founding father of British psephology, the study of elections and how voters behave. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |