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For thirty years following the end of the Second World War, it was orthodox to regard Britain as having one of the most stable and party‐oriented political systems in the Western world—parties penetrated state and society so significantly that it was virtually impossible to conceive of political life in the country without thinking first and foremost of party political life. However, since the middle of the 1970s, old certainties have been challenged by a continuing and multi‐dimensional debate about the transformation of British party politics. This challenge is predicated on a number of interconnected developments, which include: the apparent growth of electoral volatility; the spread of partisan and class dealignment; the emergence of nationalist cleavages in Scotland and Wales, which have threatened to fragment the national political culture; the erosion of two‐party electoral domination; and the growing chorus of criticism levelled at the damaging iniquities of the electoral system and the adversarial ‘winner‐takes‐all’ political mentality that is closely associated with it. Despite this, the single‐member plurality (SMP) (first‐past‐the‐post) electoral system continues to ensure that single‐party majority governments remain the norm. This chapter looks at what such changes imply for the general status of parties in the country, and is arranged in the same three sections as the other country case studies in the book; these examine the popular legitimacy of British political parties, their organizational strength, and their systemic functionalities (in governance and political recruitment, interest articulation and aggregation, political communication, and political participation).

This chapter asks whether leaders systematically matter more to certain types of voters and systematically less to others. It explores a number of possibilities. The rise of leader-centred politics thesis, which emphasizes the changing nature of media coverage and the weakening of partisan ties, raises two possibilities, namely that leaders are more important to voters who are more exposed to television news and to voters who lack strong partisan ties. The partisan dealignment thesis suggests that as voters’ ties to political parties have weakened, the number of voters who decide how to vote during the campaign itself has grown, therefore raising the possibility that leaders carry more weight with these ‘late-deciders’. Finally, there is the role of political sophistication that raises one last question: do leaders matter more to unsophisticated voters, or are they just as important to the politically sophisticated?