Voting Patterns, Party Spending and Space in England and Wales

There is a growing body of literature which suggests that voting patterns are not independent from space yet few empirical investigations exist which take explicit account of space. This article examines the determinants of voting patterns across constituencies in England and Wales using spatial econometric methods. The results suggest that while socioeconomic factors are key determinants of party vote shares in constituencies, there is strong spatial autocorrelation in voting patterns. We find that each major political party is influenced by space to different extents with the Liberal Democrats visibly exploiting spatial autocorrelation to increase their vote shares.2005 General Election, voting patterns, political party spending; spatial regression

England’s local elections 2018: the Lib Dems’ performance was underwhelming – but these were not the elections to judge the party on

Despite media headlines to the contrary, the Liberal Democrats’ performance in the recent local elections was pretty underwhelming, explains David Cutts. But it is the 2019 local elections that will tell us more about the long-term viability of the party, since those will concern a larger number of English districts where the Lib Dems will be seeking to reclaim ground lost to the Conservatives since 2010

Requirements for an Adaptive Multimedia Presentation System with Contextual Supplemental Support Media

Investigations into the requirements for a practical adaptive multimedia presentation system have led the writers to propose the use of a video segmentation process that provides contextual supplementary updates produced by users. Supplements consisting of tailored segments are dynamically inserted into previously stored material in response to questions from users. A proposal for the use of this technique is presented in the context of personalisation within a Virtual Learning Environment. During the investigation, a brief survey of advanced adaptive approaches revealed that adaptation may be enhanced by use of manually generated metadata, automated or semi-automated use of metadata by stored context dependent ontology hierarchies that describe the semantics of the learning domain. The use of neural networks or fuzzy logic filtering is a technique for future investigation. A prototype demonstrator is under construction

The electoral effectiveness of constituency campaigning in the 2010 British General Election: The ‘triumph’ of Labour?

This is the post-print version of the final paper published in Electoral Studies. The published article is available from the link below. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. Copyright @ 2011 Elsevier B.V.This article establishes a model of likely campaign effectiveness, before examining the intensity of constituency campaigning at the 2010 general election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes, using both aggregate and individual level data. It shows that constituency campaigning yielded benefits in varying degrees for all three main parties and that Labour’s constituency campaign efforts were effective despite the electoral context, and ultimately affected the overall outcome of the election. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of the circumstances under which campaigns are likely to be more or less effective, and provide further evidence that a carefully managed campaign stands the most chance of delivering tangible electoral payoffs

Personality and the gender gap in political ambition

In this article, we offer an analysis of the gender gap in political ambition that takes personality and other canonical predictors of levels of ambition into account simultaneously. We use original large-N survey data from Britain. We find that the gender gap in nascent ambition is robust to the inclusion of measures of personality alongside traditional socio-economic predictors of political ambition. Second, we find that increased extraversion is related to higher levels of nascent ambition, but only for women. Third, we find that personality does not drive any move from intending to run for office to actually doing so

Where Do They Go and Why, How Do They Vary and What Is Their Impact::Assessing Leaders’ Campaign Visits in England 2010–2019

Leaders’ visits are now an integral part of British general election campaigns. Yet, outside of a few cross-sectional explorations of leaders on the campaign trail, it remains under-explored. Here, we redress this imbalance. Using a unique data source collected by the authors over the four most recent British general elections, we explore where leaders visit, what determines these visits and whether the reasons have changed over time. For the first time, we also put forward an original typology of leader visits in England. Our findings detail how the type of visit varies over time according to the electoral context, by respective campaign strategies, closeness to election-day and how it is often shaped by the personalities of the leaders themselves. In the final part, our evidence suggests that leaders’ visits impact party support although the effects vary for parties across elections.<br/

What the Castilla-León elections told us about the trajectory of Spanish politics

The far-right party Vox is seeking its first share of power in a Spanish region following elections in Castilla y León on 13 February. Paul Kennedy and David Cutts assess what the elections told us about the current state of play in Spanish politics

Where Do They Go and Why, How Do They Vary and What Is Their Impact::Assessing Leaders’ Campaign Visits in England 2010–2019

Leaders’ visits are now an integral part of British general election campaigns. Yet, outside of a few cross-sectional explorations of leaders on the campaign trail, it remains under-explored. Here, we redress this imbalance. Using a unique data source collected by the authors over the four most recent British general elections, we explore where leaders visit, what determines these visits and whether the reasons have changed over time. For the first time, we also put forward an original typology of leader visits in England. Our findings detail how the type of visit varies over time according to the electoral context, by respective campaign strategies, closeness to election-day and how it is often shaped by the personalities of the leaders themselves. In the final part, our evidence suggests that leaders’ visits impact party support although the effects vary for parties across elections.<br/