David Cutts

The Conservatives needed a net gain of 116 seats at the 2010 general election if they were to win an overall majority and form the next government. From 2007 onwards, a unit in the central party organization, led by Conservative Deputy Chairman Lord Ashcroft, worked with local parties to promote their candidates' cause in a substantial number of marginal constituencies. The efforts of Lord Ashcroft's team involved the expenditure of several million pounds during the pre-election campaign period in an effort to win over voters in key battleground seats. But was it effective? Using a path modelling approach, we provide substantial evidence that it was. Not only did it have both a significant direct effect and an indirect effect, through “short campaign” effort, on Conservative Party support in 2010, but the Conservatives were significantly more likely to win key battleground seats against Labour where larger grant allocations were made. Frequency also mattered. The Conservatives were far more likely to win Labour-held seats if constituencies received money from Lord Ashcroft's team on two or more occasions.

This paper examines the impact of place on museum participation in England. For the first time in the cultural field, we use a multilevel logistic model to examine whether place matters after accounting for individual characteristics and area level compositional factors. Our findings show that the traditional social order remains intact, although other social cleavages have become important, and that significant variation exists in museum participation simultaneously at both the neighbourhood and local authority district spatial scales. We conclude by arguing that future research into cultural consumption patterns must take account of the fact that individuals reside in different places. That individuals cluster in space, interact in these places and spaces, and that environmental forces impact on museum participation. Put simply, both theoretically and empirically, studies of cultural behaviour should take account of place, because place matters.

The elections to the European Parliament (EP) held in June 2009 marked a breakthrough for the extreme right British National Party (BNP), while in other European states extreme right parties (ERPs) similarly made gains. However, the attitudinal drivers of support for the BNP and ERPs more generally remain under‐researched. This article draws on unique data that allow unprecedented insight into the attitudinal profile of ERP voters in Britain – an often neglected case in the wider literature. A series of possible motivational drivers of extreme right support are separated out: racial prejudice, anti‐immigrant sentiment, protest against political elites, Euroscepticism, homophobia and Islamophobia. It is found that BNP support in the 2009 EP elections was motivationally diverse, with racist hostility, xenophobia and protest voting all contributing significantly to BNP voting. The analysis suggests that the BNP, which has long been a party stigmatised by associations with racism and violent extremism, made a key breakthrough in 2009. While racist motivations remain the strongest driver of support for the party, it has also begun to win over a broader coalition of anti‐immigrant and anti‐elite voters.

This contribution examines the Liberal Democrat campaign and their subsequent performance in the 2010 General Election. Despite what appeared to be a ground-breaking campaign, the Liberal Democrat performance in the 2010 election was—as Clegg acknowledged—disappointing for the party. Here we argue that the story of the 2010 Liberal Democrat election was the remarkable similarity with 2005, with even the geographical variations in support part of a long tradition of local upsets reflecting local issues, campaigns and personalities. Moreover, we suggest that the Liberal Democrats failure to break the mould of British politics reflected the age-old problem of electoral credibility. Put simply, despite the cataclysmic events of the election campaign, the surge subsided because too many people either did not want a Liberal Democrat government or did not believe a Liberal Democrat could win the national or local constituency contest.

A number of scholars have noted a negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social capital or social trust, especially in the US. Evidence from other countries has been more mixed and sometimes contradictory. In this paper we provide the first Anglo-American comparative analysis of the relationship between neighbourhood diversity and social capital, and show how this relationship varies across ethnic categories. We apply multilevel structural equation models to individual level data from the 2000 Citizen Benchmark Survey for the US and the 2005 Citizenship Survey for Great Britain. The findings suggest that while for attitudinal social capital among Whites the negative underlying relationship with diversity is apparent in both countries, the effect is much weaker or reversed for minority groups. For structural social capital the negative relationship is apparent for minorities but not Whites, but this is mainly attributable to other neighbourhood characteristics.Résumé.Un certain nombre d'universitaires ont noté une relation négative entre la diversité ethnique et le capital social ou la confiance sociale, surtout aux États-Unis. D'autres pays, par contre, offrent des constats plus mitigés et parfois contradictoires. Dans cet article, nous présentons la première analyse comparative anglo-américaine de la relation entre la diversité du voisinage et le capital social et nous démontrons comment cette relation varie selon les catégories ethniques. Nous appliquons des modélisations par équation structurelle à multiniveaux à des données de niveau individuel provenant duCitizen Benchmark Surveyde 2000 pour les États-Unis et duCitizenship Surveyde 2005 pour la Grande-Bretagne. Les résultats démontrent que si, pour le capital social attitudinal, la relation fondamentale négative avec la diversité est évidente parmi les Blancs dans les deux pays, l'effet est cependant beaucoup plus faible ou renversé pour les groupes minoritaires. En ce qui concerne le capital social structurel, la relation négative est évidente pour les minorités, mais pas pour les Blancs, mais cette situation est principalement attribuable à d'autres caractéristiques du voisinage.

This paper examines whether voters mobilized by a Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaign continue to turn out in a subsequent election. It thereby tests the extent to which they gain the habit of voting. The research examined electoral registers in the 2006 English local elections in the constituency of Wythenshawe and Sale East. This was the site of John and Brannan’s ( 2007 John, P. and Brannan, T. 2007. How different are telephoning and canvassing? Results from a “Get Out the Vote” field experiment in the UK 2005 general election. British Journal of Political Science, 38: 565–574. [Web of Science ®] [Google Scholar] ) GOTV experiment, which had compared the impact of telephoning and door‐to‐door canvassing in the 2005 General Election. Descriptive statistics show that the downstream effect of the treatment was quite small at 3% in 2006. But the habit effect was large. Voting in 2005 raised the probability of voting in 2006 by more than half. Regression analysis confirms the size of the habit effect. The paper discusses the limitations of sample size in making statistical inferences about the prevalence of the habit effect in one location.

For many years, scholars of voting behavior have been thwarted in their attempts to identify micro spatial variations in turnout by data limitations. This has meant that most analyses have been ecological, which has implications for valid inference. Here, for the first time, a hierarchical approach is used to show the relative importance of several micro spatial scales, including the household, on voter participation. The findings highlight the importance of the household context. While those who live together often turn out together, the relative level of clustering within households as opposed to between geographical areas is found to be more important for two‐person households compared to other households. Even after taking account of whether individuals are likely to self‐select others from similar social backgrounds or with similar political attitudes, there is strong evidence of large and significant household effects on voter participation.

Labour's All-Women Shortlists (AWS), an example of an equality guarantee, have proved they can deliver. Labour's 98 women constitute 77 percent of all the women MPs in the House of Commons and 27.5 percent of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Moreover, half of all Labour's women MPs currently sitting in the House of Commons were selected on AWS, either in 1997 or 2005. Yet, rather than the success of AWS being a key story of the 2005 general election, it was the defeat of the AWS candidate, Maggie Jones, in the ultra-safe Labour seat of Blaenau Gwent that dominated media coverage. `This is what happens when you don't listen' said the successful, ex-Labour candidate, the late Peter Law: AWS lose votes. This article shows, however, that, Blaenau Gwent aside, there was no significant anti-AWS effect at the 2005 general election. AWS candidates largely suffered from being new candidates. Also, even though we cannot differentiate between an AWS effect and a differential sex effect for new and incumbent candidates, we find that neither is significant.

Der vorliegende Band beschäftigt sich mit der zunehmenden Beteiligung von überparteilichen Akteuren bei Wahlen. Dabei greifen Interessengruppen, Bürger und bestimmte politische Institutionen in die Auswahl der Kandidaten und die Wahlkampagne selbst ein. Manchmal tun sie dies, um das Wahlergebnis zu beeinflussen, manchmal aber auch, um die Qualität des Wahlprozesses selbst aufzubessern.