Ivor Crewe

Who is Ivor Crewe?

Sir Ivor Martin Crewe, AcSS is the Master of University College, Oxford and President Elect of the Academy of Social Sciences. He was previously Vice-Chancellor of the University of Essex and Professor in the Department of Government.

Crewe was educated at Manchester Grammar School and then went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he gained a first-class BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1966. He was appointed a Lecturer in Politics at Lancaster University at the age of 21, before returning to Oxford in 1969 for two years as a Junior Research Fellow, and moving to a Lectureship at the Department of Government at the University of Essex in 1971.

At Essex Crewe was Director of the ESRC Data Archive from 1974 to 1982, Co-Director of the British Election Study from 1973 to 1981. With Dr. David Rose he established the British Household Panel Study and founded the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Essex in 1990.

From 1977 to 1982, he was editor of the British Journal of Political Science and from 1984 to 1992 he was a co-editor.

Crewe undertook extensive research from the early 1970s to the mid-1990s in elections and voting behaviour, and published his results in Decade of Dealignment and numerous articles, including the influential 'Partisan Dealignment in Britain 1964-74', British Journal of Political Science, 7, pp. 129–90, which argued that voters' identification with the Conservative and Labour was steadily weakening as a result of the decline in class loyalty and in the connections voters made between class interests and party policies. He was a frequent commentator on UK elections for television and the press. He argued that the Labour party was destined for electoral defeat as the traditional working class contracted unless it both appealed to a wider social constituency embracing other classes and revised its assumptions about the policies that would appeal to a majority of voters. He regarded the electoral success of New Labour in the 1997 and 2001 general elections as a vindication of his electoral analysis.