Charles Pattie

Winning the Local Vote: The Effectiveness of Constituency Campaign Spending in Great Britain, 1983–1992

Much recent analysis of British politics has assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that constituency campaigns have no impact upon an electorate that draws on an increasingly nationalized media for its information. We employ data on constituency campaign spending to challenge this interpretation. Local party campaigners are rational in their use of funds, spending most in seats where the competition is close and least where there is little hope of winning. What is more, campaign spending is clearly associated with voting, increasing support for the spending party and decreasing support for its rivals. Contrary to the accepted wisdom, local campaign spending can result in important shifts in the vote. However, local campaigning seems to be of much more value to challengers than to incumbents.

Citizenship and Civic Engagement: Attitudes and Behaviour in Britain

Analysis of patterns of participation revealed three dimensions of civic activism in modern Britain: individualistic activism; contact activism; and collective activism. Three alternative theories of participation were examined to account for these dimensions: general incentives; social capital; and civic voluntarism. None proved sufficient in itself to account for civic activism in modern Britain: each provided only part of the explanation.

‘People Who Talk Together Vote Together’: An Exploration of Contextual Effects in Great Britain

Many students of British voting patterns have tested for the existence of contextual effects, which postulate that voters are influenced by events and people in their local milieux. One of those contextual effects is the neighborhood effect, whereby individuals are influenced by the nature of the politically relevant information circulating within their social networks, many of which are spatially constrained to their local area. Although ecological analyses have identified patterns consistent with this hypothesis, there have been virtually no direct investigations of the effect, largely because of the absence of relevant data. Using information from a large, clustered survey of voters at the time of the 1992 general election, this paper uncovers clear evidence of such effects: people are much more likely to change their votes in a particular direction if those with whom they discuss political issues support that direction, especially if they are members of the respondents family and are the individuals with whom they discuss politics most.

Tactical Voting in Great Britain in 1983 and 1987: An Alternative Approach

The analyses presented in this note have extended earlier work on tactical voting in Great Britain by looking at variations between constituencies in the flow-of-the-vote matrix that are consistent with hypotheses of tactical voting. They have suggested that about 4 per cent of the British electorate voted tactically in 1983, as did nearly 6 per cent in 1987. The volume of tactical voting was greater in Conservative-held than in Labour-held seats, and in both was greater the more marginal the seat. In general, the opposition party with the greatest chance of unseating the incumbent, as suggested by the result of the previous election, gained from the tactical voting process, and there is evidence that greater campaign effort, as indexed by constituency spending, helped them in this.

Split-Ticket Patterns in Mixed-Member Proportional Election Systems : Estimates and Analyses of their Spatial Variation at the German Federal Election, 1998

Mixed-member proportional election systems give voters two choices – one for a party candidate in a first-past-the-post single-member constituency election and the other for a party list in a multi-member constituency. Some will vote a straight ticket (i.e. vote for the same party at each contest); others may vote a split-ticket. Although such an electoral system has been operating in Germany since 1953, very little work has been done on variations between constituencies in either the volume of split-ticket voting or the direction of the switching involved. Using an entropy-maximizing method, this article reports estimates of the pattern of straight-ticket and split-ticket voting in each of Germany’s 328 constituencies at the 1998 federal elections. Analyses of the variations show that the patterns are consistent with patterns of party strength at the constituency level: the stronger a party’s performance at the 1994 election, the better its ability to retain the support of straight-ticket voters in 1998, to limit the out-flows of split-ticket voters, and to attract split-ticket voters who supported another party in the list contest. The recent adoption of the mixed-member proportional (MMP) or additional member (AMS) electoral system in countries such as New Zealand, Scotland and Wales, as well as consideration of its use elsewhere (as in Portugal) have stimulated interest in the degree and nature of split-ticket voting which such a two-vote system permits. 1 However, relatively little research has been reported (in the English language) on certain aspects of split-ticket voting in the country that has used MMP for all of its federal elections since 1953 – Germany (the Federal Republic of (West) Germany until 1990; the reunited state thereafter). 2

The Impact of Spending on Party Constituency Campaigns at Recent British General Elections

British political parties spent over £10 million on the 1992 general election campaign in the constituencies. Most commentators believe that this expenditure has no impact on the election outcome. Analyses of the last three inter-election periods show otherwise, however. Parties spent most in marginal constituencies and in defending the seats that they held. In general, the more they spent, the better their electoral performance, which could have influenced the outcome in a not-insignificant number of seats. Overall, the pattern of local campaign activity appears to be both rational and effective.

Context, Conversation and Conviction: Social Networks and Voting at the 1992 British General Election

After some initial interest, analyses of contextual effects in British voting behaviour have tended to downplay or ignore the role of face to face conversations between electors. However, evidence from the 1992 British Election Study shows that conversations with partisan discussants do act as a statistically significant influence on voting. Those who discuss politics with supporters of a particular party are more likely to switch their votes to that party, if they had not previously voted for it, and less likely to switch to other parties. Conversations with family members are particularly important, though talking to other discussants also plays a part.

Measuring Local Campaign Effects: Labour Party Constituency Campaigning at the 1987 General Election

Thursday 31 March: Polling day. To headquarters at about 9 and from 9.30 am to 6 visiting all the polling stations and committee rooms. We had lunch at the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ and then went out again with our loudspeaker, doing final knocking up. After the polls closed we cleared up the headquarters, went back to the hotel and began watching the BBC Election programme. It was evident that a big Labour victory was coming …1

A Low Turnout Landslide: Abstention at the British General Election of 1997

Turnout at the 1997 British General Election fell to a post-war low of 71 percent, raising worried speculation about long term decline in political participation. On closer analysis, however, this judgement seems premature. Most of the post-war decline in British turnout occurred between 1950 and 1970, and there is no evidence of long term decline in general election turnout between 1974 and 1997. The closeness of the electoral competition is a better predictor of national turnout than a secular trend. Close elections produce high turnout, but widely anticipated landslides (as in 1997) produce low turnouts. The 1997 election was also notable for the small ideological gap between the main parties. Analysis of individual voter abstention in 1992 and 1997 reveals that changes from one year to the other in the perceived difference between Labour and the Conservatives is crucial to accounting for the fall in turnout between the two contests. Turnout in 1997 was low because the result was widely anticipated and because relatively few saw important policy differences between the parties, not because British democracy is in crisis.

Local battles in a national landslide: constituency campaigning at the 2001 British general election

Abstract Constituency campaigning is an important—though till recently relatively understudied—aspect of electioneering in Great Britain. The paper analyses new evidence of constituency campaigning at the 2001 British General Election. Not only are parties shown to be (on the whole) rational in how they utilise local campaign resources, but those local campaign efforts are also shown to have an impact on actual election outcomes. The more a party campaigns locally, the better it tends to do at an election, other things being equal. Furthermore, survey evidence demonstrates that, over the course of a campaign, whether individual voters are likely to change their electoral choices depends on the extent to which they have been contacted by the parties via constituency campaigns. Voters who are contacted in their constituency by a party are more likely to switch support to that party than are voters who are not contacted.