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.