Blessed Be the Tie that Unbinds: Constituency Pressures and National Party Forces in Great Britain

This study looks at the relationship between constituency service and party ties at the local and national levels. The data come from two surveys: one of the British electorate in May 1979 and the other of Members and their agents in those constituencies sampled in the voter study. Pressures at the local party level, it is argued, reinforce the electoral incentive for Members to perform constituency services diligently. Members widely believe that constituency work improves relations with activists and bolsters local party morale. For their part, core constituents—activists and strong party identifiers—value constituency work very highly and are more likely than other groups in the electorate to make use of the Member's services. The effect of constituency effort at the local level is to weaken party ties at the national level. Ivor Crewe noted that Labour fought very well in its marginal seats in 1979, and this study argues that this was because Labour MPs in marginal seats worked hard to establish a local identity. MPs in marginal seats tend to have more favourable voter ratings than do those in safer seats. Moreover, MPs who were active in their constituencies had better swings in 1979 than MPs who were inactive. For Labour Members, constituency work "cushioned" the swing, and for Conservative Members, it "amplified" the swing. The paper concludes with some speculation about why non-policy pressures might increase at the local level

Dynamic and Static Components of Political Support in Britain

This paper will consider a model of the British electorate which tries to account for both exogenous structural and endogenous political factors. The specification of the proposed model will be discussed in some detail and compared with the Butler and Stokes paradigm, which places almost exclusive emphasis on exogenous structural factors. The estimates obtained from a multivariate regression are then used to measure the relative impact of structural and political components on individual preferences and to draw inferences about the sources of electoral change in Britain. We will then confront the other half of the problem; namely, can a model which incorporates a significant endogenous component successfully account for electoral stability. The estimates of issue and lagged partisan components from a second set of regressions will form the basis of some observations about the stability of preferences across individuals in this model

Assessing the Partisan Effects of Redistricting

The purpose of this paper is to assess the reality behind the politician's perception that redistricting matters. There are, of course, many dimensions to that perception since redistricting has many effects. This paper will focus on the impact that boundary changes have on the partisan composition of seats. In order to do this, it will be necessary to specify what the expected partisan effects of redistricting are and how they can be measure. Thus, the paper first explains how the impact of redistricting will vary with the strategy of particular plans. Following this, there is an exploration of some techniques for measuring the partisan impact of boundary changes, and then a detailed analysis of the most important Congressional redistricting in 1982—the Burton plan in California

Dynamic and Static Components of Political Support in Britain

Many studies in British politics in particular and comparative politics more generally have shown a strong relation between personal attributes and voting behavior. Such studies have tended to assume an excessively static picture of party support. "Issue-voting" models, on the other hand, have not adequately accounted for sources of electoral stability. This paper attempts to link structural and political factors in a single model of political preference, and to show the implications of this for the study of broader questions such as why political systems remain stable or change over time. Two routes by which the social structure affects political preferences are posited, estimated, and compared. The strength of the endogenous political component raises the question of the source of stability in the British political system. The proposed model thus estimates the importance of lagged judgments and socialization biases in maintaining a core of "partisan" support for the parties