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This paper uses data gathered in the 2001 British Election Study to investigate the determinants of turnout in general elections. The analyses focus on the explanatory power of a variant of a modified rational choice model which has stimulated protracted debate among students of voting behaviour. The paper also considers two versions of the much discussed ?heartlands hypothesis? which has been offered to explain the unprecedented drop in turnout in the 2001 general election. Analyses indicate that all three variables in the modified rational choice model have strong and statistically significant effects. Although sense of civic duty is predictably powerful, turnout also is affected by expected benefits and perceived costs of voting. Analyses do not support a ?Downsian? version of the heartlands hypothesis that blames low turnout on New Labour’s abandonment of traditional Labour policy and ideological positions. A ‘stokesian? version of the hypothesis that attributes effects to government performance dissatisfaction among Labour’s heartlands supports fares better. The paper concludes by considering the implications of major findings for future trends in electoral participation in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UK held its second nationwide referendum, on reform of the electoral system, in May 2011. This paper analyses the quality of debate that preceded the referendum in the print media. It begins by considering how debate quality in the context of a referendum campaign may best be conceptualized. Then, using content analysis of media coverage and drawing where possible on international comparisons, it investigates three aspects of that debate: its quantity; the balance between Yes and No arguments, and the quality of reasoning. It finds that the quantity of debate was comparable to other recent electoral reform referendums. The coverage was balanced overall but not, on the whole, within individual newspapers. The different indicators of the quality of reasoning present a mixed picture. The paper concludes by considering how the analysis could be developed further, notably through more detailed comparison with other cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased support for the UK Independence Party (UKIP) adds to the difficulties that the issue of European integration causes for the British Conservative Party. A hard Eurosceptic party supporting withdrawal from the European Union (EU), UKIP is winning support from disaffected Conservatives and intensifying divisions with the Conservative parliamentary party on the EU issue. This paper examines how the EU issue has re-emerged as a difficult and divisive one for the Conservatives. It firstly explores the challenge posed by UKIP and the Conservative response, drawing on the literature on competition between niche and mainstream parties. The paper then examines the extent to which the Conservatives have pursued a soft Eurosceptic policy while in coalition with the more pro-integration Liberal Democrats, divisions between hard and soft Eurosceptics within the Conservative Party, and the limits of Cameron's modernisation project in relation to the EU issue. Finally, the paper considers the significance of Cameron's January 2013 announcement that a Conservative government elected in 2015 would seek a 'new settlement' between the UK and EU and then hold an 'in-out' referendum. The paper draws on data from interviews with MPs, MEPs and party officials conducted by the authors, as well as our own surveys of parliamentary candidates, analysis of manifestos and YouGov and British Election Study data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the nature and intensity of constituency (district-level) campaigning at the 2010 General Election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes. Data are derived from questionnaire surveys sent to constituency agents immediately after the election. The paper considers the extent to which campaigns have continued to modernise through the incorporation of e-campaigning and the degree to which party supporters are involved in campaigns alongside party members. It then examines the variation in campaign intensity relative to seat marginality and whether or not party campaigns yielded electoral payoffs. It shows that e-campaigning was not a significant component of parties' overall campaign efforts and that party supporters provide an important source of volunteer labour alongside party members. Finally, it suggests that the overall outcome of the election was in part a function of the surprisingly effective campaigning by the Labour Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the mid-2000s, Britain's political communication environment has undergone rapid change. During the 2010 election campaign, television continued its dominance as the most important medium through which the British public acquires its political information, as Britain's first ever live televised party leaders' debates received saturation coverage for almost the entire campaign. But over the previous half-decade the growing mainstream popularity of the internet has started to undermine some broadcast-era assumptions regarding strategic news management, both in government, and on the campaign trail. This new, hybrid, environment, one characterised by a complex intermingling of the "old", the "new", and the "renewed" creates particular uncertainty for "old" news media, established politicians, and political parties. The old media environment, dominated by media and political elites working in traditional television, radio, and newspapers, remains significant for British politics, but politics is increasingly mediated online. The internet is creating a more open, fluid political opportunity structure - one that increasingly enables the British public to exert its influence and hold politicians and media to account. The origins of this current hybridity can be traced back over the last couple of decades, but since the mid-2000s, the pace of change has quickened, and the stage on which the drama of British politics unfolds is in the process of being redesigned, partly by political and media elites, and partly by ordinary citizens. This paper provides an overview of this changing political communication environment and its consequences for British politics. The first part draws on the latest data to illustrate key developments in new media usage in Britain. Part two explores the way in which news, so central to an informed citizenry, is changing. Part three examines the parties' news management strategies and how they have sought to use a blend of old and new media to boost their popularity. The paper then moves on to explore the role of media during the momentous 2010 general election campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The central topic of this paper is the measurement of one variable, civic duty. This variable has become a mainstay in empirical research on individual voting behavior since the 1960s and it is one of the chief explanatory saviors of the rational choice model of voting. Nevertheless, the measurement of civic duty on the American National Elections Study is prima facie substandard. Question wording is one concern, as a number of scholars have demonstrated that seemingly small changes in question wording can have large effects on the answers individuals provide and the conclusions scholars draw. My primary concern is measurement validity, commonly defined as "whether a variable measures what it is supposed to measure" (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994). In survey research, the question is the instrument through which we measure a concept; if the wording is unclear, biased, or just plain bad, then any research that uses that indicator will also be flawed.In the paper, I will explain the controversies surrounding question wording and measurement validity; I will examine the existing body of work on civic duty; and I will empirical evaluate the validity of survey instruments that use different measures of civic duty in the United States and the United Kingdom. Possible explanations for the results, recommendations for further analysis, and the implications of these findings for research on voting behavior will also be discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How individual voters make their choices is a well-studied topic where candidate and officeholder elections are concerned. But voters in referenda cannot be assumed to make choices on the basis of the same determinants - group identity, self-interest and judgmental shortcuts - that citizens use to select candidates. This paper explores the nature of choice in referenda and the role that partisan and leader cues play in balloting on questions that are often, on their face, devoid of partisan and leader links. The paper uses British survey data from 2008 (N=17540) to construct a model of individual choice using a hypothetical referendum on denying benefits to illegal immigrants. To analyze partisan cues, a survey experiment was embedded in the Dynamics of Party Support in Britain follow-up survey to determine the relative effects of cues alone and cues placed in context by an individual's partisan identification and affect for the cue giver. We hypothesize that cues alone are suspect and uncertain messages for most voters, and thus would not be statistically significant. Cues in context are expected to produce statitically significant effects. Findings support both hypotheses. To determine other effects on voter choice, rival models are tested and a composite model of choice is constructed that suggests that attitudes held by individuals on immigration and immigration threats were the most powerful determinants of voter choice. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of the Scottish Parliament and Welsh assembly in 1999 brought a new electoral system to mainland Britain, mixed-member proportional (MMP). This paper examines the electoral effect of having two types of Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs). Lundberg (2006), using an elite survey in 2000 and 2003, has shown that MSPs elected through the constituency part of MMP spend more time doing constituency service than MSPs elected thought the list. This paper looks at the effect of these different types of incumbency on constituency vote totals in the 2003 and 2007 Scottish Parliament elections. While it finds that both types of incumbents have an incumbency advantage, this effect is small for list MSPs and is also affected by the party affiliation of the MSPs. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between government policy and public preferences is a core concern of democratic theorists. One particularly powerful method of relating policy to opinion is the 'dynamic representation' approach. Scholars in this tradition test to what extent current policy changes are a function of past public preferences. This paper derives hypotheses from the dynamic representation approach and tests them for the United Kingdom in a left-right context from 1976-2006. First, it is shown that government policy on the left-right scale changes as a consequence of changing public preferences (the direct mechanism of 'rational anticipation'). Second, a right-wing public results in the election of the Conservative Party, which consequently pursues right-wing policies in office (the indirect mechanism of 'electoral turnover'). Third, government responsiveness is found to be conditional on electoral vulnerability. Popular incumbents are less likely than unpopular incumbents to adjust their policy position to the public. While the Westminster system has received much criticism for its failure to reliably link rulers to the ruled, this paper finds that dynamic representation on the left-right scale in the United Kingdom functions quite admirably. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explanations of party competition and vote choice are commonly based on the Downsian view of politics: parties maximize votes by adopting positions on policy dimensions. Correspondingly, voters choose parties according to their preferences on these dimensions. However, recent research shows that British voters choose parties based on competence rather than on ideological position. This raises the question of whether spatial theories are currently relevant to this context. This paper responds by offering a theoretical account of party competition and of vote choice which combines elements of the spatial model with the 'issue ownership' model. The issue ownership model relies upon perceptions of party competence on issues and the salience of issues to predict party strategies. It therefore has obvious relevance to these trends in voting behaviour. However, the issue ownership model remains relatively untested. In this paper we therefore examine the validity of the model from the perspective of both parties and voters. We analyze the empirical assumptions of the issue ownership model and test its application to the 2005 British General Election. Moreover, we also examine the relative importance of spatial and competence-based voting over time. Our findings suggest that a better developed issue ownership model offers a satisfactory explanation of voter choices and party competition in the most recent British election. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the circumstances under which Michael Howard became leader of the British Conservative Party in November 2003, and analyzes his effectiveness as Leader of the Opposition through the general election of 5 May 2005. Howard inherited a party bitterly divided over its leadership, its policy direction, and its future. After immediately establishing his credibility as a fearsome debater at the dispatch box in parliamentary debates with Prime Minister Tony Blair, he established a vision for Britain in his "British Dream" speech. While staying true to Conservative principles of fair play, choice, and expanded opportunity, he offered a framework for the policies the Tories would put before the British people at the 2005 general election. Ultimately, the Conservative Party's 2005 Election Manifesto emphasized six themes: 1) More Police, 2) Cleaner Hospitals, 3) Lower Taxes, 4) School Discipline, 5) Controlled Immigration, and 6) Accountability. The main argument of this paper is that those themes were chosen because they represented areas of policy where Howard had provided an effective critique of government policy and had established a realistic alternative. This paper details Howard's effectiveness in holding the Labour Government of Tony Blair to account.After exploring the enormity and dimensions of Howard's task as Leader of the Opposition, this paper concludes that he deserves enormous credit for leading the Conservative Party out of the political wilderness, and that he effectively established a credible alternative to New Labour. While the current leader of the Conservative Party, David Cameron, has recently been given much credit for the revival of his party, Michael Howard's contributions should not be underestimated. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of the phenomenon of blogging in the 2004 US presidential campaign, this paper examines blogging during the 2005 British general election campaign. The paper seeks to establish how widespread blogging was, the extent of bloggers' partisanship, what issues blogs were concerned with, what the purpose of the messages posted by the bloggers were, and what if any impact blogs had beyond the immediate community of users. These questions were addressed through a content analysis of over 300 blogs and 1,300 posted messages, by additional searches of the Lexis-Nexis newspaper archive, and via the use of Internet poll data on blogging. The research found that blogging in the UK is in its infancy. There were few bloggers posting messages about the campaign and few people accessed blogs regularly. The findings provide important insights into the evolving online election communication environment in the UK. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper connects the formal theory surrounding Duverger's Law with an empirical specification and test to examine the empirical evidence for strategic voting in the 2001 General Election in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper expands on the experimental findings of the motivated reasoning literature to numerous election studies in the U.S., Britain, and Germany. Conclusions inform both the information processing and campaign effects literatures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there is considerable agreement that economic conditions affect electoral outcomes, there is less agreement as to exactly how. Scholars have spent a great deal of effort exploring the links between economics and vote choice but have generally ignored the potential that economic perceptions could also affect the likelihood of voter abstention. I explore that possibility in this paper. First, I develop a theory of how economic perceptions affect the likelihood of abstention. I argue that the relevant factors in this relationship are one?s retrospective and prospective judgments of the economy and the ideology of the respondent and government. Hypotheses are generated and tested using national election survey data from the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. The results show that economic perceptions have an effect on the likelihood of electoral abstention. This effect is mediated by the ideology of the respondent and party and appears to be weakened in situations of greater coalitional complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the issue of differential levels of electoral participation at national, sub-national and supra-national elections within Britain. Electoral turnout is regarded as a key indicator of civic engagement in systems of multi-level governance. Using a combination of aggregate and individual level data it describes a process of electoral turnout decline from the late 1970s onwards. Britain is unusual for the range in recorded turnout for different types of election and various explanations for this are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transformation in constituency (local) campaigning in British general elections that has occurred over the last ten years or so. The first area of change concerns the role of the national party headquarters in planning and managing local campaigns. Targeting of constituencies (and even of individual voters) organised from the centre has become the norm. This reflects increasingly professionalized campaigning, a re-evaluation of the potential impact of constituency campaigns on electoral outcomes and also clearer appreciation of the constraints imposed by the first-past-the-post electoral system on the part of party officials. These changes have proceeded at different speeds in each of the major parties but all are heading down the same road. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been much discussion of the influence of American campaign techniques on elections in the UK, but in spite of claims that UK politics is becoming increasingly presidential, one form that has not yet been imported in the televised debate between party leaders. In the 2001 election formal proposals were made by the television companies, but nothing came of this, and little political capital was made of the apparent failure of the Labour administration to take up the gauntlet. The lack of a 'presidential style' debate does not mean that the electorate fail to see televised head-to head confrontations, and the paper outlines examples of the various fora for political debate that were presented on the TV during the course of the campaign. The party-based structure of UK politics, the lack of a separate election for national leader, multiple minor parties, the vigorous pursuit of policy debates in the current electoral 'system', and tradition all seem currently to militate against leader debates - as well as the simple electoral calculation of whoever leads in the polls. Nevertheless the recent sharp decline in political turnout is concentrating political minds on the search for methods to engage citizens with politics and elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates economic voting in four countries in Western Europe - Britain, Germany, The Netherlands, and Norway - with reference to variations in institutional structure, the internal dimensions of the voting model, and economics vs. cleavages and ideology as determinants of the vote. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs formal stochastic models of the elections in Great Britain in 2005 and 2010. The models include various kinds of valence, where valence is de?ned to be associated with the non policy considerations involving perceptions of party leaders. Valences can be (i) exogenous, held by all members of the electorate, and empirically estimated by the intercepts in a spatial model (ii) sociodemographic, associated with the various propensities of subgroups in the polity to choose one candidate over another (iii) determined by the perception of leader character traits. We consider a set of nested logit models involving these valences, as well as spatial cmponents inving policy differences between voters and party positions. We show the models involving traits are statistically signi?cant. However, spatial models involving traits and the spatial component are also significant. We compare these models across the regions, England Scotland and Wales. We show first that a comparison of 2005 and 2010 indicates that all measures of Gordons Brown's valence was much lower than Tony Blair's valence in the earlier election. We also show that the vote maximizing equilibium positions of the parties were at the electoral origin in 2005. In 2010, however, the large traits differences between Brown and the other two leaders gives divergent equilibria, with Brown's equilibrium position relatively close to his estimated position. The higher valences of Clegg and Cameron suggest their equilibia are more or less symmetrically located in opposed quadrants of the policy space. We propose that the positions of the three major parties were influenced by the support offered by the activists to the parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although often treated as such, political parties are not unitary actors: presumably, therefore, their leaders have to take at least some account of the views of their followers, not least when deciding whether or not to enter a coalition with other parties. Hitherto there has been relatively little research into those views. This paper uses a survey of members of the UK's Conservative Party in order to elicit and explain their thinking on the coalition the Party formed with the Liberal Democrats in 2010, on the performance of the government since then, and on the prospects of a similar arrangement after the next general election. It finds that, although they largely approve of the government's record, grassroots Tories regret the decision to go into coalition in the first place. However, they would sanction a continuation of the arrangement as the price of hanging onto power after the next election. Different members, of course, have different views, and these are best explained by ideological rather than demographic variables, as well as by members' views on their party leader and - at least in part - their levels of activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spatial model of electoral competition emphasizes the role issues play in the electoral decision-making. Unfortunately, the informational requirements associated with a policy-based choice can be quite rigorous. In this paper, I argue that the political environment, in the form of constituency competition (or marginality), can improve the ability of citizens to acquire political knowledge. Constituency marginality increases the amount of campaign attention a constituency's voters receive, and therefore influences the amount of information citizens have regarding the policy positions of the parties competing in their constituency. I evaluate this argument using data from the 2005 British Election Study, and find that citizens residing in marginal constituencies are, in fact, more likely than their counterparts in safe constituencies to perceive the parties' relative ideological positions correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young adults have since long been identified as a group of the electorate least likely to vote. Recent research suggests, however, that turnout among young cohorts is declining rapidly in some countries. It does so at a much faster pace than the turnout among older age groups. In sum, today's youth turns out at lower levels than their parents or grandparents did when they were young. Consequently, the turnout gap between younger and older voters enlarges. The trend towards a widening generational divide has been particularly well documented in Canada and Great Britain. In other countries, such as Sweden and the Netherlands, the turnout difference between younger and older citizens is however stable through time. This paper contributes to the literature on youth participation by assessing the age gap in voter turnout in a longitudinal and comparative way. After observing patterns in the age gap in turnout, competing hypotheses explaining trends are put to the test. Using time-series cross-sectional analysis, the impact of both characteristics of elections and characteristics of voters on the age gap are assessed. The focus is exclusively on Western democracies for which the age gap can be estimated through election survey data. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While priming is often mentioned in studies of media effects in Britain, empirical tests of the media’s capacity to prime are lacking. Similarly, despite the recent claim that evaluations of party leaders in Britain are more important to voting behavior than previously thought, little is known about whether or how the media influence those evaluations. In this paper we examine media priming in British elections. Our analysis will demonstrate that there were some strong, dynamic, media effects on perceptions of Tony Blair in 2001 and 2005, both as a direct consequence of the amount of coverage of an issue and via priming. These effects appear stronger than the media’s capacity to set the agenda in either election. We will also examine the impact of the tone of coverage of issues on priming effects and explore short-term and cumulative effects of media coverage, in keeping with recent literature. Our findings thus far are at odds with claims that British elections are too short and British newspapers too partisan for there to be media effects beyond partisan reinforcement. Our analysis of the short-term and cumulative effects of media coverage on priming will also provide a unique examination of their influence outside the US. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using a structural equation modelling approach, this paper combines available campaign data to produce a latent measure of campaign effort to analyze its direct and indirect effect on party performance at the 2005 British General Election. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the impact of distance to polling station upon electoral turnout. Using polling station level data from a London borough, it examines three types of election, parliamentary, European and local elections, over a twenty year period. The UK is notable among western liberal democracies for its relatively large turnout gap - the percentage point difference between turnout at elections for the Westminster parliament compared to that for other institutions, including local councils and the supra-national European parliament. This research considers the hypothesis that in high information, high salience elections for the national parliament the costs of voting associated with travel to vote are perceived as either low or insignificant but that in low information, low salience elections, those costs are perceived as higher and may act as a deterrent upon voting. A series of regression models consider the relationships between the dependent variable, percentage turnout, and a range of independent variables, including socio-economic characteristics, party competition as well as the spatial context. We show that there is indeed a relationship between distance and voter turnout which is stronger for the lower salience European and local elections than it is for the higher salience national elections. Hence we conclude that the local geography of the polling station can have a significant impact on voter turnout and that there should be a more strategic approach to the location of polling stations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]