Campaigning and advertising: an evaluation of the components of constituency activism at recent British General Elections

It is becoming increasingly accepted among analysts of British voting behaviour that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, local campaigning matters. The widespread view, largely propagated by David Butler and his co-workers on the Nuffield election studies, has been that campaigning in the constituencies by party activists and their candidates has no influence on the outcome: the distribution of votes across the parties in each constituency is a function of the national campaign only. This view was initially challenged by studies of canvassing in the 1970s, and extended during the 1980s by studies of campaign spending in the constituencies; further support was provided by work in the late 1980s and early 1990s on party canvassing activity. This note takes the challenge forward with an analysis of the impact of different aspects of constituency campaigning

Hanging on the telephone? Doorstep and telephone canvassing at the British General Election of 1997

After years of neglect, a growing literature has reclaimed the constituency campaign as an important aspect of British elections. However, relatively little work has been done to disentangle which aspects of the local campaign are effective, and which are not. For much of the twentieth century, the mechanics of the local campaign were in essentials unchanged. But changing campaign technologies in the last decade offer new possibilities to party campaign managers. The 1997 British general election was the first in which parties made extensive use of telephone canvassing as well as the more traditional doorstep canvass. This article provides a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of traditional versus telephone constituency campaigns. Traditional face-to-face canvassing had a statistically significant influence on the outcome of the 1997 general election. But the telephone canvass did not

A close-run thing? Accounting for changing overall turnout in UK general elections

Turnout at UK General Elections has remained stubbornly below post-war levels in the new millennium. Between 1950 and 1997, official turnout averaged 76% and never fell below 71% (in 1997); since 2001 average turnout has been 12 percentage points lower, at 64%. We investigate several possible explanations for that decline: the lack of competitiveness in recent contests; an increase in ideological similarity between the major parties; and partisan dealignment. Although electoral competitiveness affects turnout, and in the expected directions, it cannot readily account for the sudden drop in participation after 2000. But there is evidence that aggregate levels of partisanship are important: the unusually low turnout levels since 2000 are associated with unusually low levels of partisanship, and there are signs of a ‘threshold effect’

Class dealignment and the neighbourhood effect: Miller revisited

The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-area census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristics of voters' local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided into five equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for which further research is necessary to identify the processes involved

Are Regions Important in British Elections? Valence Politics and Local Economic Contexts at the 2010 General Election

Pattie C. J., Johnston R. J., Schipper M. and Potts L. Are regions important in British elections? Valence politics and local economic contexts at the 2010 General Election, Regional Studies. Electoral support for major parties is influenced by judgements of economic performance. This helps account for electoral geographies, as economic conditions vary spatially. Past work, concentrating on objective economic indicators or on voters' personal economic evaluations, suggested that contextual effects work most powerfully when very local, suggesting that regional voting trends are artefacts of more intimate geographies. This paper extends that work by examining how voters' decisions are influenced by the economic evaluations of others in their communities and demonstrates that some contextual effects, at least, really are more powerful at the regional than at more local scales

Geographies of Brexit and its aftermath: voting in England at the 2016 referendum and the 2017 general election

Much has been written since the 2016 Brexit referendum regarding the divides within British society that the vote illustrated – including geographical divides – and their influence on the outcome of the 2017 general election. Focusing on England, this paper explores the extent and significance of those geographical divides at the 2016 referendum, at a variety of spatial scales – concluding that apart from a major difference between parts of inner London and the rest of England these were largely insignificant. Turning to the 2017 general election, analyses show that this return to a predominantly two-party system within England largely involved a replication of the geography of the 2015 general election outcome. A new electoral map of England did not emerge from the divisions that Brexit stimulated: the country is divided along class lines, with London standing out as different from all other regions

The changing geography of voting Conservative in Great Britain: is it all to do with inequality?

In a series of publications, Dorling has argued that there is a strong correlation between levels of inequality in Great Britain and the spatial concentration of Conservative party support at general elections. His interpretation of this relationship is questioned; the interpretation is inconsistent with the data and fails to take account of Britain’s changing party system and electoral geography

Local context, social networks and neighborhood effects on voter choice

This handbook details the key developments and state of the art research across elections, voting behavior and the public opinion by providing both an advanced overview of each core area and engaging in debate about the relative merits of ..

Learning on the job? Adapting party campaign strategy to changing information on the local political context

An extensive literature demonstrates that local campaign efforts in the UK generally pay electoral dividends for parties. As a result, rational parties focus campaign efforts most in seats where the electoral outcome is not pre-determined and where a few more votes either way could change the result. An important indicator of where such constituencies can be found is provided by prior election results, and research has shown that rational parties tend to focus their campaigns most heavily on those seats where the previous election was close and less in seats where in the past they either lost badly or won comfortably. However, much less attention has been given to how local parties react to new information showing how the competitive situation in their area is changing as a general election approaches. We use data from a rare set of local opinion polls conducted by Lord Ashcroft in British constituencies in the runup to the 2015 UK General Election. Although hampered by their generally small size, limited fundraising capacity, and reliance on volunteers, local parties do appear to respond to new information. Our results indicate that parties tend to put more effort into local campaigns in seats where an opinion poll had been carried out than in otherwise similar seats where one had not. And, the more competitive the poll suggested their race was, the more resources they devoted to it

Predicting general election outcomes: campaigns and changing voter knowledge at the 2017 general election in England

There is a growing literature suggesting that the result for each constituency at British general elections can be predicted using ‘citizen forecasts’ obtained through voter surveys. This may be true for the majority of constituencies where the result at previous contests was a substantial majority for one party’s candidates: few ‘safe seats’ change hands. But is it true in the marginal constituencies, where elections are won and lost? Analysis of such ‘citizen forecast’ data for the Labour-Conservative marginal constituencies in 2017 indicates not. Although respondents were aware of the seats’ relative marginality and of general trends in party support during the campaign, they could not separate out those that were eventually lost by each party from those that were won again, even in seats where the elected party won comfortably