A Note on Local Spending in the 1983 General Election: Differences between the Liberal and SDP Parties in England

Abstract

Information is an important ingredient in electoral success; a political party must sell itself to the voters to build up a core of support. This paper is a look at the role of local information in the first general election fought by a new political party in England, the Social Democratic Party. The party chose to spread its spending on information widely, but in places where the level of spending was relatively high—because central grants were boosted by local fund-raising—the electoral returns were significant. Local concentrations of information produced local concentrations of votes.