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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.

It is now nearly a half century since the publication of The American Voter. Greeted with wide acclaim, the book quickly exercised enormous influence, not only in the United States, but in many other countries as well. One of those countries was Great Britain where the British Election Study (BES) closely modeled on the American National Election Study (ANES) was initiated in 1964. In this paper we present selected findings from two recent books, Political Choice in Britain (2004) and Performance Politics and the British Voter (2009) that describe what the BES data collection tells us about forces affecting British voting behavior. A valence politics model featuring valence (not position) issues, party leader images, and flexible partisan attachments has powerful explanatory power. The model also works well in the United States, thereby warranting the inference that the American voter's British cousin is a close relative. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Although political scientists have begun to investigate the properties of Internet surveys, much remains to be learned about the utility of the Internet mode for conducting major survey research projects such as national election studies. This paper addresses this topic by presenting the results of an extensive survey comparison experiment conducted as part of the 2005 British Election Study. Analyses show statistically significant, but generally small, differences in distributions of key explanatory variables in models of turnout and party choice. Estimating model parameters reveals that there are few statistically significant differences between coefficients generated using the in-person and Internet data, and the relative explanatory power of rival models is virtually identical for the two types of data. In general, the in-person and Internet data tell very similar stories about what matters for turnout and party preference in Britain. Determining if similar findings obtain in other countries should have high priority on the research agenda for national election studies.