Suchergebnisse

After years of neglect, a growing literature has reclaimed the constituency campaign as an important aspect of British elections. However, relatively little work has been done to disentangle which aspects of the local campaign are effective, and which are not. For much of the twentieth century, the mechanics of the local campaign were in essentials unchanged. But changing campaign technologies in the last decade offer new possibilities to party campaign managers. The 1997 British general election was the first in which parties made extensive use of telephone canvassing as well as the more traditional doorstep canvass. This article provides a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of traditional versus telephone constituency campaigns. Traditional face-to-face canvassing had a statistically significant influence on the outcome of the 1997 general election. But the telephone canvass did not. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

Most conventional accounts of voting behaviour fit single models to the entire electorate, implicitly assuming that all voters respond to the same sets of influences, and do so in similar ways. However, a growing body of research suggests that this approach may be misleading, and that distinct groups of voters approach politics, and the electoral decision, from different perspectives. The paper takes a disaggregated look at voting in the 1997 British General Election, dividing voters into different groups according to their formal educational qualifications. Results suggest that different groups of voters respond to different stimuli, depending on their education, and on the party they are voting for. (European Journal of Political Research / FUB)

Analyzes political campaign and results for Northern Irish political parties. Results for Sinn Féin, Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Social Democratic and Labor Party (SDLP), United Kingdom Unionists (UKU), and Alliance Party (APNI).

The concept of a neighbourhood effect within British voting patterns has largely been discarded, because no data have been available for testing it at the appropriate spatial scales. To undertake such tests, bespoke neighbourhoods have been created around the home of each respondent to the 1997 British Election Study survey in England and Wales, and small-area census data have been assembled for these to depict the socio-economic characteristics of voters' local contexts. Analyses of voting in these small areas, divided into five equal-sized status areas, provides very strong evidence that members of each social class were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible. The data provide very strong evidence of micro-geographical variations in voting patterns, for which further research is necessary to identify the processes involved. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)

Aggregate cross-national analyses of political participation have reported correlations between civic literacy, political knowledge and election turnout. Enhancing civic literacy among Canadian voters, in part by encouraging greater newspaper readership in the general population, has been put forward as a strategy for combating falling turnout in national general elections. The idea is evaluated comparatively at the level of individual voters, using data from the British Election Study. Newspaper readership is related to political knowledge, but increased newspaper reading does not translate into a greater propensity to vote.

Analyzes results for national British political parties in the English regions.