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e:/document/papers/2006/ electoral geography IEHG 20/11/2006 1

Electoral Geography (ms. No. 770)

THIS PAPER HAS BEEN PREPARED FOR THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF HUMAN GEOGRAPHY

Not to be cited without the authors’ consent

Professor Charles Pattie Department of Geography University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 2TN United Kingdom e-mail [email protected] Professor Ron Johnston School of Geographical Sciences University of Bristol Bristol BS8 1SS United Kingdom e-mail: [email protected] Keywords: Synopsis:


Introduction Electoral geography, the analysis of the interaction of space, place and electoral processes, is one of the older sub-disciplines of political geography, and shares a considerable hinterland with the related sub-field of psephology, an area of study within political science. Put crudely, the primary research question in the field is ‘why do particular parties draw more electoral support from some places than from others’? Many of these patterns have entered the national political conversation. In Britain, for instance, it is now commonplace to see the Conservatives as a party of the south and the suburbs, and Labour as a party of the northern industrial cities and the celtic periphery. Sectionalism has long been seen as a key element in American politics: between the Civil War of the 1860s and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the Democrats were strong in the states of the old South and the Republicans in the North; since the 1970s, the New South and the mid-west heartland has increasingly turned Republican, while it is the states of the eastern and Western seaboards, and the old industrial centres, which now provide core democrat support. In post-war Italy, support for western Europe’s most successful Communist party was concentrated in the so-called ‘red zones’ of the north east and of central Italy. Regionalist parties (Italy’s Northern League, Quebec nationalists in Canada, Scottish and Welsh nationalists in Britain, and so on) make an explicit reference to geography and territory in both where, and why, they fight elections. And so on: we challenge the reader to think of elections in other countries too. Pronounced geographies of party support are to be found in most countries, even in those (such as the Netherlands and Israel) which employ highly proportional electoral rules in a single na tional constituency. Describing such geographies is straightforward, and provides an easy visual reference point for the presentation of election results. Particularly in plurality election systems, where the contest is fought in numerous single-member constituencies, a map showing the geography of the election result is one of the most immediate visuals used by the media to show what has happened. However, understanding how these geographies of party support are created is a harder task than simply demonstrating that such geographies exist. Explaining the geography of party support requires that attention be given to a variety of factors, all of which are likely to interact in potentially complex ways. Among other things, we need to have regard to: the underlying social geography of party support; the impact of interactions between citizens living in the same areas (the so-called neighbourhood effect); the impact of economic geography on particularly government popularity; the pro-active and geographically targeted role of party campaigning; and last but not least, the geographical outcomes of the operation of the electoral system. Underpinning all of these is a debate, common to much modern human geography, about the relative importance of compositional and contextual effects. To caricature, do people behave and think as they do because of who they are (compositional effects, based on the social groups they belong to, the upbringings they have had and so on), or because of where they are (contextual effects, drawing on the wider environments within which they are embedded, the things they see and experience around them, and the- spatially structured – encounters they have throughout their lives)? Needless to say, the geography of any actual election is likely to result from a combination of both


contextual and compositional effects: unravelling how these operate is the central task of electoral geography. Origins Electoral geography has a long pedigree: its origins can be traced back to the early twentieth century, making it almost as long-established a sub-field of political geography as geopolitics. As befits a subject straddling geography and political science, however, many of the early contributions were by political scientists. For instance, three early advocates of a recognisable electoral geography, Siegfried, Tingsten and Key, were political scientists. However, the approaches they adopted, and the insights they developed, have had a lasting influence on the field. The French political scientist André Siegfried is often seen as the founder of academic electoral geography. His path-breaking analyses of voting in France, beginning with his 1913 work, Tableau Politique de la France de l’Ouest, proved surprisingly prescient in their attempts to link social processes to geographies of party support. His work rested on comparing mapped distributions in order to uncover associations between party support and other factors. But the associations Siegfried pointed to could be subtler than the maps alone might suggest. To take one example, some of his cartographic comparisons compared party support with underlying geology: in northern France, he noted, support for the right was highest in areas where the local rock was granite, while parties of the left did better in chalk areas. But this was not a simple case of environmental determinism. The link from geology to vote went via the (non-deterministic) influence of local geology on factors such as local land-holding patterns (e.g. whether farms were large or small – which in turn affected whether agricultural workers were employees or self-employed peasants, and hence local patterns of social stratification) and industrial location (which influenced local class structures). While the maps included local geologies, therefore, the electorally important processes reflected social relations in particular places. As we will see, this remains a focus of attention for theoretically informed electoral geography at the present time. Another pioneer, the Swedish political scientist Herbert Tingsten, was one of the first to employ statistical data to analyse electoral geographies. His seminal 1937 work, Political Behavior, relies largely on the direct display of raw data to make its point: the adoption of the advanced statistical methods which have come to be associated with electoral studies lay in the future. However, by comparing electoral and social data for voting districts, Tingsten was able to uncover ecological correlations between the two. Utilising data from 55 Stockholm electoral districts at the 1932 second chamber election, he was one of the first to demonstrate clearly the close correlation between the proportion of working class voters in an area and the level of support for parties of the left there. The relationship was strong and positive: the more working class the neighbourhood, the more votes the Socialists won there (figure 1). Following Tingsten’s lead, the statistical analysis of voting and social data (the latter often, though not always, drawn from Census information) aggregated into electoral districts, has become part of the electoral geography mainstream. Two further pioneer studies deserve close attention. Both involved analyses of electoral politics in the USA, and were published shortly after World War II, but each


respresents a distinct approach to the subject. Perhaps the best-known is V.O. Key’s 1949 study, Southern Politics, which attempts to explain the electoral distinctiveness of the Southern states in terms of their particular political his tories. At the time of writing, the states of the old Confederacy were – and had for some time been –Democrat strongholds: non-Democrat candidates were rarely successful. In part, this reflected the legacy of the Civil War. Support for the Republicans, the party of the Union, was weak in the South for many years after, while southern Democrats were more conservative and appealed more to a white supremacist vote than did their more liberal northern counterparts (Jim Crowe laws severely restricted Afro-American enfranchisement in the post-bellum South). And racism was also linked to white voters’ participation in elections: the larger the local Afro-American community in a district, the greater the turnout among white voters. But the geography of party support in the South also resulted from what Key termed ‘friends and neighbours’ voting: voters, he demonstrated, were more likely to vote for candidates from their local areas than for candidates from other parts of the state, let alone for candidates from other parts of the USA. Localism mattered in the pre-civil rights South. A rather different take, both methodologically and substantively, was offered by sociologists at Columbia University, led by Paul Lazarsfeld and Bernard Berelson. Whereas most previous studies – including Siegfried, Tingsten and Key – had employed aggregate data to study electoral behaviour, the Columbia group utilised detailed social surveys in particular communities, beginning with their study of the 1948 Presidential election in Elmira, New York. For them, individual voters had to be seen as embedded within social groups and local communities. Their detailed survey evidence suggested that political influence spread through contact with friends and acquaintances: voters were influenced by (and also influenced) the views and opinions of those they talked to and interacted with. The longer-term effects of the Columbia studies on electoral studies generally can be seen in the widespread adoption of the sample survey as the dominant source of data for the analysis of electoral behaviour. Most subsequent studies have followed the example of the slightly later project launched by political scientists at the University of Michigan in the 1950s (and continuing to the present as the American National Election Studies), and have employed national random samples of the electorate. In the process, they have gained the ability to generalise across the entire electorate, but have lost the ability to focus in depth on politics within particular communities. Only a handful of subsequent studies, most notably Huckfeldt and Sprague’s outstanding study of the 1984 Presidential campaign in South Bend, Indiana, have repeated the Columbia school’s in-depth surveys of a particular community. For electoral geographers, meanwhile, the enduring legacy of the Columbia school has been a focus on the so-called neighbourhood effect – the tendency for individuals living in the same place to vote in the same way. Among geographers, perhaps the most influential pioneer in the field was Kevin Cox. In a series of papers published in the late 1960s (particularly in a seminal 1969 paper, published in the journal Progress in Geography), Cox fruitfully combined the sorts of approaches and findings discussed above with a then-fashionable spatial science perspective. The resulting theoretical and empirical work saw voters as decision-makers who could be influenced by their local contexts. Cox conceptualised voters as nodes in a network, receiving, processing and transmitting political information. The


extent to which individuals might be influenced by the views of those they lived among, he argued, would be influenced by a variety of biases:

• Geographical distance bias: other things being equal, he argued people would be more influenced by the views of their neighbours than by individuals who lived further away – the so-called neighbourhood effect;

• Acquaintance circle bias: individuals are more likely to be influenced by the views of others in their acquaintance circle than by the opinions of relative strangers (though later work by the sociologist Granovetter showed the importance of casual acquaintances as a means of encountering heterodox views);

• Force field bias: especially before the introduction of the secret ballot, voters might come under pressure from politically more powerful groups and individuals;

• Reciprocity bias: individuals are more likely to be influenced by those they are related to in some structural way (spouses; employees and employers; children and parents) than by people with whom they have no structural relations.

• Ideological bias: voters with strong political convictions would be less open to influence than those with weaker opinions;

Cox went on, in a series of publications between 1968 and 1971 drawing on both survey and aggregate data, to show patterns consistent with each of these biases. And, albeit shorn of some of their spatial science underpinnings, they continue to inform work in electoral geography to the present. Methodological issues From these origins, electoral geography has developed into a small but vibrant research field. Work in the field has become increasingly sophisticated, both theoretically and methodologically. Before moving on to look at some of the substantive areas of research in the field, therefore, we here briefly review the underpinnings. By their nature, elections are mass events, depending on the simultaneous participation not only of several political parties, but also – and more importantly – of many voters. Millions take part in national elections: at the 2005 UK general election, for instance, almost 44.3 million adults were eligible to vote, and 27.1 million did so. Furthermore, election results are routinely published for many small areas within the country, enabling geographical analysis of the outcome. To take the 2005 UK election as an example once again, results were announced for 646 constituencies. Understanding the entirety of an election requires methods which can generalise over large populations, therefore. Qualitative methods such as in-depth interviews and focus groups could not be conducted with all but a tiny handful of voters. While these may offer some insights into how individuals react, they cannot, by their nature, account for the overall story of an election since they preclude the ability to generalise. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that quantitative methods are the most important tools of analysis for electoral geographers. The quantitative methods employed range from simple cartographic representations of election results (a procedure which takes us back to Siegfried), to more advanced methodologies. Regression models are perhaps the most widely used statistical methods in electoral geography, since they allow the simulataneous examination of


several explanatory variables. Most analyses of constituency results, for instance, involve regressing a party’s vote share in each seat against a range of social, political and economic indicators. Having said this, however, there are intriguing variations between communities of electoral geographers in the precise methodologies they apply. Spatial regression techniques, which allow the identification of ‘hot spots’ of support for particular parties, are most widely applied by North American analysts, such as John O’Loughlin, Colin Flint and James Gimpel: they have applied these methods not only to the study of elections in the USA but also to elections in other places and at other times (for instance to contemporary Italy, and to Weimar Germany). But American electoral geography is dominated by the ecological analysis of election results on small districts. Despite the heavy use of sample surveys by American political scientists (with geographically interesting consequences, as in the work of Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague), few US electoral geographers made use of them. In the UK, by contrast, spatial regression has rarely been used to study constituency voting patterns: conventional OLS models have been more commonly applied. However, British electoral geographers have made heavy use of survey data in recent years, applying not only logistic regression models but also multi- level modelling techniques: the first application of ML to electoral data was conducted by Kelvyn Jones, Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie in 1992. The decision whether to work either on ecological data from electoral districts or on survey data carries pros and cons, whichever is adopted. Ecological data allow the analysis of election results in all parts of the country simultaneously, since there is complete coverage for all areas. However, analysts are limited by the constraints of data availability and of the well-known ecological inference problem: just because two variables are correlated at the constituency scale does not mean they are also correlated at the scale of individual voters. To take one example, support for racist far right parties may be highest in areas with substantial ethnic minority populations, but it would be wrong to infer from this that ethnic minority voters support the far right: rather, racist parties draw their strength from white voters in these communities. The relative strengths and weaknesses of survey data are almost the mirror image of ecological data. Survey data make it possible to analyse the factors which influence individual voters’ decisions (a plus). But, since most surveys are national in scope, interview in only a sample of constituencies, and rarely interview more than a handful of votes in each seat, they are less than ideal vehicles for uncovering the detailed geography of constituency voting. Analysts have therefore sought to combine in various ways the strengths of ecological and survey data. Most obviously, data on individual voters can be combined directly with ecological data for the constituencies in which they live, a procedure which is particularly valuable where multi- level models are employed. A different approach employs estimation techniques to provide constituency-level estimates of data which are not available directly at that scale. For instance, class voting has been of long-term interest to European psephologists (crudely, working class voters are more likely to vote for the left, and middle class voters for the right). And there are grounds for suspecting that the strength of class voting varies from place to place. However, while national surveys give a good picture of the national class cleavage, they are not large enough to allow for detailed examination of the geography. And while census data on class and election results are commonly available at the constituency level, they are almost never cross-classified. Some estimation method is therefore required to get at


the constituency geography. A variety of methods have been employed, including Gary King’s EI (ecological inference) approach, and Ron Johnston’ entropy maximising method (which is derived from the work of Alan Wilson). They reveal substantial geographical variations in electoral behaviour, which are discussed in more detail below. Electoral geographers are not naïve empiricists, however. In common with other areas of human geography, the sub-field is dominated by theoretically informed accounts of society. No single theoretical perspective dominates. Not surprisingly, given the close links between electoral geography and political science, theories from the latter field have proved important. For instance, partisan identification (the so-called Michigan model) has been utilised as a means of understanding voters’ long-term loyalties to particular parties. Sociological accounts have emphasised the electoral influence of factors such as class, religion and core-periphery relations. The seminal work in this vein was conducted in the 1960s by Lipset and Rokkan, who traced patterns of party support in twentieth century Europe back to the political consequences of the national and industrial revolutions of the nineteenth century: later work has identified politically salient divides emerging around issues such as reliance on the welfare state (Patrick Dunleavy) or changing values (Ron Inglehart). As the distribution of (for instance social classes varies from place to place, these social cleavages are liable to produce distinctive electoral geographies. Rational choice theories, meanwhile, emphasise the cost-benefit calculations taken by both individual voters and parties. They have proved influential in several different areas of electoral analysis. For instance, rational choice influences the analysis of electoral participation, tactical (or, in North America, strategic) voting and electoral campaigning. It has also had an influence on the emergence of the valence politics perspective, which argues that voters decide by evaluating the relative performance of parties when in office. Again, the theory has, as we will see below, geographical implications. The traffic of ideas has not been one-way, however. Electoral geographers have emphasised the contextual nature of voting decisions. Place-based explanations drawing on structuration theory and similar approaches have been offered by, among others, John Agnew. Ron Johnston, meanwhile, has used similar theoretical ideas to argue for the development and long-term persistence of distinctive local political cultures, in which individuals learn about politics in distinct environments. Two individuals in otherwise identical social positions might have very different political beliefs if one grew up in an affluent commuter suburb while the other grew up in a declining industrial city, for instance. Much empirical work in electoral geography is at root about tracing the geographical ramifications of these theories: we describe some of the key findings in the following sections. Social bases of the vote As discussed above, much electoral research has focussed on the social bases of party support. Many political parties develop to represent the interests of particular sections of society. Most commonly, these sectional interests are mobilised along class lines: Social Democrat or Labour parties, advocating workers’ rights and the social wage, try to mobilise working class votes, while Conservative or Liberal parties advocating low taxes, free market economics and (sometimes) socially conservative agendas appeal for middle class support. The class cleavage, while never absolute (some


working class voters always supported parties of the right, while some members of the middle class always voted left), dominated West European electoral politics for much of the twentieth century. British politics provides a good example: at the 1964 General election, roughly two-thirds of middle class voters supported the Conservatives, and around two-thirds of working class voters supported Labour (figure 2). A class cleavage among individual; voters also has clear implications for the geography of the vote, as the operation of housing and labour markets tends, in most countries, to produce social differentiation between areas. Some communities are predominantly working class, while others are more middle class. If the individual class cleavage holds everywhere throughout a country, therefore, we would expect the vote share of the main party of the right to be highest in middle class areas, and the vote share of the main left-of-centre party to be highest in working class areas. To take a hypothetical example, consider two different constituencies, Richtown and Steeltown. Both have electorates of 60,000, and both are contested by the Conservatives on the right, by Labour on the left, and by some minor party candidates. Richtown is an affluent middle class community, and 80% of its voters are in non-manual jobs. Steelborough, meanwhile is a working class, industrial constituency: 70% of its electorate are in manual jobs. If we assume that there is a strong national class cleavage in voting, invariant throughout the country, of the same size as that at the 1964 British General Election, we can readily predict how well each of the parties should do in each seat (table 1). The Conservatives win a clear overall majority of the vote in Richtown, as do Labour in Steelborough. Note that the underlying class cleavage is identical in both constituencies: the different election outcomes are purely a result of the differences in class composition between the two seats. Nor is this simply a hypothetical effect: real world evidence reveals similar patterns. Clearly, Tingsten’s 1930s Swedish data, discussed above, are consistent with this. So too are other examples. For instance, the German Social Democrats have traditionally been strongest in industrial areas such as the Ruhr, while the Christian Democrats and their partners have drawn more support from affluent and agricultural areas such as Bavaria. In Britain, meanwhile, Labour has drawn most of its electoral strength from the deprived inner cities, from industrial communities, and from the old coalfield areas, while the Conservatives have done best in the affluent suburbs and commuter towns, and in rural areas. This is well- illustrated by constituency results at the 1970 British General Election. Labour’s vote share was highest in the most working class seats, and the Conservatives did best in the most middle class (figures 3 and 4). The patterns are not as clear cut those Tingsten reported for Stockholm (partly because British parliamentary constituencies are larger and more heterogeneous than Stockholm electoral districts), but the general trend remains clear. As implied by the preceding discussion, a geography of the vote can result simply from the interaction of a national electoral cleavage and the geography of different social groups. In other words, just because party support varies from place to place does not mean that geography has an independent effect on electoral behaviour. Indeed, critics of electoral geography have argued that, once the appropriate attributes of individual voters are taken into account (for instance, their class, their union membership, whether they own their own home, and so on), apparent geographic effects will disappear: they argue places vote differently because of the sort of people


who live there (compositional effects), not because of the sorts of places they are (contextual effects). A closer examination of social geography of the vote suggests that contextual effects do operate however. For instance, in their seminal analysis of British voting, David Butler and Donald Stokes reported that the class cleavage was not uniform throughout the country but varied systematically from place to place. They illustrated this by comparing voters in different types of constituencies. For instance, they contrasted the class cleavage (based on individuals’ partisan and class self- images) among voters living in the 10% of seats with the highest proportions of manual workers in 1970 with that for those living in the 10% of seats with most non-manual workers (table 2). In both areas, a higher proportion of middle class than working class people voted Conservative than voted Labour, and a higher proportion of working class than middle class people voted Labour, just as the class cleavage would suggest. But support was higher for Labour lower for the Conservatives among all classes in the most working class areas than in the most middle class. Working class voters in predominantly middle class communities were more likely to support the Conservatives than were working class voters in mainly working class areas. And similarly, middle class voters in working class areas were more pro-Labour in outlook than other middle class voters in middle class areas. Other researchers have pointed to similar effects. For instance, William Miller’s analyses of British constituency voting patterns in the 1960s and 1970s showed that, in seats with a large working class, Labour’s vote was higher, and the Conservatives vote was lower than would be predicted purely on the basis of the national class cleavage, while in mainly middle class seats, support for the Conservatives was higher, and support for Labour was lower, than predicted. Miller hypothesised that this was the result of a local process of ‘conversion by conversation’: individua ls in areas dominated by a particular class would be more likely than average to encounter the views and opinions of that class, and hence would be more open to its influence than voters elsewhere (we take this story up in more detail below, when we discuss the neighbourhood effect). And Ron Johnston’s analyses of British voting trends in the 1980s showed that, even when class (and other) compositional effects were taken into account, a distinct geography of the vote remained. In other words, compositional forces account in part for the geography of the vote, but they do not entirely explain it away. Who people are is not the only influence on how they vote: where they live seems to have an effect too. The discussion so far has concentrated on class, since this has enjoyed most attention from electoral researchers interested in social influences on the vote. Broadly similar analyses could be presented for other social cleavages, such as that between those dependent on the public sector and those dependent on the private sector for major goods and services. However, recent cross-national trends in electoral cleavages provide even more striking evidence for contextual effects. Since the early 1970s, dealignment has taken place in most western democracies. Voters are no longer so strongly influenced by social class, or by long-term loyalties to particular parties. We can illustrate this by comparing class voting in Britain at the 1964 and 2005 General Elections. Compared to the earlier contest, far fewer voters in 2005 voted for their ‘natural’ class party, and many more voted either for a third party or for the ‘wrong’ class party (figure 5). For instance, Labour won almost as many middle class votes as the Conservatives. Many factors underlie this phenomenon, including he expansion of formal education, increasing sophistication, more complex lifestyles which break up


simple class loyalties, and growing disillusion with governments of both right and left. But whatever the reason, voters are more volatile, and more likely to judge parties by results (a topic we return to below) than in the past. One might be forgiven, therefore, for expecting that this would imply a more volatile electoral geography. However, this is often not the case. Although individual voters are less class-aligned than in the past, for instance, the same is not true of the geography of party support. Even among dealigned electorates, right of centre parties gain most support in middle class neighbourhoods and left of centre parties in working class areas. For instance, class dealignment was far advanced at the 1992 British General Election: it had relatively little bearing on the decisions of individual voters, certainly compared to the early 1960s. But at the constituency level, little had changed since 1970, when the individual class alignment was still strong (compare figures 6 and 7 with figures 3 and 4). The implication is that voters are increasingly influenced by where they are, rather than by who they are: context matters. But how does context influence the vote? In the following three sections, we explore this in more depth by looking at: the influence of other voters; the impact of local economic conditions; and the effects of party campaigns. The neighbourhood effect The neighbourhood effect literature draws on a simple observation: people tend to live, work and play with other people. Few individuals are so socially isolated that they never talk to others. And through these daily interactions (some deep, some fleeting) with others – whether family members, friends, workmates, neighbours, casual acquaintances or relative strangers – we find out what those around us think, what concerns them, and where they agree with or differ from us. And some individuals are likely to be influenced by the views they encounter in these interactions, either by sheer weight of numbers (majority opinion – ‘if that’s what most people think, there must be something in it’) or because the opinion is promulgated by individuals who are seen as particularly authoritative (‘she obviously knows what she’s talking about, so I had better take her view seriously’). Our conversations with others expose us to heterodox views and encourage us to think again about our own opinions (whether to confirm or to change them). By its nature, this is a contextual process: individuals can be influenced by, and in their turn can influence, the views of those they encounter. The neighbourhood effect traces its origins back to the work of (among others) the Columbia school and Kevin Cox – both discussed above. Its core claim is interactions between people living in the same communities are particularly consequential (for instance, as a result of Cox’s geographical distance bias), such that a dominant community view will come to be shared by most people living there. This is Miller’s ‘conversion by conversation’ in action. Much evidence for the neighbourhood effect has been circumstantial, pointing to patterns in election results which are consistent with the effect, but which do no t, of themselves, demonstrate the impact of talk among voters. For instance, Miller’s observation, discussed above, that the Labour vote was higher than expected on the basis of national trends in the most working class communities, and lower than


expected in the most middle class communities, is certainly the sort of pattern we might anticipate if the effect does operate. But it could also occur through a ‘discouraged voter’ effect. Rather than being the result of individuals converting to the locally dominant view, it could be a consequence of those who disagree with that view (for instance, Conservative voters in a strongly Labour-voting area) deciding to abstain, on the grounds that their participation is very unlikely to change the result locally (this is more likely in plurality electoral systems such as those used in the USA and the UK than in proportional representation systems where every vote counts). Substantiating the neighbourhood effect therefore requires more direct research on the effects of discussions between voters. A substantial cross-national body of such research – much of it inspired by the innovative analyses of Robert Huckfeldt and John Sprague – has now grown up and, for the most part, demonstrates that voters’ decisions are indeed influenced by the views of those they talk to. For instance, respondents to the 1992 British Election Study were asked to name the 3 individuals they were most likely to talk to regarding important matters, and were also asked to say which parties (if any) they thought these individuals supported. Analysis of the resulting data shows the impact of conversation. Among those who had not voted for a party at the preceding (1987) election, the more individuals they reported having talked to who did support that party, the more likely they were to switch heir vote to it in 1992 (table 3). Take, for example, those individuals who did not vote Conservative in 1987: while just under 9% of those who did not name any Conservative-supporting conversation partners went on to vote for the party in 1992, 26% of those who had talked to one Conservative did so, as did 46% of those who had talked to two, and 52% of those who talked to three. And the corollary holds too: the more these individuals talked to supporters of other parties, the less likely they were to switch: looking again at those who had not voted Conservative in 1987, while 19% of those who did not name a Labour-supporting conversation partner switched to the Conservatives in 1992, only 2% of those who talked to three Labour supporters did so. So conversations can persuade individuals to change their minds. But where one’s conversation partners agree with one, discussion can reinforce one’s views. The same data show that loyalty to a party is enhanced by conversation with other supporters (table 4): among those who voted for a party in 1987, the more they talked to other supporters of the party, the more likely they were to stay loyal to it five years later, while the more they talked to supporters of other parties, the less likely they were to stay loyal. The extent to which conversations with others can have an influence on individuals’ views varies from person to person, however. Not surprisingly, those who already have strongly held political preferences are less likely to be influenced than are those who do not. The 1992 British data illustrate the point once again (table 5). The chances that those who had not voted for a party in 1987, and who did not generally identify themselves with it, would switch to it in 1992 were almost non-existent for those who identified very strongly with a second party, irrespective of whether they talked to supporters of first party. But among those who had not voted for the first party in 1987, did not identify with it, and also did not identify strongly with any other party, the chance of switching to the first party in 1992 were between 3 and 5 times higher for those who spoke to at least one supporter of the first party than among those who spoke to no supporters of the party. Partisans are hard to persuade, but the undecided are rather easier.


One might suspect that the conversion by conversation effect is self- limiting. If this were the case, then eventually, all those who were likely to be persuaded by others would be persuaded, members of the same conversation networks would come to share the same views as each other, and political talk between individuals would cease to have any measurable effect. However, this is unlikely to happen, for two reasons. First, as new voters enter the electorate, as existing voters migrate from place to place and from job to job, and as friendships are made and broken, individuals’ conversation networks will change gradually over time. Second, few conversation networks are hermetically sealed: most individuals know several different circles of acquaintances, some of whom will know each other and some of whom will not. My work colleagues, for instance, might be strangers to the fellow parents I meet through my child’s school, for instance. As a result, most conversation networks are always open to new ideas, brought in by individuals who have encountered them elsewhere. Disagreement can flourish, even while conversion by conversation takes place. However, cross-national research suggests the conversation effect is, to some extent, culturally specific. Comparisons of American and Japanese evidence, for instance, suggest that Japanese voters are less willing than Americans to give their opinions to others, and hence are less likely to encounter the heterodox views of other citizens. A distinctive variant of the neighbourhood effect is the similar-sounding phenomenon of ‘friends and neighbours’ voting, in which voters in a particular area give greater support to candidates with local connections than to candidate from outside the area. Examples of friends and neighbours voting have been reported at a variety of scales, from local government elections to Presidential elections in the USA. In the latter contest, for instance, it is rare for a candidate to lose the vote in his home state, even when his campaign stalls throughout the rest of the country. Evidence from Ireland (where election results are commonly available for sub-constituency electoral districts) shows that friends and neighbours voting can even happen within a constituency: for example, analysis of election returns in the 63 electoral districts of the multi-member Galway West constituency at the 1977 election show that most candidates’ local vote shares were significantly negatively correla ted with the distance of the electoral district from the candidate’s home: the further from the district a candidate lived, the fewer votes the candidate gained there (table 6: the main exception, Molloy, turned out to have family connections to the west of the constituency, where his vote was strong). Political talk between voters has a clear impact on their voting decisions, therefore. However, the neighbourhood effect is neither sufficient nor necessary for the creation of a distinctive electoral geography. Voters can also be influenced by what they see around them, even if they do not talk to others in their local communities. We discuss this further in the next section. Valence politics: economic geography and electoral geography Classic theories of democracy often assume voters are well- informed, careful decision-makers who carefully examine the various policy proposals and ideological claims made by the political parties, comparing them against their own clear preferences. To some extent, this is borne out by empirical research, which not only


suggests that voters are guided by their ideological predispositions and attitudes, but also demonstrate that this ‘issue voting’ has become more important over time as class and partisan Dealignment has reduced the influence of the social bases of the vote. But at the same time, two findings recur repeatedly in the empirical literature: most voters, most of the time, have little if any detailed knowledge of particular policy areas; and voters’ attitudes are oft en volatile, shifting sometimes radically over even short periods of time, and implying that they are not, in fact, deeply held. The electorate is not, on the whole, well informed and does not have deep-seated, clear preferences. But this does not mean voters are ignorant fools. Indeed, their lack of knowledge is, in fact, rational. Modern governments are complex organisations. They legislate over very many fields, and much of their activity is both highly technical and controversial: even experts in the field can and do disagree. Few voters have the resources (of time, as much as anything) really to get to grips with even a few policy areas. And yet (as most voters now) the chance that their personal vote will be decisive in an election is small, and (since they vote for a party and its entire programme, rather than for individual policy items), the chances of supporting a party with which they agree on every issue are remote. Given these facts, rational ignorance is a sensible strategy: while a broad idea of what one stands for is useful, holding detailed opinions on every policy area (even if possible) is not. Given this, how are voters, especially in a dealigning electorate, to choose sensibly between parties? As a now extensive body of research attests, the answer is the emergence of valence politics: voters decide on the basis of broad judgements of ‘what works’. I may not understand economic theory, may be baffled by arguments over federalism in the European Union, may never have thought at all about policy on weights and measures, but I do have a useful yardstick against which to judge governments especially: have they improved my standard of living or not? If the government can make me better off, it must be doing something right (even if I do not know what that something is) and hence probably deserves my support. If, however, I am worse off than I was, I might reasonably feel that the government is failing, and hence that I should try to vote it out by supporting the opposition. This is the essence of valence politics: results matter. Much of the research activity on valence politics has concentrated on economic performance in particular. A now vast cross-national literature has repeatedly confirmed that government popularity (whether measured by monthly opinion poll data or by election results) varies over time in step with the state of the economy. Some studies examine the impact of actual national economic indicators, most commonly the unemployment and inflation rates. Others look at survey evidence of public perceptions of economic performance – do people feel things are getting better or worse over time? Other things being equal, most studies confirm that the better the economy performs, and the more affluent voters feel, other things being equal, the more support the government of the day enjoys. In part, this is due to the effect of general economic movements on voters’ personal circumstances (so-called egocentric voting – do I feel better or worse off?). But in part, too, it reflects a more contextual, or sociotropic, effect – irrespective of who I personally am faring, how are opther people doing?


Two factors limit the general applicability of these findings, however. First, what ‘counts’ as a good or bad economic performance is in part contextual. Over time voters can become accustomed to economic conditions which, a few years before, might have seemed highly problematic. To take an example, unemployment levels which would have been deemed unacceptably high in the low unemployment years of the 1960s were often seem as a marker of economic success after the high unemployment 1980s. This does not, of itself, invalidate the economic vote model, but it does suggest that models need to be periodically recalibrated. Second, international comparisons show that the extent to which governments are held to account for economic performance depends on how easy it is for voters to hold particular parties responsible for success or failure. Other things being equal, economic performance has a stronger impact on government support in countries with a strong tradition of single party majority governments (for instance, where plurality electoral systems are used) than in countries where multi-party coalition governments are the norm (as is common under proportional representation). In the former states, accountability is clear: only one party forms a government at any given point in time, and hence only that party can reasonably be held responsible for the state of the economy. In the latter, however, several parties contribute to the government and each can, if need be, blame any economic failings on its coalition partners, while claiming success for itself – and hence muddying the waters for voters. The economic vote has geographical consequences due to the persistence of economic geography. In all but the very smallest states, economic performance varies from place to place: while some areas may enjoy prosperity, others can suffer austerity – and this geography can change over relatively short periods of time. The changing economic geography of the UK since 1980 provides a recent example. In the early 1980s, manufacturing recession brought mass unemployment to inner city Britain and to the old industrial areas of the North and Midlands. But at the same time, a boom generated by the financial services industry in the southeast produced considerable prosperity in that region. By the early 1990s, the local economies of the old industrial areas were beginning to recover, but the previously prosperous southeast was caught up in a recession. A decade on again, the southeast was again booming, while the recovery continued in the north. This means that both voters’ egocentric and sociotropic evaluations may vary, depending on where a voter lives. Voters’ life chances (and hence their likely egocentric evaluations) influenced by the state of their local economy: for example, individuals are more likely to be out of work themselves in areas where unemployment is high than in areas where it is low. But even where two individuals have identical levels of personal prosperity, they may come to rather different judgements regarding the government’s handling of the economy if one lives in a depressed region and the other in a thriving one. Not surprisingly, therefore, many analysts have been able to show that the changing regional and local geography of support for governments are strongly influenced by the waxing and waning of regional and local economies: other things being equal, voters in areas which prosper support the government, while those in areas in decline oppose it. We can illustrate these points once again by examining data from recent British elections. A first step is to demonstrate that voters are aware of their local economies. We can do this by using the 1997 British Election Survey (BES), which asked respondents how they felt their personal financial situation had changed over the


previous year, how they thought the national economy had changed over the same period, and how they felt their local area had fared relative to the rest of the country since the 1992 election. Overall, the period between 1992 and 1997 was a good one for the UK economy: unemployment fell almost everywhere and the economy grew quite strongly. But the strength of the recovery varied from place to place. Voters noticed. Their opinions of economic change at all three scales (personal, regional and national) were sensible related to actual changes. Those who felt things had improved tended to live in areas with the largest average falls in unemployment, while those who felt things had worsened lived in areas with the lowest average falls (table 7). Not only that, but whereas local economic conditions were only relatively weakly related to evaluations of personal income, they were related more strongly to evaluations of the national, and most strongly of all to evaluations of the regional economy. Furthermore, voters’ party choices are influenced by their evaluations of their local area’s economic performance. At the 1997 UK election, a Conservative government was defending its record against an opposition dominated by Labour. Among those who felt their local economy was performing much better than the national average, a near-majority (49%) voted Conservative, while only a third voted Labour (table 8). But as perceptions of regional performance worsen, support for the government falls, while support for the main opposition party grows: only 10% of those who felt their local economy was becoming much less prosperous voted for the government, while 68% voted for Labour. These effects are robust: even when controls are introduced for prior partisanship, for personal circumstances, and for evaluations of the state of the national economy, evaluations of local prosperity still have an independent effect on vote choice. Further analyses demonstrate that these effects are strongly influenced by voters’ attributions of responsibility for the state of the local economy (Table 9). Among those who held the government primarily responsible for the state of their local economy in 1997, support for the Conservatives was 67% among those who felt their region had become much more prosperous, but only 7% among those who felt it had become much less well off: the equivalent figures for Labour support were 18% and 73% respectively. But among voters who did not hold the government primarily responsible, there was no real change in support for the government and opposition between those who felt the local economy had performed well and those who felt it had fared badly. Once again, we see evidence of voters using contextual information about their surroundings to decide how to vote in an election. Government performance is a key influence on voting, and, to the extent that its results are spatially variant, gives voters in different places different impressions of how the incumbents are performing, and whether they should be rewarded or punished. The geography of electoral campaigning The geography of an election can also be influenced by the direct campaigning activities of the parties themselves, both in the long run-up to an election and during the campaign itself. Party campaigns aim to achieve a variety of goals. They must mobilise existing supporters, ensuring they are enthused to go out and vote for the party. They seek to win over uncommitted voters, whose support may change the election outcome. The can try to discourage supporters of a party’s opponents from


voting, by suggesting that the rival party has no chance of winning. And they try to inform voters, both of the main issues of the campaign (though they are not particularly effective at this), and of the identities of the candidates (which can be useful if, for instance, friends and neighbours voting prevails). In part, this all requires campaigns aimed at voters throughout the country. But in part, too, it demands the ability to target campaign resources on particular, pivotal, contests and communities, where an extra effort might yield electoral rewards. An ability to use geography to the party’s advantage is an important tool for campaign planners. Not surprisingly, therefore, the analysis of electoral campaigning has become an integral part of electoral geography, overturning in the process the accepted wisdom that the advent of television campaigning in the 1950s had rendered local campaigning during a general election a superfluous anachronism. It hadn’t, but to demonstrate this required careful data analysis. Effective campaigning requires the careful and efficient allocation of scarce resources across competing demands. In an election campaign, not all areas of the country are of equal importance to a party (especially, but not exclusively, if the campaign is fought under a plurality electoral system). In some seats, the party’s support is too low to give any realistic chance of winning election there. In other seats, its popularity is so high that it can virtually guarantee it will win, even in a bad year nationally. A rational party will expend few resources fighting in either kind of seat (of course, in seats where the party is unpopular, it may, in any case, have too few resources to mount an effective campaign, even if it wanted to). Rather, it should concentrate its efforts in marginal areas, where a few votes either way could mean the difference between winning and losing. There is substantial evidence that parties do indeed behave in this manner. In Britain, for instance, the main parties have all employed ‘target seat’ strategies in most recent elections, identifying particularly strategic seats for extra campaign effort, and largely ignoring other seats. This can be shown graphically by looking at the relationship between how much a party spent on its constituency campaign at the 2005 British general election, and how marginal the seat was for the party (for technical reasons, we concentrate only on English constituencies in this example). Marginality is defined here as the difference between a party’s constituency vote share at the previous (2001) election and (if the party won the seat then) the vote share of the party in second place or (if the party lost the seat) the share of the party which did win. Each party’s marginality measure is negative where it lost a seat, and positive where it won. The closer the measure is to zero, the more marginal – and hence competitive – the seat is for the party. Graphs for the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats (the three main parties in the UK) all show similar patterns (figures 8, 9 and 10). Campaign spending (as a percentage of the legally permitted maximum in each seat) in 2005 was lowest in seats where the party had lost by a wide margin, reached a peak in the party’s most marginal seats, and (for Labour and to a lesser extent the Conservatives) declined somewhat in the party’s safer seats. As we might expect, given the context of the 2005 election, The Conservative party spent most in those marginal seats where it had lost narrowly at the previous election, and which it needed to win in order to regain power (the curve for the party peaks just to the left of zero marginality). And Labour, a government with a very large majority in Parliament before the election, was more concerned with defending those marginal seats it had won in previous contests and


which it had to retain to stay in office (the Labour curve peaks just to the right of zero marginality). What is more, this campaign spending does make a – small but important in close elections – difference to each party’s performance (table 10). Broadly, the more effort parties put into their campaigns locally, the more votes they gather themselves, and the fewer votes go to their rivals. Controlling for how well each party did in each constituency at the preceding election, the more the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats spent on their local campaigns in 2005, the better they did themselves, and the worse their rivals did. Labour’s constituency campaign seems to have misfired in 2005, however. While the party’s campaign efforts had the desired negative effect on the Conservative vote, it did nothing to boost either its own vote, or its ability to see of challenges from the Liberal Democrats. (This is in striking contrast to other recent UK general elections, when Labour’s local campaign was effective and it was the Conservative campaign which failed to perform. Almost certainly this reflects both the general unpopularity of the Labour government in the run-up to the 2005 election, and the Conservatives’ gradual reforms of their party’s structures to enable more targeted campaigning than at previous contests.) There is little evidence that constituency campaigning imparts substantial new information to voters (beyond the identities of the main candidates – though this can of itself win votes). Rather, the main impacts seem top come through a combination of information about the relevant political context in the constituency and of mobilisation of one’s supporters. This can be illustrated by looking at tactical voting (we use the standard British nomenclature here: in North America, the same phenomenon is referred to as strategic voting) and at the geography of electoral turnout. Tactical voting can occur when a voter’s preferred candidate stands no chance of winning a constituency. She might then decide to switch support to her second-preference candidate if that candidate has a better chance of defeating a third candidate whose election she strongly opposes. Such switching is most likely between candidates of parties which are relatively close ideologically. The key point for us, however, is tha t the decision whether or not to vote tactically is a contextual decision: it only makes sense in the light of one’s favoured party’s prospects in the seat where one votes. Parties can exploit this in their constituency campaigns by drawing attention to the structure of local party competition where this is likely to attract tactical voters to them. For instance, at the 1997 and 2001 UK General Elections, Labour and the Liberal Democrats were ideologically relatively close, and were seen as quite distinct from the Conservatives. In seats where they were in second place behind a Conservative incumbent, or which they held against a Conservative challenge, Liberal Democrat candidates produced campaign literature reminding Labour supporters in the constituency of this fact, and pointing out that while a Labour vote there would be wasted (as the Labour candidate had no chance) a tactical vote for the Liberal Democrat would provide the best chance of preventing a Conservative victory. And there is evidence that such appeals work. For instance, at the 2001 UK General Election, voters were asked why they voted as they did. Around 10% said they voted for tactical reasons: about 70% of these tactical voters supported either Labour or the Liberal Democrats. The tactical picture becomes clear when we look at the state of party competition in their seats. For instance, table 11 concentrates


on tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats. More voters supported the party for tactical reasons where it was in first or second place in a seat at the previous election than were it was in third place or worse: 30% of Liberal Democrat voters in seats where the party was second to the Conservatives voted tactically, as did 45% of the party’s supporters in seats where it was in first place in 1997 and the Conservatives were in second, whereas in seats where the main battle was between Conservatives and Labour, only 20% of Liberal Democrat voters said they voted tactically (the table ignores seats where there were few Liberal Democrat-voting respondents). And if we look at who these Liberal Democrat tactical voters said they really preferred, we find that, in general, they supported Labour – especially in seats where Labour was in third place or worse: for instance almost to thirds of Liberal Democrat tactical voters in seats a Conservative incumbent faced a Liberal Democrat in second place would have voted for Labour had they not voted tactically. What of voter mobilisation by the constituency campaign? The aim here is to maximise one’s support where it is most needed – in the most marginal constituencies. Since, by definition, at least two parties will be trying to achieve this in each marginal, we would expect that overall election turnout should be higher in the most marginal seats (where the campaign is fiercest and most effort goes into mobilisation) than in safer seats, where there is less to gain. In fact, this is borne out empirically (Figure 11): the lower the winning party’s majority in a seat at the 2001 General Election (and hence the closer the competition there in 2005), the higher turnout at the 2005 General Election. The main exception to this trend (picked out as a circle in the figure) also, in some respects, shows the importance of local campaigning for mobilising voters. The seat is Blaenau Gwent, normally a very safe Labour stronghold. However, in 2005, there was a dispute locally over the imposition of the Labour candidate by national headquarters in place of a local candidate: a local party member therefore ran as an independent, generating considerable publicity in the constituency and winning the seat. The geography of electoral campaigning plays an important role in creating the wider patterns of electoral geography, therefore. And, of particular importance given the widespread tendency for electoral participation to fall in established democracies since the late twentieth century, it also has a bearing on turnout. From votes to seats: geography and electoral systems The above discussion shows some of the ways in which geographical context matters for an understanding of the electoral behaviour of voters and of political parties (and some of the sorts of research undertaken by electoral geographers). However, geography can affect election results in another, more mechanical, manner, through its impact on the conversion of votes into seats. This occurs because almost all electoral systems divide a state up into electoral districts, each of which elects members to the national parliament (the main – and rare - exceptions are Netherlands and Israel, where the whole state is one multi-member constituency in a PR contest). In plurality systems such as first past the post (used in the UK and the USA), these electoral districts usually return just one elected politician, supported by a plurality of voters in the area. Most proportional representation systems, meanwhile, employ larger, multi-member seats: the degree of proportionality


achieved depends in part on the number of seats up for election in each district – the more seats, the greater the proportionality. But because party supporters tend to be clustered geographically, the imposition of a grid of electoral districts over a country can affect election outcomes. A hypothetical example is given in figure 12. Imagine a country, divided, as in panel a, into 9 small areas, each with 1000 voters. Only two parties (L & R) contest elections in our country, and party R has, at the moment, more supporters than party L. Assume, for simplicity, that the country employs a first past the post plurality electoral system, and that it is divided into three constituencies, each with 3000 voters. There are a variety of ways in which this could be achieved, using the 9 small districts as building blocks. Two are shown here. Without any vo ters changing their preferences, we can change the result of the election by using different constituency boundaries. We could, for instance, define 3 seats which all run from east to west (panel b: the constituency boundaries are the solid thick lines). In this scenario, party R will win two seats (the two more northerly ones) while party L wins one seat, the shaded constituency in the south of the country. But another possible constituency geography (shown in panel c) would produce only 1 seat for party R and 2 (shaded) for party L: the least popular party would win the election. Clearly, other things being equal, where the constituency boundaries are drawn is potentially of real consequence. To add to the problem, population change creates a need periodically to revise the boundaries of electoral districts, as some areas grow and others decline. Most modern electoral systems assume that each vote is of equal influence, a desideratum often captured in the slogan ‘one person, one vote’. Failure to revise electoral boundaries in line with population change can lead to the subversion of this aim, however: voters in districts with falling populations end up with more influence, other things being equal, than those in districts with growing population. British politics prior to the 1832 Great Reform Act provides some extreme examples. Parliamentary constituencies up till that point had hardly changed since the middle ages, though huge changes had occurred in the UK, not least the beginnings of the industrial revo lution and the associated growth of cities like Manchester and Birmingham. As a result, some constituencies – often termed rotten boroughs - had very few registered electors. The most notorious example was Old Sarum, in Wilshire, which had just 11 registered electors in 1831. But some of the new industrial cities had no dedicated MPs, being represented in Parliament only as part of a larger county. Clearly, electors in Old Sarum had much more influence on choosing an MP than did those in Manchester. Differences in electorates between constituencies persist, though much less dramatically so than in early nineteenth century Britain. Where constituency size varies systematically with party support (for instance, when one party’s support is concentrated in smaller constituencies while another’s is concentrated in larger ones), this can result in the electoral abuse of malaportionment. The party which wins in the smaller seats is at an advantage over a rival which wins in larger seats, other things being equal, as it takes fewer votes on average to elect each of the former’s MPs than to elect the latter’s. Malaportionment can occur deliberately or by accident – as when one party is more popular in areas of declining population and another is more popular where population is growing, but constituency boundaries are not changed to keep abreast of population change. In the UK, Labour has tended to be the beneficiary of an accidental malaportionment, as it is most popular in inner cities and in Wales


and Scotland, all areas which have lost population steadily since the mid-twentieth century. A common means of avoiding excessive malaportionment is therefore to provide for periodic revisions of constituency boundaries, normally with the aim of making electorates as near to equal in all districts as possible (though there are variations to this in different countries). In the USA, for instance, reviews take place after each decennial Census. In the UK, Boundary Commissions have reviewed Parliamentary constituencies roughly every 14 years since the late 1940s. The detailed rules governing this process can vary substantially from country to country, altering the frequency with which reviews take place, the nature of the personnel involved (non-partisan civil servants or government appointees, for instance), the amount of input from political parties (very high in some systems such as the USA; almost negligible in others, like New Zealand), the extent of public involvement, and so on. Electoral geographers in different countries have both analysed redistricting and also participated in reviews as ‘expert witnesses’ at various stages of the process. The alteration of constituency boundaries also gives rise to another potential electoral abuse, gerrymandering. In a gerrymander, constituencies may be of roughly equal size, but are drawn deliberately to maximise one party’s representation at the expense of another. The hypothetical examples shown in figure 12 illustrate how this can be achieved. Gerrymanders can work by concentration– allowing a party to win a few seats by very large margins, hence wasting many of their votes – or by dispersion – spreading a party’s supporters thinly across several seats in order to deny the party a winning majority in any one. The abuse is most common in systems which allow parties a strong input –either de jure or de facto - into the redistricting process. To minimise the risk of gerrymandering, some countries either exclude parties and the public entirely from redistricting (as in New Zealand) or grant them a relatively minor and restricted role, leaving the final decisions in the hands of independent civil servants (as in the UK). Contrary to some views, gerrymandering and malaportionment are not restricted simply to plurality electoral systems (though much of the relevant literature is restricted to them). Boundaries can also be manipulated for partisan advantage in PR systems, for instance by controlling how many MPs are returned from each multi-member district. This affects the proportionality of the result. A party might seek smaller constituencies where it is strong (in which case proportionality will decline, and it stands to win more MPs than its vote share strictly entitles it to) and larger constituencies where it is weak (to increase proportionality and hence guarantee it at least some MPs). Malaportionment and gerrymandering (whether deliberate or an accidental by-product of non-partisan redistricting) can result in electoral bias, whereby one party gains a systematic advantage through the operation of the electoral system, gaining more seats than its vote share strictly entitles it to. A winner’s bias is a familiar feature of most plurality systems (indeed, it is one of the effects such systems are designed to produce): more often than not, the party with the largest vote share wins an even larger share of seats in Parliament. The 2005 UK General Election provides a striking example. Labour gained the largest vote share of any party, but at just 35%, this was the smallest winning party vo te share in the UK in the modern era. But the party won


55% of seats in Parliament, giving it a clear working majority. Though seldom as dramatic, similar winners’ biases have typified most modern British elections: since 1945, no government has ever won a majority of the vote, but most governments have enjoyed a majority in the Commons. Electoral bias is not restricted to the first past the post winner’s bias, however. Even where a party loses an election, biases in the operation of the electoral system can protect its representation in Parliament. One way of demonstrating the relative bias of the electoral system in favour of one party rather than another is to take a particular election result, then apply a uniform swing to all constituencies in order to simulate a result in which both parties tie nationally in terms of vote share. If there is no systematic bias in favour of one party rather than the other, then the two should win identical numbers of seats at equal votes nationally. But if, when their votes tie, one party still wins more seats than the other, then the electoral system is biased in favour of the former party. Furthermore, it is possible to break down the sources of this bias, in terms of malaportionment, differential turnout, and variations in vote efficiency. Other things being equal, if one party is more successful than the other in seats with smaller electorates and lower turnouts, or if it enjoys smaller majorities where it wins and gains smaller vote shares in seats that it loses than does its rival (and hence wastes fewer votes), then a plurality system will tend to be biased in its favour. Electoral bias has now been investigated in many electoral systems, including the USA, the UK and New Zealand. Scale and electoral geography As implicitly shown by the above discussion, one of the most striking, though surprisingly little commented-upon, features of the electoral geography literature is that most studies are contained within national or sub-national spatial frames. We have studies of American elections, British elections, French elections, national elections, local elections, and so on. But very few have looked at electoral geography on a wider canvass. This is doubly surprising given the rise of comparative politics in the related field of political science. Two notable exceptions stand out. As part of his world systems approach to political geography generally, Peter Taylor has noted that the international distribution of democracies as opposed to authoritarian governments shows a striking core-periphery pattern. Most core states are functioning democracies while most (though not all – India is a clear exception, for instance) peripheral states are not. Taylor accounts for this in terms of the surplus available for re-distribution nationally. In core states, there is sufficient surplus to allow a relatively open political debate over who benefits. But in the periphery limited surpluses raise the stakes: local elites are more reluctant to share their gains with the poor and hence are less likely to allow the poor access to politics through elections. In collaboration with Osei-Kwame, Taylor further developed this insight to consider what they termed ‘the politics of failure’. Experiments with electoral democracy in many peripheral states struggle to succeed, as the pressures on governments are high and their ability to deliver small (hence the ‘politics of failure’). Many peripheral democracies are therefore either short- lived, ending in coups, or fail to establish long-lasting parties with reliable geographies of support.


The other notable exception can be found in work on the spread of democracy and civil rights. Although several geographers (including Ron Johnston and John Agnew) have written on this subject, perhaps the most sustained engagement with it has come from John O’Loughlin and his colleagues. O’Loughlin’s interest in the spread of democracy can be set against the backdrop of initial reactions to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Communism in the early 1990s. A triumphalist rhetoric emerged among some Western commentators (most notably from Francis Fukuyama) to the effect that democracy had ‘won’, and would now spread inexorably to all countries. O’Loughlin’s work provides an important corrective to this view. Using time series and spatial regression models, he showed that democracy did spread from country to country in a diffusion-like manner. However, his analyses also demonstrated that this spread was not inexorable, but was subject to reversals and setbacks. Previous waves of democratisation had stalled and been to some extent reversed, and there were no grounds to expect the post-Cold War wave to be any different. In the light of international politics post 9/11, his results seem prescient. These exceptions nothwithstanding, however, electoral geography remains primarily concerned with intra-national, not international variations, and with elections in established rather than emerging democracies. The development of a global, comparativist electoral geography remains a challenge for the future.


Further reading Agnew, J., 1987, Place and Politics: The Geographical Mediation of State and

Society, London, Allen and Unwin.

Dalton, R.J., 2006, Citizen Politics: Public Opinion and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies (4th edition), Washington, DC: CQ Press.

Huckfeldt, R. and Sprague, J., 1995, Citizens, Politics and Social Communications: Information and Influence in an Election Campaign, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Johnston, R.J. and Pattie, C.J., 2006, Putting Voters in Their Place: Geography and Elections in Great Britain, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Johnston, R.J., Shelley, F..M. and Taylor, P.J. (eds.), 1990, Developments in Electoral Geography, London: Routledge.

Monmonier, M., 2001, Bushmanders and Bullwinkles: How Politicians Manipulate Electronic Maps and Census Data to Win Elections, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, P. and Johnston, R.J., 1979, Geography of Elections, London: Croom Helm.


Table 1: The effect of a national class cleavage on voting in to hypothetical constituencies. National class cleavage: Non-manual Manual % % Conservative 62 28 Labour 22 64 Other 16 8 Total 100 100 Richtown Non-manual Manual Total N % N % N % Conservative 29760 62 3360 28 33120 55.2 Labour 10560 22 7680 64 18240 30.4 Other 7680 16 960 8 8640 14.4 Total 48000 100 12000 100 60000 100 Steelborough Non-manual Manual Total N % N % N % Conservative 11160 62 11760 28 22920 38.2 Labour 3960 22 26880 64 30840 51.4 Other 2880 16 3360 8 6240 10.4 Total 18000 100 42000 100 60000 100


Table 2: Geographical variation in the class cleavage at the 1970 British General Election: class self- image and partisan self- image Most manual 10% of seats Most non-manual 10% of seats Middle class Working class Middle class Working class % % % % Conservative 46 21 78 50 Labour 54 79 22 50


Table 3: Voter defection and intensity of partisan reinforcement in conversation networks (source: 1992 BES) a) Respondent did not vote Conservative in 1987 % voting Conservative in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 8.5 26.0 45.5 51.7 Labour 19.4 12.0 5.8 2.1 Liberal Democrat 15.1 15.7 8.9 22.2 b) Respondent did not vote Labour in 1987 % voting Labour in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 16.8 8.1 2.7 2.1 Labour 6.9 15.3 37.3 66.7 Liberal Democrat 12.0 6.5 6.2 0.0 c) Respondent did not vote Liberal Democrat in 1987 % voting Liberal Democrat in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 10.5 9.9 8.6 2.1 Labour 9.0 13.6 8.3 6.4 Liberal Democrat 6.5 28.8 40.0 57.1


Table 4: Voter loyalty and intensity of partisan reinforcement in conversation networks (source: 1992 BES) a) Respondent voted Conservative in 1987 % voting Conservative in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 70.7 81.3 88.1 91.3 Labour 82.0 76.0 50.0 20.0 Liberal Democrat 82.1 68.8 52.6 25.0 b) Respondent voted Labour in 1987 % voting Labour in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 80.6 72.4 68.8 50.0 Labour 73.9 76.7 87.9 90.9 Liberal Democrat 80.9 64.4 60.0 ND c) Respondent voted Liberal Democrat in 1987 % voting Liberal Democrat in 1992 N of discussants supporting party Party supported by discussants: 0 1 2 3 Conservative 64.7 61.5 50.0 ND Labour 62.2 60.0 73.9 ND Liberal Democrat 51.6 73.3 83.9 ND ND = insufficient data


Table 5: Strength of partisanship and the influence of conversation, 1992 (source: 1992 BES) a) respondent did not identify with Conservatives and did not vote Conservative in

1987:

% voting Conservative in 1992 Respondent had: No Conservative 1+ Conservative discussants discussants Very strong party identification 0.5 0.0 Fairly strong party identification 2.1 2.7 Not very strong/no party identification 5.1 23.6 b) respondent did not identify with Labour and did not vote Labour in 1987:

% voting Labour in 1992 Respondent had: No Labour 1+ Labour discussants discussants Very strong party identification 0.8 0.0 Fairly strong party identification 1.8 2.7 Not very strong/no party identification 4.7 13.9 c) respondent did not identify with Liberal Democrats and did not vote Liberal/SDP

Alliance in 1987:

% voting Lib Dem in 1992 Respondent had: No Lib Dem 1+ Lib Dem discussants discussants Very strong party identification 1.0 5.0 Fairly strong party identification 3.1 11.3 Not very strong/no party identification 6.1 22.1


Table 6: Friends and neighbours voting in Galway West, 1977: correlation between vote share and distance from candidate’s home (source: table 2, AJ Parker, 1982, ‘The friends and neighbours voting effect in the Galway West constituency’, Political Geography Quarterly, 1, 243-262) Political party/candidate Correlation coefficient Fianna Fail: Geoghegan-Quinn -0.20 Loughnane -0.73 Molloy +0.27 O’Morain -0.66 Fine Gael: Byrne -0.65 Coogan -0.50 McCormack -0.38 Mannion -0.85 Labour: Higgins -0.48 Sinn Fein: Coffey -0.15


Table 7: Retrospective economic evaluations and local economic conditions, 1997 (source 1997 BES and constituency data) Mean % change in constituency number unemployed, 1995-1997 Situation got: better same worse Area prosperity since last election -30.32 -28.99 -25.39 UK economic situation last year -30.08 -27.30 -26.66 Household financial situation last year -29.36 -27.96 -27.28


Table 8: Perceptions of regional economic performance and vote, 1997 UK General Election. Since the last election, local % voting for: area has become: Conservative Labour Other A lot more prosperous % 49.0 32.0 19.0 A little more prosperous % 36.2 40.0 23.8 Stayed about average % 32.2 45.7 22.1 A little less prosperous % 18.3 58.7 23.0 A lot less prosperous % 10.4 68.3 21.3


Table 9: Perceptions of regional economic performance, vote, and attribution of responsibility, 1997 UK General Election. Responsibility for local economy Government Other Since the last election, local % voting for: % voting for: area has become: Conservative Labour Conservative Labour A lot more prosperous % 67.3 18.4 31.4 43.1 A little more prosperous % 47.2 31.8 27.3 47.3 Stayed about average % 30.2 49.4 33.8 42.6 A little less prosperous % 11.5 66.6 37.8 37.8 A lot less prosperous % 7.0 73.1 26.2 47.6


Table 10: The impact of constituency campaigning on party vote share at the 2005 UK General Election in England: regression models % vote 2005 Conservative Labour Lib Dem Conservative % vote 2001 0.99* Labour % vote 2001 0.82* Lib Dem % vote 2001 0.60** Conservative % campaign spend 2005 0.05* -0.04* -0.04* Labour % campaign spend 2005 -0.01* 0.00 -0.00 Lib Dem % campaign spend 2005 -0.02* -0.02* 0.12** Constant -1.01 4.87 9.90 R2 0.95 0.96 0.89 * significant at p=0.05


Table 11: Tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats at the 2001 UK General Election Constituency result % voting LD 1st preference for LD tactical voters 1st 2nd tactically Con Lab LD Con Lab 20.0 14.3 42.9 42.9 Con LD 30.0 15.4 65.4 11.5 Lab Con 20.3 30.8 34.6 23.1 LD Con 44.9 22.0 54.9 15.9


Figure 1: Social class and Socialist voting in Stockholm, 1932

20.0 40.0 60.0 80.0 100.0

% of electors in working class

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

100.0

% S

ocia

list v

ote

R Sq Linear = 0.911


Figure 2: The class cleavage at the 1964 General Election in Britain

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Conservative Labour Other

% v

ote Non-manual

Manual


Figure 3: Constituency class composition and the Labour vote in Britain, 1970

30.00 40.00 50.00 60.00 70.00 80.00 90.00

% Manual workers 1971

0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

Labo

ur %

vot

e 19

70

R Sq Linear = 0.447


Figure 4: Constituency class composition and the Conservative vote in Britain, 1970

0.00 10.00 20.00 30.00 40.00

% Professionals and managers, 1971

0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

Con

serv

ativ

e %

vot

e 19

70

R Sq Linear = 0.464


Figure 5: The class cleavage at the 2005 General Election in Britain

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

Conservative Labour Other

% v

ote Non-manual

Manual


Figure 6: Constituency class composition and the Labour vote in Britain, 1992

10.00 20.00 30.00 40.00 50.00 60.00 70.00

% Working class 1991

0.0

20.0

40.0

60.0

80.0

Labo

ur %

vot

e 19

92

R Sq Linear = 0.356


Figure 7: Constituency class composition and the Conservative vote in Britain, 1992

10.00 20.00 30.00 40.00 50.00 60.00 70.00

% Professionals and managers 1991

0.0

10.0

20.0

30.0

40.0

50.0

60.0

70.0

Con

serv

ativ

e %

vot

e 19

92

R Sq Linear = 0.471


Figure 8: Conservative constituency marginality and campaign expenditure in England at the 2005 General Election

-80.00 -60.00 -40.00 -20.00 0.00 20.00 40.00

Conservative % marginality 2001

0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

120.00

Con

serv

ativ

e ca

mpa

ign

spen

d as

% o

f max

200

5


Figure 9: Labour constituency marginality and campaign expenditure in England at the 2005 General Election

-60.00 -40.00 -20.00 0.00 20.00 40.00 60.00 80.00

Labour % marginality 2001

0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

120.00

Labo

ur c

ampa

ign

spen

d as

% o

f max

200

5


Figure 10: Liberal Democrat constituency marginality and campaign expenditure in England at the 2005 General Election

-80.00 -60.00 -40.00 -20.00 0.00 20.00 40.00

Lib Dem % marginality 2001

0.00

20.00

40.00

60.00

80.00

100.00

120.00

Lib

Dem

cam

paig

n sp

end

as %

of m

ax 2

005


Figure 11: Constituency turnout and marginality at the 2005 British General Election

0.0 10.0 20.0 30.0 40.0 50.0 60.0 70.0

% Majority 2001

40.0

50.0

60.0

70.0

80.0

% T

urno

ut 2

005

R Sq Linear = 0.508


Figure 12: The effect of varying the geography of electoral districts: a hypothetical example a) The underlying geography of party support: L: 560 R: 440

L: 520 R: 480

L: 120 R: 880

L: 535 R: 465

L: 210 R: 790

L: 300 R: 700

L: 780 R: 220

L: 412 R: 588

L: 350 R: 650

Overall vote shares: L: 3787 (42%) R: 5213 (58%) b) Constituency geography I: L: 560 R: 440

L: 520 R: 480

L: 120 R: 880

L: 535 R: 465

L: 210 R: 790

L: 300 R: 700

L: 780 R: 220

L: 412 R: 588

L: 350 R: 650

Seats won: L: 1 R: 2 c) Constituency geography II: L: 560 R: 440

L: 520 R: 480

L: 120 R: 880

L: 535 R: 465

L: 210 R: 790

L: 300 R: 700

L: 780 R: 220

L: 412 R: 588

L: 350 R: 650

Seats won: L: 2 R: 1

electoral geography (ms. no. 770) this paper has been … › staff › personal › ronjohnston ›...

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