A body of research has built up in recent years linking the changing geography of party support in British elections to variations in the country’s economic geography. 10 Consistent with the economic vote model, government support has been shown to be higher than average in affluent areas and lower than average in poorer areas. However, the great majority of such studies have concentrated on elections between 1979 and 1997, a prolonged period of one-party rule. This article argues that this means existing research cannot differentiate between the very different predictions of positional 15 and valence approaches to economic voting since both suggest identical outcomes during Conservative administrations. By contrasting a period of Conservative rule with a period of Labour rule, however, the article provides a test of the competing claims of the positional and valence arguments for an understanding of Britain’s electoral geography. 20 Keywords: economic voting, valence politics, electoral geography JEL classifications: D72 (models of political processes: rent-seeking, elections, legislatures and voting behaviour) Date submitted: 13 July 2006 Date accepted: 26 July 2007 Two broad theoretical families have dominated the analysis of electoral behaviour: 25 positional theories, which emphasise voters’ social locations, long-term ideologies and loyalties; and valence theories, which explain the voting decision in terms of (usually) short-term judgements of government competence and performance. While these accounts are often discussed as though they are mutually incompatible, they share some common ground. Both make use of the concept of partisan identification (though they 30 conceptualise it in very different ways), and economic interests (albeit once again conceptualised in rather different ways) underpin both approaches. Economic factors have also provided powerful explanations for the geography of the vote, helping analysts understand why voters in some areas tend to vote for one party, while voters in other areas tend to vote for another, and why this might change over 35 time. As we argue below, much of the literature on the economic geography of the vote has implicitly assumed that it is a manifestation of valence politics, ignoring the positional perspective entirely. In this article, we consider both the valence and the positional aspects of the economic geography of the vote, employing evidence from