Iain MacAllister

The Electoral Impact of Constituency Campaigning in Britain, 1992-2001

Political parties maintain local organisations and recruit members mainly to fight elections. For most of the post-war period, however, the dominant view among analysts has been that constituency campaigning in British general elections has little or no effect on election outcomes. This view has been challenged over the last ten years or so. Evidence derived from post-election surveys of constituency election agents following the 1992, 1997 and 2001 general elections is used here to show that the intensity of constituency campaigning significantly affects turnout levels and, for Labour and the Liberal Democrats, levels of party support. There is also some evidence that Conservative campaigning affected constituency variations in the partys performance in 2001. The conclusions reached on the basis of aggregate-level analysis are supported by analysis of individual-level data derived from British Election Study surveys. The effects of campaigning are not large, but they are clear and significant – and sufficient to affect the numbers of seats won by the major parties. In the light of this, parties have good reasons to maintain healthy local organisations.

The impact of constituency campaigning in the 2001 general election

Among the most interesting developments in British elections during the 1990s was the increased attention given to constituency campaigning by the major parties. Having been eclipsed by television and the national campaign since the 1960s, and consistently downgraded in importance by academic analysts, local campaigning was revitalized. There were a number of reasons for this, including the development of personal computers, the campaigning possibilities opened up by telephone canvassing and an increasingly professional approach to campaigning on the part of staff at party headquarters. The revival of the parties’ enthusiasm for constituency campaigning was matched by, and in part also encouraged by, renewed interest on the part of academics whose work significantly revised the prevailing orthodoxy about the impact of local campaigning. Far from being a ‘ritual’, undertaken by party workers out of habit, a series of studies by three separate groups of researchers provided clear and persuasive evidence that local campaigning affected election outcomes. Measuring the strength of campaigns in various ways, Seyd and Whiteley, Johnston, Pattie and colleagues, and Denver and Hands demonstrated that in recent elections variations across constituencies in the intensity of campaigns mounted by the parties were associated with variations in their electoral performance (see, for example, Denver and Hands, 1997, 1998; Denver, Hands and Henig, 1998; Johnston, Pattie and Fieldhouse, 1995; Whiteley and Seyd, 1994). There are some areas of disagreement between these research teams on whether Conservative campaigning has been as effective as that of the other major parties, for example, and on whether campaigns by incumbent parties were as effective as those of challengers but there is substantial agreement on the central point: at least as far as Labour and Liberal Democrats are concerned, constituencies which mount strong campaigns generally achieve better results than those whose campaigns are weaker.

Locating the Altruistic Voter: Context, Egocentric Voting, and Support for the Conservative Party at the 1997 General Election in England and Wales

Egocentric economic voting models are widely used in studies of voting behaviour in Great Britain: they suggest that people whose standard of living has risen recently as a perceived consequence of government policies are more likely to vote for the governments return to office than are those who blame government policies for a decline in their living standards. But many people whose living standards have increased vote against the government. Analyses reported here, using specially constructed bespoke neighbourhoods around the homes of respondents to the 1997 British Election Study, show that the latter group mainly live in areas of high local unemployment. This suggests a pattern of altruistic voting, of people who are prospering personally, but whose neighbours are not, voting against the incumbent government—a pattern confirmed by statistical analyses of both egocentric and sociotropic voting.

Social locations, spatial locations and voting at the 1997 British general election: Evaluating the sources of Conservative support

Most study of British voting behaviour focuses on class and other compositional influences on party choice, paying relatively little attention to contextual influences — spatial variations in patterns of party choice. Recent work stresses the interdependence of social and spatial locations as influences on how people vote, which this paper analyses using the large British Household Panel Study data set. By locating respondents in their local social milieux as well as their class and other contexts, it shows that how people voted at the 1997 British general election reflected just as much on where they lived and who they lived among as to what social categories they belonged to.

The Funding of Constituency Party General Election Campaigns in Great Britain

The issues of political party campaign expenditure and funding sources are again high on the British political agenda. Most attention is focused on the amounts raised and spent by the parties nationally, with much less being devoted to the separate local parties in the 641 parliamentary constituencies—where the amounts that can be spent on general election campaigns are subject to legal constraints. Little is known about the sources of funds for those campaigns, and research on the 1997 general election has shown that for most parties the legal requirement to disclose where they obtain their income does not result in the disclosure of original sources of their income. As at previous elections, however, the amounts spent in the constituencies have an impact on the outcome, sustaining the case for regulation; much is spent outside the legal constraints, however, and it is difficult to envisage ways in which this might be regulated.

Changing biases in the operation of the UK's electoral system, 1950–97

The biased outcomes of recent British general elections, whereby the two main parties (Conservative and Labour) would have achieved different percentages of the seats in the House of Commons for the same percentages of the votes cast, are explored, using a method of bias decomposition developed by a New Zealand political scientist. Overall, the situation changed markedly between 1950 and 1997: the biases in the system strongly favoured the Conservatives in the 1950s and early 1960s, but Labour in 1992 and 1997. Examination of the seven components of the bias measure shows that most of these moved in Labours favour over the 50-year period, with a major shift between 1992 and 1997 because of the greater geographical efficiency of the Labour partys vote at the latter date: reasons for this are suggested.

Yellow fever? The political geography of liberal voting in Great Britain

Abstract The rise of the Labour Party after World War I forced the Liberal Party in Britain back into the nonconformist and remote ‘Celtic Fringe’, where local identity and religion rather than class remained the dominant political cleavages. The party has struggled to break out of these Liberal ‘heartlands’ ever since. However, in the 1997 General Election the Liberal Democrats won a total of 46 constituencies, their best result since 1929, despite a fall in their national share of the vote. While historical voting patterns and the level of religious nonconformity can help explain the success in the traditional heartlands seats we must turn to contemporary reasons for why the party were able to make gains in areas of historical weakness. Bridging the credibility gap through success at the local level or in by-elections has been particularly vital for the party. Building on the understanding gained from qualitative interviews with the party elite and case studies in key constituencies, we analyze the basis of Liberal Democrat support in 1997. Models that include data on historical patterns, demographics and the local political context are found to be particularly successful in explaining the party’s support.

Housing tenure, local context, scale and voting in England and Wales, 1997☆

The absence of data at the correct spatial scales has made testing for the neighbourhood effect in voting at British general elections very difficult to undertake. A specially-constructed data set for ‘bespoke neighbourhoods’ at a range of small scales makes such tests feasible for the 1997 general election. These are used in conjunction with individual data obtained from the British Election Study to test whether voting by housing tenure varied according to the composition of the local housing market. The results provide evidence that is entirely consistent with the hypothesised effect (although it is only circumstantial regarding the reason for it), and strongly indicates that how people vote is substantially influenced by the nature of their (very) local milieux.

Constituency Marginality and Turnout in Britain Revisited.

(2003). Constituency marginality and turnout in Britain revisited. British Elections & Parties Review: Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 174-194.

The state of two nations: An analysis of voting in the Scottish parliament and welsh assembly elections 1999

The following article compares and contrasts the elections for the recently devolved Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales.