MONEY AND ELECTORAL POLITICS
Local parties and funding at general elections
Ron Johnston and Charles Pattie
First published in Great Britain in 2014 by
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Contents
Ron Johnston has been a professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol since 1995: previously he held posts at Monash University and the Universities of Canterbury, Sheffield and Essex. He has been a recipient of the Royal Geographical Societys Victoria Medal in 1991, a Life-Time Achievement Award from the Association of American Geographers in 2010, and the Political Studies Associations Political Communicator of the Year Award in 2011. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1989 and awarded an OBE for services to scholarship in 2011.
Charles Pattie is a professor of geography at the University of Sheffield, where he has been based since 1994. Prior to that, he lectured at Nottingham University. In addition to his work with Ron on electoral geography, he has published on citizenship and political participation, on referendums, and on the politics of devolution. He was elected to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2013.
Charles and Ron have worked together on a substantial number of projects in electoral studies for some 25 years including work on constituency campaigns, spatial variations in voting behaviour at the regional, constituency and neighbourhood scales, biases in the translation of votes into seats, and the redistribution of constituencies in the UK. As well as a large number of academic papers their work has been brought together in a number of books including A Nation Dividing? (1988), The Boundary Commissions (1999), From Votes to Seats (2001) and Putting Voters in their Place (2006).
In the short three-week campaign leading up to the Eastleigh by-election on 28 February 2013 it was claimed that the Liberal Democrats, who were defending the seat, bombarded the electorate with half a million pieces of literature (an average of seven per elector). Their campaign was contrasted favourably to the Conservatives, whose MPs came back to Westminster to complain about the shrivelling of their grass roots whereas the Liberal Democrats local organisation was characterised by vigour and the enthusiasm with which activists swarmed into Hampshire from all over the country. Labour came only fourth in that contest, barely increasing its share of the votes from that cast at the 2010 General Election (9.6 per cent) despite its substantial lead in the national opinion polls at the time, an outcome that it explained by the lack of an active local organisation.
The Liberal Democrats were not only able to flood the Eastleigh constituency with party activists and supporters promoting their candidates credentials, but they were also able to raise a substantial sum of money with which to pay for those leaflets, as well as posters and the other costs of an intensive short campaign. The spending limit for candidates contesting a by-election is 100,000; the Liberal Democrats Mike Thornton reported spending 98,172.26. Two of his opponents also spent close to the maximum allowed: 92,965.74 by the Conservatives Maria Hutchings and 82,160 by UKIPs Diane James, but the reported expenditure of Labours John OFarrell was only about half of that, at 50,194.55.
Because of the context within which it was fought the resignation after a scandal of a popular local MP and cabinet member who represented the minor party in the Coalition government as well as the growth in support for UKIP, an anti-European Union (EU) and anti-immigration party, in the national opinion polls at the time its intensity meant that the Eastleigh campaign was not typical of by-elections, let alone general elections in the majority of constituencies. But its general characteristics were nevertheless typical of both of those contests in some constituencies with relatively large numbers of activists on the streets, doorsteps and telephones contacting potential supporters and encouraging them to turn out and vote, in addition to large sums of money (within the legally prescribed limits) spent on leaflets, posters, offices and staff. Neither may be sufficient without the other, but much research over the last four decades has shown that in general the more money that parties spend on their local campaigns and the more people who are involved in their delivery, the better their performance, relative to national trends.
Given that situation, the issues of recruiting local party workers and raising substantial funds to spend on campaigning have been central to party strategies, both nationally and in the individual constituencies, especially those marginal seats where a general election is likely to be won or lost. Both have become increasingly problematic, however: party membership has declined very substantially, recruiting and mobilising people to work for a candidates (re-)election, and raising money to sustain those campaigns, not only in the weeks immediately preceding the contest but, increasingly, in the weeks and months beforehand when the campaigning foundations are laid, has become increasingly difficult. In this book we focus on one of those issues raising money as a contribution to both our understanding of the current situation and the ongoing (although frustratingly never coming close to resolution) debates about party funding in the UK.
Over the 20th centurys middle decades there was what Johnson (1972, p 53) termed a nationalisation of British politics, a process through which local political arenas are increasingly subordinated and integrated into a single national political arena; its preconditions are the improvement of communications and the increasing mobility of the population, its agents are the great national parties, and its results are the gradual ironing out of autonomous local political characteristics, styles and behaviour. At the same time analysts, as in the classic book by Butler and Stokes (1969, 1974), identified a pattern of what they termed uniform swing across the country: between pairs of adjacent elections the change in the relative support for the two main parties pre-1970 (Conservative and Labour) was virtually the same in all constituencies. This was interpreted by Bogdanor (1983, p 53), for example, as showing that between 1945 and 1970, Electoral behaviour came to display a considerable degree of homogeneity since an elector in Cornwall would tend to vote the same way as an elector from a similar class in Glasgow regardless of national or local differences (see Bogdanor, 1986; Johnston, 1986).
