Paul Whiteley

Economic Growth and Social Capital

Recent interdisciplinary theoretical work has suggested that social capital, or the interpersonal trust of citizens, plays an important role in explaining both the efficiency of political institutions, and in the economic performance of contemporary societies. This paper examines the relationship between social capital and economic growth in a sample of thirty-four countries over the period 1970 to 1992, within the framework of a modified neo-classical model of economic growth. The findings suggest that social capital has an impact on growth which is at least as strong as that of human capital or education, which has been the focus of much of the recent work on endogenous growth theory. It appears to have about the same impact on growth as catch-up or the ability of poorer nations to adopt technological innovations pioneered by their richer counterparts.

Performance Politics and the British Voter

What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in Britain and elsewhere.

Is the party over? The decline of party activism and membership across the democratic world

The decline of party activism and membership in European democracies has been well documented, but not effectively explained. This article examines the state of party membership and activism across a wide spectrum of democratic countries and shows that membership is in decline in most of them. It tests two rival explanations of the decline using a cross-sectional multi-level analysis of data from the ISSP Citizenship survey of 2004. One hypothesis is that the decline is due to ‘state capture’, or excessive state regulation brought about by an ever-closer relationship between parties and the state which has the effect of stifling voluntary activity at the grassroots level. A second suggests that parties are being undermined by the growth of relatively new forms of participation, notably cheque book participation, and consumer and Internet participation. These provide alternative outlets for political action outside traditional forms of participation such as party involvement. There is evidence to support the first of these hypotheses, but not the second.

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.

Local Party Campaigning and Electoral Mobilization in Britain

Research on the effects of local election campaigning by party activists on electoral behavior has been confined almost entirely to the United States, where most findings suggest that there are significant effects. This note discusses reasons why such effects are also likely to exist, and may even be stronger, in Britain than in the United States. It then goes on to estimate models of the turnout and vote share for the Labour party in the 1987 general election in Britain. The results show that local campaigning by Labour party members had a significant influence on the Labour vote share in the 1987 election, but not on turnout. A model is developed using data from a national survey of Labour party members, together with a number of control variables to test relationships. The findings are similar to those by Huckfeldt and Sprague for gubernatorial and Senate elections in the United States.

Recapturing the Falklands: Models of Conservative Popularity, 1979–83

Recently, Sanders et al. have made the intriguing and counter-intuitive argument that the impact of the Falklands war on Conservative popularity was inconsequential. Their analyses raise important theoretical and methodological issues concerning the time-series analysis of party support. This present article contends that the stepwise regression procedures employed by Sanders et al. are misleading, particularly when predictor variables are highly intercorrelated. Box-Jenkins analyses demonstrate that the Falklands strongly influenced Conservative support, net of the effects of macroeconomic conditions and personal economic expectations. The significance of the latter variable in the models confirms Sanders et al. s argument about the role of subjective economic variables in party popularity functions. Non-economic variables are also relevant, however, and popularity functions that model them correctly will enhance our understanding of both the economics and the politics of party support.

Downs, stokes and the dynamics of electoral choice

A six-wave 2005–09 national panel survey conducted in conjunction with the British Election Study provided data for an investigation of sources of stability and change in voters’ party preferences. The authors test competing spatial and valence theories of party choice and investigate the hypothesis that spatial calculations provide cues for making valence judgements. Analyses reveal that valence mechanisms – heuristics based on party leader images, party performance evaluations and mutable partisan attachments – outperform a spatial model in terms of strength of direct effects on party choice. However, spatial effects still have sizeable indirect effects on the vote via their influence on valence judgements. The results of exogeneity tests bolster claims about the flow of influence from spatial calculations to valence judgments to electoral choice.

British Party Members : An Overview

Party membership and activism is declining among Britain’s three major parties. Using individual membership survey data, evidence of this decline, particularly in party activism, is presented. Reasons for the decline are considered. It is suggested that choice-based rather than structural explanations are more persuasive. The impact of the decline upon the parties and the political system is considered. The article concludes that it is possible for parties to stimulate membership and activism.

New Models for New Labour: The Political Economy of Labour Party Support, January 1992–April 1997

This article uses newly available British time-series data to analyze dynamic interrelationships among Labour vote intentions, perceptions that the Labour leader would make the best prime minister, and Labour party identification. Error-correction models reveal that best prime minister perceptions and party identification have important short- and long-run influences on vote intentions. Tests of rival models indicate that personal economic expectations outperform other economic evaluations in the vote intention and party identification analyses. National retrospective judgments perform well in analyses of best prime minister perceptions, and emotional reactions to economic conditions significantly influence these perceptions as well as party identification.

How to win a landslide by really trying: the effects of local campaigning on voting in the 1997 British general election

Abstract There is a continuing debate among political scientists and commentators about the relevance of local party campaigns in influencing the vote in British general elections. We review that debate in the case of the 1997 British general election, and then go on to specify and estimate models of the influence of local campaigning on the constituency vote share for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives in that election. In contrast to the Michigan studies, which have tended to emphasise long-term partisan and policy-related predispositions, the results of our analysis show that local campaigning, measured from surveys of local party members together with proxy variables based on constituency spending data, had a very important influence on the vote. The effects appear to be strongest for the Liberal Democrats, important for New Labour, and rather weak for the Conservatives. The findings are relevant for both debates about campaign effects in Britain and debates about the electoral–professional party model. The results imply that the image of the electoral–professional party as a well-organised ‘army’ that obeys commands from the centre is misleading when applied to understanding party election campaigns.