British General Election Research Articles

Defeat of the People's Army? The 2015 British general election and the UK Independence Party (UKIP)

The 2015 general election in Britain saw a major attempt by a relatively new party - the UK Independence Party (UKIP)- to secure elected representation. While UKIP received nearly four million votes, the party left the 2015 general election with just one Member of Parliament. Our evidence, drawn from analysis of British Election survey data and in-depth qualitative interviews with activists, suggests that UKIP's campaign was a major factor in its inability to translate widespread support into elected representation. While the party pursued a targeted campaign, this had only a modest impact on its own vote. UKIP's lack of resources, inexperience and inability to operationalize highly effective, targeted local campaigns severely hamstrung the party and prevented it from converting support into MPs at Westminster.

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III)

Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III) Sean Brophy The Anglo-Irish War (1919-21) In the British general election of 1918, Sinn Féin, vigorously opposing the extension of military conscription to Ireland, won a huge majority of the seats in the south. They withdrew from Westminster and established an Irish parliament – or Dáil – in Dublin, essentially ignoring Britain and proceeding to govern themselves. The British administration remained in place, as did the army and the national police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary. All the conditions for anAnglo-Irish war existed as, by means of political agitation and violence, Sinn Féin and the IRAproceeded to render the country ungovernable. The Irish government, through its armed wing, the IRA, fought a guerrilla war from 1919 to the middle of 1921. Through the IRA’s activities and the reactions and reprisals of the British military, and the auxiliary police they drafted in (the so-called ‘Black and Tans’and Auxiliaries), the loss of life and destruction to property was huge. Both sides fought to a standstill, neither one yielding on the principle of whether Ireland was to become a thirty-two county republic or a dominion of the British Empire, with home rule under the crown and no coercion of Ulster to become part of a united country. Westminster passed the Government of Ireland Act in 1920, giving home rule along the lines of the original 1914 measure to two parliaments, one in Dublin for twenty-six counties, the other in Belfast for the six counties of Ulster, thus partitioning the country. King George V opened the Belfast parliament at Stormont Castle in 1921. Sinn Féin declared the act illegal and refused to accept a Dublin parliament on such lines: they had their own freely-elected parliament of a thirty-two county Irish republic, their own army and its supporters. In July 1921, representatives of the Dáil were invited to London to agree a truce and the basis on which negotiations for home rule could proceed. Following in the footsteps of successive British governments, since Robert Peel faced Daniel O’Connell in the early nineteenth century, Lloyd George was unequivocal: no settlement would be acceptable that threatened the integrity of the British Empire and fidelity to the crown or that coerced Ulster. Studies • volume 106 • number 421 95 Ireland’s Decade of Conflict, 1913-23 (III) These principles would be defended by total war. De Valera tried to teach Lloyd George the same lessons of Irish-British history as Daniel O’Connell had done when he wrote to Queen Victoria in 1843, with no greater success. He argued that the British Empire was finished and that it was in British interests to have it transform itself into an association of former British colonies, including the United States of America. Ireland would join such an association and accept the king as the head of those associated states. But, for his interlocutor, this was too big an imaginative leap and too formidable a task. Even so, the truce held and subsequent negotiations culminated in a treaty agreement in December 1921. De Valera himself did not attend the negotiations. Was he reserving the right, as head of state, to decide on the treaty before it was signed? He knew from his truce negotiations with Lloyd George that conceding a thirty-two county republic was impossible for the British and that dominion status was all that could be achieved. Did he position himself to not be identified with the failure to vindicate the republic and thus secure his political base in Ireland? Did the negotiators discourage him from participating because they knew they could not get agreement with the British if he were present? Civil War (1922-23) The plenipotentiaries of the Dáil, led by Arthur Griffith, signed the treaty without De Valera’s presence or approval. In the Dáil, where the debates revealed the rancour between deputies on either side, it was passed by a vote of sixty-four to fifty-seven. In the general election that followed, the protreaty party won a majority of seats and claimed the support of the people and their acceptance of...

The Chester Penn Higby Prize for 2016

The Chester Penn Higby Prize for 2016

Book Review: Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2015

Book Review: Philip Cowley and Dennis Kavanagh, <i>The British General Election of 2015</i>

Parties, mandates and multilevel politics

The three main statewide British parties – Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats – all produce different versions of their manifestos in British general elections. Many policies debated in a British general election no longer apply at the subnational level, where separate devolved institutions control large areas of policy. This article therefore assesses the roles of national party manifestos at the subnational level in British general elections. It develops an original theory linking Strom’s alternative party goals to Ray’s typology of mandate/contract manifestos, advertisement manifestos and identity manifestos. It then explores a comparative overview of British parties’ general election manifestos at the subnational level, before focusing in detail on Labour’s 2010 and 2015 general election manifestos, which reflect the party’s strategic difficulties caused by devolution. The expected variation is found between the national and subnational manifestos. In some instances, multiple goals are pursued simultaneously and this is reflected in manifestos which assume elements of more than one manifesto ideal type. This supports the additional conclusion that manifestos can perform multiple functions in complex multilevel systems of government.

A typology of political participation online: how citizens used Twitter to mobilize during the 2015 British general elections

ABSTRACTThis study investigates how, and to what extent, citizens use Twitter as a platform for political mobilization in an electoral context. Conceptualizing political participation as a process, we develop a typology of political participation designed to isolate mobilizing calls for action from the rest of the political discussion online. Based on Twitter data collected one week prior to the 2015 British general election, we then identify the top 100 most retweeted accounts using the hashtag #GE2015, classify them by actor type, and perform a content analysis of their Twitter posts according to our typology. Our results show that citizens – not political parties – are the primary initiators and sharers of political calls for action leading up to the election. However, this finding is largely due to an uneven distribution of citizen-driven mobilizing activity. A small number of highly active users, typically supporters of nationalist parties, are by far the most active users in our dataset. We also identify four primary strategies used by citizens to enact mobilization through Twitter: in-text calls for action, hashtag commands, sharing mobilizing content, and frequent postings. Citizens predominantly expressed political calls for action through Twitter’s hashtag feature, a finding that supports the notion that traditional conceptions of political participation require nuance to accommodate the new ways citizens are participating in the politics of the digital age.

All Change in the House? The Profile of Candidates and MPs in the 2015 British General Election

Drawing on data from the Parliamentary Candidates UK project, we profile the socio-demographic characteristics of parliamentary candidates standing in 2015 and compare elected MPs to previous cohorts since 1979. We argue that the 2015 cohort of candidates largely resembles the archetypal candidate identified by Durose et al. (2013, Parliamentary Affairs, 66, 246–267). Despite smaller parties’ campaign rhetoric of a ‘new kind of politics’, parties across the spectrum offer up very similar candidate profiles. We find a narrowing of occupational backgrounds, with fewer candidates and MPs from manual occupations, and an increasing percentage of candidates and MPs with a university education. Competition across the parties, particularly in terms of the selection of women and black and minority ethnic (BME) candidates, has positive consequences for the representativeness of Parliament. However, despite a record number of women and BME MPs elected, Parliament remains disproportionately white and male.

Electoral bias at the 2015 general election: reducing Labour’s electoral advantage

ABSTRACTElectoral bias results in an asymmetrical seat distribution between parties with similar vote shares. Over recent British general elections Labour held an advantage because it efficiently converted votes into seats. Following the 2015 election result this advantage has reduced considerably, principally because Labour’s vote distribution saw it accumulate more ineffective votes, particularly where electoral support was not converted into seats. By contrast, the vote distribution of the Conservative party is now superior to that of Labour because it acquired fewer wasted votes although Labour retains a modest advantage overall because it benefits from inequalities in electorate size and differences in voter turnout. Features of the 2015 election, however, raise general methodological challenges for decomposing electoral bias. The analysis, therefore, considers the effect of substituting the Liberal Democrats as the third party with the United Kingdom Independence Party. It also examines the outcome in Scotland separately from that in England and Wales. Following this analysis it becomes clear that the method for decomposing electoral bias requires clearer guidelines for its application in specific settings.

‘Public Foreplay’ or Programmes for Government? The Content of the 2015 Party Manifestos

This article analyses the content of the 2015 British General Election manifestos using manually derived Manifesto Project estimates and computer-assisted text analysis (CATA). It analyses the parties’ policy emphases, investigates their ideological positioning and movement, and further compares their policy agendas with voters’ concerns. It finds the three main parties moved slightly leftwards but continued to agree on the broad thrust of economic policy. It also finds that, while the economy dominated the manifestos, there was considerable differentiation in respect of other issues. Finally, the parties appeared to downplay the issue of immigration despite its importance to the public.

Party system fragmentation and single-party government: the British general election of 2015

The 2015 British general election returned a majority Conservative government after five years of coalition government – the first coalition government in Britain since 1945.1 The result defied exp...

The BBC Charter Review

Both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are being subjected to close scrutiny, but from different quarters. During the lead up to the British general election in 2015, the Cameron Conservative government issued a Green Paper, BBC Charter Review, July-October 2015, which broke new ground in terms of the scope of such an enquiry for its level of institutional criticism. Whilst ostensibly the document only purported to raise options for future change, and invited public submissions for consideration, there has been widespread concern about the possible serious intentions of the government for the corporation’s future. Though the ABC appears to be subject to much less vitriolic attack than its British counterpart, it too faces a range of threats and abuses. Paradoxically, such aggressive scrutiny comes at a time when both broadcasting corporations enjoy record audiences, continuing high levels of public trust, and on-line market leadership as a result their successful development of new digital platforms.

The BBC Charter Review

Both the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) are being subjected to close scrutiny, but from different quarters. During the lead up to the British general election in 2015, the Cameron Conservative government issued a Green Paper, BBC Charter Review, July-October 2015, which broke new ground in terms of the scope of such an enquiry for its level of institutional criticism. Whilst ostensibly the document only purported to raise options for future change, and invited public submissions for consideration, there has been widespread concern about the possible serious intentions of the government for the corporation’s future. Though the ABC appears to be subject to much less vitriolic attack than its British counterpart, it too faces a range of threats and abuses. Paradoxically, such aggressive scrutiny comes at a time when both broadcasting corporations enjoy record audiences, continuing high levels of public trust, and on-line market leadership as a result their successful development of new digital platforms.

Neoliberalism in Britain: From Thatcherism to Cameronism

The Conservative Party has in the 2015 British general elections won an absolute majority under David Cameron’s leadership. Cameron’s rule signifies a contested phase in British politics in the 21st century. This paper asks the question: What is Cameronism? Cameron argues that Margaret Thatcher “was a big influence” for him. It is therefore appropriate to study the relationship between Thatcherism and Cameronism. The article revisits theories of Thatcherism and analyses how it is related to Cameronism. Thatcherism and Cameronism are understood as being unities of ideology and policies that want to implement a particular model of society and for doing so, are organised along three dimensions: the economy, politics, and culture. An ideology critique of key speeches, interviews and documents analyses these three dimensions of Cameronism.

The rise of choice as an absolute ‘good’

In this article we report on a corpus-based study of the lexical item ‘choice’. ‘Choice’ was previously found to be a keyword inJeffries and Walker’s (2012) study of political discourse from the New Labour years, occurring more frequently in newspaper articles during that period (1998–2007) than in those dating from the years in which John Major was Prime Minister (1990–1997). The current project investigates the use of ‘choice’ in British general election manifestos between 1900 and 2010. We first of all carry out a quantitative study of the use of ‘choice’ by the three main UK political parties across this time period, before undertaking a qualitative study of the use of the word in context. Our approach is informed by work in lexical meaning and critical stylistics, and demonstrates how ‘choice’ has taken on new semantic meanings in a political context.

Economic globalisation, the perceived room to manoeuvre of national governments, and electoral participation: Evidence from the 2001 British General Election

Recent macro-level research argues that economic globalisation negatively affects electoral turnout by constraining the leeway of national governments and thereby rendering elections less meaningful to voters. This article analyses the link between perceptions of the national government's room to manoeuvre and turnout on the individual level. Drawing on the 2001 British General Election, it is shown that citizens who believe that economic globalisation leaves the national government with less influence on the economy are less likely to report to have voted. Further findings also support the proposed theoretical model according to which room to manoeuvre perceptions affect turnout via views on the importance of elections and matter specifically for citizens that tend towards the left side of the left-right scale.

Combining national and constituency polling for forecasting

We describe a method for forecasting British general elections by combining national and constituency polling. We reconcile national and constituency estimates through a new swing model.

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

AbstractMany 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.

The wisdom of crowds: What do citizens forecast for the 2015 British General Election?

Who do you think will win in your constituency? Most citizens correctly answer this question, and groups are even better at answering it. Combining individual forecasts results in the ‘wisdom of crowds’ explained by Condorcet's jury theorem. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of citizen forecasts in seven British General Elections between 1964 and 2010, and reports what citizens interviewed in February and March forecasted for the election in May 2015. ‘Citizen forecasting’ predicts vote shares and winners in constituency elections, and seat numbers and governments in national elections. The paper also introduces a new method for predicting vote shares from citizen forecasts. Citizen forecasts are direct, accurate, and comprehensible. Pollsters should collect them and communicate their results more often.

The British general election: Synthetic forecasts

Election forecasting work, in Britain and elsewhere, has been confined mainly to traditional approaches – statistical modeling or poll-watching. We import a new approach, which we call synthetic modeling. These models, developed out of forecasting efforts from the American 2012 presidential election, we are currently testing in a comparative European context. In this exercise, we apply the strategy to forecasting British general elections, in particular the upcoming 2015 contest. These synthetic forecasts come from hybrid models blending structural knowledge with contemporary public opinion. We generate ongoing nowcasts, from six months prior, to one month before, Election Day itself.

Forecasting the 2015 British general election: The Seats-Votes model

This paper applies the Seats-Votes Model to the task of forecasting the outcome of the 2015 election in Britain in terms of the seats won by the three major parties. The model derives originally from the ‘Law of Cubic Proportions’ the first formal statistical election forecasting model to be developed in Britain. It is an aggregate model which utilises the seats won by the major parties in the previous general election together with vote intentions six months prior to the general election to forecast seats. The model was reasonably successful in forecasting the 2005 and 2010 general elections, but has to be modified to take into account the ‘regime shift’ which occurred when the Liberal Democrats went into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010.