Betting and the 1997 British General Election

How good are political gamblers and bookmakers at predicting election results? In 1997, despite indications from polls, betting markets badly underestimated Labour's Parliamentary majority. But the same applies to a panel of expert 'pundits' and the public generally. The predictions of punters move reasonably in line with pundits and public. And the betting industry scores better when examining percentage vote share. It was close to getting this right, narrowly beating the pundits and all the pollsters. Punters were right to believe polls overstated Labour's percentage lead, but wrong to miss the fact that differential swing would boost its Commons majority.     

Routes to party choice: Ideology,economic evaluations and voting at the 1997 British General Election

Abstract. 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.     

Young Voters at the 2005 British General Election

Pronounced declines in the number of young (non‐) voters casting their ballots in 1997 and 2001 has raised the question: are we witnessing a generational disengagement with electoral politics? It is generally understood that voter turnout is strongly related to closeness of electoral competition. This research report examines the results of the 2005 election in the context of the debate on declining youth turnout at general elections. Did a closer competition in 2005 encourage young voters back to the polls?     

Party knowledge and candidate knowledge: constituency campaigning and voting and the 1997 British General Election

There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the electoral impact of constituency campaigns in British General Elections. Much is now known about the electoral consequences of local campaigns on parties’ constituency vote shares. Yet more remains to be discovered about the impacts of these local campaigns on voters’ knowledge of parties and candidates. Analysis of data from the 1997 British General Election demonstrates that the local campaign is associated with improved voter knowledge of who is standing for each party in a constituency, which is, in its turn, associated with an increased chance of voting for the party in the election, other things being equal. Campaign efforts at different scales, from the national to the local, have different impacts on voters’ knowledge.     

Early Voting Changes and Voter Turnout: North Carolina in the 2016 General Election

North Carolina offers its residents the opportunity to cast early in-person (EIP) ballots prior to Election Day, a practice known locally as “One-Stop” voting. Following a successful legal challenge to the state’s controversial 2013 Voter Information and Verification Act, North Carolina’s 100 counties were given wide discretion over the hours and locations of EIP voting for the 2016 General Election. This discretion yielded a patchwork of election practices across the state, providing us with a set of natural experiments to study the effect of changes in early voting hours on voter turnout. Drawing on individual-level voting records from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, our research design matches voters on race, party, and geography. We find little evidence that changes to early opportunities in North Carolina had uniform effects on voter turnout. Nonetheless, we do identify areas in the presidential battleground state where voters appear to have reacted to local changes in early voting availability, albeit not always in directions consistent with the existing literature. We suspect that effects of changes to early voting rules are conditional on local conditions, and future research on the effects of election law changes on turnout should explore these conditions in detail.

     

Region, Local Context, and Voting at the 1997 General Election in England

There has been considerable debate in recent work on voting patterns in Great Britain regarding the importance of regional effects: are these “real” or are they simply statistical artifacts of decision‐making processes at smaller spatial scales which are aggregated up to the regional scale if not incorporated directly into any modeling? Using a multilevel model design, this article reports on analyses of survey data for the 1997 general election in England which allows tests of whether regional variations are no more than aggregation effects. Individual voters are nested within households, neighborhoods, constituencies, and regions and when all of the smaller‐scale spatial levels are included in the model, the observed regional effects are statistically insignificant. At the 1997 general election, at least, regional variations within England in support for the three main parties—basically, a north‐south divide—are aggregation effects.     

Context, Conversation and Conviction: Social Networks and Voting at the 1992 British General Election

After some initial interest, analyses of contextual effects in British voting behaviour have tended to downplay or ignore the role of face to face conversations between electors. However, evidence from the 1992 British Election Study shows that conversations with partisan discussants do act as a statistically significant influence on voting. Those who discuss politics with supporters of a particular party are more likely to switch their votes to that party, if they had not previously voted for it, and less likely to switch to other parties. Conversations with family members are particularly important, though talking to other discussants also plays a part.     

Voter Turnout and the National Election Studies

Though the overreporting of voter turnout in the National ElectionStudy (NES) is widely known, this article shows that the problemhas become increasingly severe. The gap between NES and officialestimates of presidential election turnout has more than doubledin a nearly linear fashion, from 11 points in 1952 to 24 pointsin 1996. This occurred because official voter turnout fell steadilyfrom 1960 onward, while NES turnout did not. In contrast, thebias in House election turnout is always smaller and has increasedonly marginally. Using simple bivariate statistics, I find thatworsening presidential turnout estimates are the result mostlyof declining response rates rather than instrumentation, questionwording changes, or other factors. As more peripheral votershave eluded interviewers in recent years, the sample becamemore saturated with self-reported voters, thus inflating reportedturnout.     

The British General Election of 2015 and the Rise of the Meritocracy

Many on the left hoped that the 2015 general election in Britain would prove a social democratic moment. Instead, it proved a nationalist moment, since the only parties radically to increase their vote were UKIP and the SNP. This mirrored trends on the Continent, where nationalist parties on the right and the left have been the beneficiaries of the financial collapse of 2008. These parties exploit a new social cleavage between those who benefit from globalisation and those left behind. The new parties exploit issues of identity rather than economics, and these issues—whether Britain remains in the European Union, whether mass immigration continues and whether Scotland remains in the United Kingdom—are likely to dominate the 2015 parliament.     

Brexit,the 2019 General Election and the Realignment of British Politics

The outcome of the 2019 general election—a resounding Conservative majority and an unprecedented defeat for Labour—delivered a decisive electoral verdict for the first time in recent years following a period where British politics has been characterised by instability and indecision. In this article, we draw on aggregate-level data to conduct an initial exploration of the vote. What was the impact of Brexit on the 2019 general election result? How far has Brexit reshaped electoral politics? Was 2019 a ‘realignment election’? And, if so, what are the implications? With a focus on England and Wales we show that, although the Conservatives made gains deep into Labour’s working class heartlands, these gains have been a long time coming, reflected in Labour’s weakening relationship with working class Britain. As such, 2019 is not a critical election but a continuation of longer-term trends of dealignment and realignment in British politics.     

Voter turnout at the British General Election of 1992: Rational choice,social standing or political efficacy?

Abstract. Analyses of turnout in British general elections fall broadly into two camps: those based on constituency–level data, and those based on survey data. The former stress the importance of local context, while the latter stress personal characteristics and viewpoints. Underlying both are a range of theories purporting to explain turnout. However, to date, there has been little systematic attempt to analyse turnout in the round. In this paper, we combine survey and constituency data to study the individual and contextual correlates of turnout at the British general election and 1992. Constituency level analyses seem to confirm the importance of local context, though it declined during the 1980s. However, and contrary to analyses which employ constituency data only, while individual electors' decisions on whether or not to turn out are influenced by their personal circumstances, they are not influenced by local context.     

Election Laws,Mobilization, and Turnout: The Unanticipated Consequences of Election Reform

State governments have experimented with a variety of election laws to make voting more convenient and increase turnout. The impacts of these reforms vary in surprising ways, providing insight into the mechanisms by which states can encourage or reduce turnout. Our theory focuses on mobilization and distinguishes between the direct and indirect effects of election laws. We conduct both aggregate and individual‐level statistical analyses of voter turnout in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections. The results show that Election Day registration has a consistently positive effect on turnout, whereas the most popular reform—early voting—is actually associated with lower turnout when it is implemented by itself. We propose that early voting has created negative unanticipated consequences by reducing the civic significance of elections for individuals and altering the incentives for political campaigns to invest in mobilization.     

Social and Economic Determinants of English Voter Choice in the 1997 General Election

Using a theoretical framework in which voters' choicesare the result of utility maximisation decisions, andin which the variation of utility functions acrossindividuals is partly deterministic (depending ontheir socio-economic characteristics) and partlystochastic, we estimate constituency-level regressionequations to explain how the electoral shares of eachof the main parties depend on conditions in theconstituency. Whilst social characteristics appear tohave an impact similar to that predicted in theexisting literature, economic conditions appear tohave played a very different role in 1997 from inprevious elections.     

Party Strategies and the Descriptive Representation of Ethnic Minorities: The 2010 British General Election

The 2010 election proved critical for ethnic minority representation in Britain. The number of minority Members of Parliament reached an unprecedented high. Furthermore, the virtual monopoly of the Labour party on minority parliamentary representation ended. In explaining this development, this article moves away from the traditional discussion of disadvantages facing minority candidates and turns to the role of the political parties. It argues that a new commitment to increased minority representation exists and shows, on the basis of new data, that in the 2010 election both Labour and Conservatives employed a variety of strategies for increasing ethnic minority representation. The strategy to select more minority candidates in ‘white’ seats was not only a key to increasing the numbers of minority parliamentarians but also signals a departure from the traditional pattern of ethnic minority politicians being elected by ethnic minorities.     

Protest and Survive? Alliance Support in the 1983 British General Election

Much of the key to the future of the British party system rests in the nature of the support for the Liberal—Social Democratic Alliance. If that support is a protest vote, the possibility of realignment within the party system is negligible; if it is socially and attitudinally distinct, then the potential for a fundamental realignment is clearly present. By applying multivariate analysis to survey data, this paper examines the social and attitudinal bases of support for the Alliance in the 1983 British general election, and for comparative purposes, examines Liberal support in the 1979 general election. The results show that Alliance support in 1983 was somewhat different from 1979 Liberal support, notably in terms of the issues that motivated Alliance voters. In light of comparative theoretical work on third parties, these findings suggest the possibility of a long-term rôle for the Alliance as either a realigning or at least persistently dealigning force.     

"Its not like that round here": Region, economic evaluations and voting at the 1992 British General Election

Abstract. Accounting for regional divides in British electoral behaviour during the 1980s has proved controversial. Critics have argued that, once individual characteristics are taken into account, regional context is unimportant. Supporters of the regional divide have pointed to the connection between economic conditions and voting, but have been unable to show direct links between local economies and voters' decisions. The paper employs new data to examine the controversy. Voters at the 1992 General Election are shown to judge their regional economies, and to act on those judgements, even when their personal positions are controlled for.     

The discursive reconstruction of poor electoral performance: the British Trotskyist left and the 2010 General Election

This paper is situated within the rhetorical turn in political science and investigates the discourses constructed by Trotskyist parties in order to justify the policy of electoral participation despite poor electoral performance. A wide range of texts are examined from eight organizations that contested seats in the 2010 UK General Election. The thrust of Trotskyist discourse downplayed dismal vote totals, contextualizing them by reference to pro-Labour tactical voting and elaborating a variety of benefits that emerged from electoral participation. It is argued that such analysis could usefully be incorporated into the study of party responses to electoral problems and setbacks.     

On the Overreport Bias of the National Election Study Turnout Rate

Consumers of the National Election Study (NES) should be concernedif the survey has a bias that is increasing with time. A recentarticle by Barry Burden claims that for presidential elections,there is an increasing overreport bias, or turnout gap, betweenthe NES turnout rate and the observed turnout rate caused bydeclining NES response rates. I show that the increasing turnoutgap is an artifact of the universes these two turnout ratesare based on. Reconciling the two universes shows no systematicincrease of the reconciled turnout gap in presidential electionsfrom 1948 to 2000, and furthermore demonstrates that the post-1976rise in NES response rates (until 2000) is rewarded in a lowerturnout gap. In addition, I offer another theory to explainthe turnout gap. If respondents have an equal propensity tomisreport that they voted when they did not, as turnout declines,the number of nonvoter respondents increases and so does theturnout gap. I show that in multivariate analysis this theoryoutperforms Burden's response rate driven theory, though neithertheory reaches statistical significance.