The End of English Exceptionalism? Support for the British National Party in the 2002 and 2003 English Local Elections.

Until recently, Britain seemed impervious to the trend in many West European countries of growing electoral support for extreme right parties. However, the British National Party (BNP) has emerged as an increasingly viable force in local elections in many parts of England in the past few years, even winning seats on a few local councils. This paper investigates the contextual determinants of support for the BNP in the 2002 and 2003 local elections in England. Aggregate electoral data at the ward level for each district council that held elections in these years are matched to Census statistics and other contextual data. These data are used to estimate multivariate models for two dependent variables: whether or not the BNP contested an election and the BNP's percentage of the white vote in a ward. The findings of this paper suggest that support for the BNP is greatest in districts with large populations of ethnic minorities, especially Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. However, within these districts, it is not necessarily those whites who live in the most ethnically diverse wards who are most supportive of the extreme right. The socio-economic composition of a ward appears to be more important for the BNP's electoral prospects than its ethnic composition. It is in the most economically deprived urban areas that the BNP seems to have its strongest foothold. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for the future electoral viability of the extreme right in England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]