Suchergebnisse

This volume features key political issues for 1990s Britain: the reform of the Labour party; the use of opinion polls; the impact of the media; European integration; Scotland and regional trends; and the bases of party support.

One feature of the result of the 2015 British general election was the reduction, to a level lower than at any time since 1945, in the number of marginal constituencies. This paper shows that the main reason for this was the change in the level and pattern of support then for the country's smaller parties, compared to the previous election in 2010. Although support for the two largest parties—Conservative and Labour—changed very little, the 2015 result nevertheless meant that each had fewer marginal seats to defend and more safe seats where its continued incumbency was virtually assured. After the 2015 election, Labour's chances of becoming the largest, let alone the majority, party in the House of Commons were slight unless it achieves a swing of some six percentage points.

Analyses of local campaign effects are dominated by aggregate-level analyses of constituency activity. Though individual-level data are available on whether voters are (or remember being) contacted by parties during campaigns, their analysis is fraught with difficulties, not least the extent to which memory of campaign contact is itself conditioned partly on party allegiance, creating a circularity in the analysis of the impact of party contact on vote choice. To some degree, this can be (and has been) dealt with in a regression framework. However, this does not fully deal with the potential difficulties. Ideally, experimental approaches are needed to tease out definitively the effects of campaign exposure on individual's election decisions. However, these present practical difficulties. In this paper, therefore, we utilise quasi-experimental difference-in-difference and propensity score matching methods to estimate campaign effects at the 2010 British General Election from individual-level data.

Political parties are crucial to British democracy, providing the foundations for mobilising voters. Their constituency branches are key links between voters and Parliamentary candidates and their activities require two vital resources – people and money. Much has been written on the decline of party membership but far less on money. In this much-needed new book, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie use the latest research and hitherto unpublished material to explore financial differences across the UK's three main parties in the four years leading up to the 2010 General Election. They look at how much local parties raise for election campaigns and find that the more money candidates spend then, the better their performance. Analyses of their annual accounts, however, show that many local parties are unable to raise all of the money that they are entitled to spend on such campaigns. This reveals an unhealthy picture of grassroots party organisation in which the capacity to engage effectively with many voters is concentrated in a relatively small number of constituencies and is likely to remain so. This timely and essential book will make a major contribution to the literature on British elections and parties, especially to continuing debates regarding party funding. It will make important reading for academics, students, politicians, civil servants and others interested in this topic

Analyses the effects of political homogeneity and heterogeneity in citizens' conversation networks on ideological position Other things being equal, membership of more politically homogenous conversation networks leads individuals into more extreme political evaluations Network homogeneity drives polarisation of political attitudes and creates larger perceived gulfs between individuals' own views and the views they ascribe to parties opposed by their conversation partners.Persuasion is a well-known consequence of political discussion between citizens: people bring their partisan and ideological views into line with those of their discussion partners. Less often considered is another aspect of this process: does persuasion in conversation networks increase the gap individuals perceive between their own views and those of groups or parties opposed by their discussion partners? Building on work which suggests that ideological homogeneity within networks leads to increased polarisation and drives individuals to relative political extremes, the article examines British voters' perceptions of parties whose views they do not share. The more internally homogeneous the partisan message coming from their main discussion partners, the more extreme individuals become in their views, and the greater the gulf they perceive between themselves and parties not supported by their networks. But the effect is evident only on issues which are politically salient, suggesting this is a real conversation effect.

First-past-the-post electoral rules create strong incentives for parties to focus their campaigns on key marginal seats and much research has been devoted to the vote-winning potential of such activity. Less attention has been given to local party organisations' ability to mount these campaigns, however. We therefore examine recent evidence of British political parties' local campaigning capacities. Overall, Britain's grassroots party organisations are struggling. While some local parties are resource-rich, many are not: only half of all Conservative and fewer than one in six Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency parties had an annual turnover in 2010 exceeding £25,000. Many local parties are seriously under-resourced: funds are limited, donations meagre, and members few. For most local parties, campaign resources depend primarily on their own local fund-raising initiatives – but their yields tend to be low. Even in key marginal constituencies, many local parties increasingly struggle to resource their campaign activities. What is more, there are substantial variations between the various political parties in the relative health of their constituency operations, and in the national parties' abilities to subsidise local activities in strategically important seats. The implications for local voter mobilisation efforts in the UK are not good.