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The 2009 scandal over British MPs' expenses claims unleashed a powerful and highly vocal tide of public anger with elected politicians. It claimed some political careers: some of the MPs most heavily implicated in the scandal decided (or were forced) to stand down at the 2010 election rather than face the voters' wrath. Others struggled to deal with the consequences and the party leaderships felt they had to be seen to be responsive to public outrage. But the scandal hit a year before the UK general election, a contest dominated by anxieties over a deep global recession, looming public sector cuts and antipathies towards a deeply unpopular prime minister. In this environment, no-one could be sure of the scandal's wider electoral fallout. Would the departure of the most notably guilty MPs assuage public anger, or would the effects be more extensive, taking in either implicated MPs seeking re-election, or even all MPs standing again, irrespective of their involvement? The article examines the scandal's electoral implications.

Tactical voting is an important element of British electoral behaviour, with approximately one sixth of all voters surveyed indicating that they voted tactically at the 2010 general election. Such voting for one's second preference party rather than one's first in order to prevent a less preferred party winning in a constituency is only rational in certain circumstances, reflecting the local context and electors' perceptions of the tactical situation there. Using 2010 British Election Study Internet survey data, this paper uses three separate definitions of tactical voting (two self-defined by the respondents, one inferred from a separate indication of their preferences) to test whether rational voting models successfully predict such behaviour. The findings are very clear and consistent with the theory, for all three groups.

After its landslide victory at the 1997 UK general election, Labour lost some 4 million votes over the next two elections, and a further million between 2005 and 2010. Commentators disagree somewhat on the pattern of this latter loss. The relative importance of arguments based on sociological and valence politics perspectives on voting behaviour is evaluated here, alongside contextual arguments. Using data from the 2010 British Election Study Internet campaign panel survey, this article looks at the flow of the vote away from Labour from 2005 until the start of the 2010 campaign in April of that year, as well as changes to and from Labour during the campaign itself. Valence politics account for much of the variation, but local context is also important.

Healthy party grassroots constituency organisations play an important part in modern electoral campaigning, especially in marginal seats, and political parties try to concentrate their efforts on those closely contested constituencies. Recent evidence on party fund‐raising at a local level shows that the Conservatives have taken considerable strides in supporting their campaign organisations in marginals, and have done so in a way which enhances their long‐term campaigning potential there. The party's grassroots organisations are increasingly well‐resourced, especially in the seats the Conservatives need to win back if they are to win the next General Election. However, while fund‐raising suggests a healthy grassroots where it is needed, party membership data highlights continued problems for the party.

Constituency electioneering has become established as an important element of postmodern political campaigning, allowing parties and candidates to focus effort on targeted seats. A substantial literature has developed, showing the efficacy of such targeting: other things being equal, the harder parties campaign locally, the more votes they win relative to their rivals. However, on the whole, such studies have taken a relatively static view of local campaigning, concentrating on particular elections. Yet there are a priori grounds to expect the efficacy of local campaigns to vary from party to party and from election to election. In this article, we therefore analyse dynamic trends in constituency campaigning using a pooled data set of British constituency electioneering between 1997 and 2005. The results illustrate important and substantial variations over time and across parties in the impact of local election campaigning.

Most studies of the impact of local campaign expenditure on British election results have found that expenditure by incumbents has less of an effect on the outcome than does that by challengers. Some argue that this, in part, reflects an underestimate of how much is spent by incumbents because it excludes their expenditure under various parliamentary allowances which facilitates contacts between MPs and their constituents. Data on spending under those allowances are now available and are used here to evaluate its impact at the 2005 general election in England. The analyses show that only expenditure by Conservative MPs had any impact on their re-election chances.