At each election, some Members of Parliament (MPs) decide to step down. Irrespective of their motivation, retirement has an electoral impact; their party’s constituency vote share experiences a ‘slump’. Conventional wisdom attributes this underperformance to the loss of the retiring MP’s personal vote. This article uses aggregate-level data covering UK general elections between 1987 and 2010 to demonstrate whether this explanation is supported. It also examines whether political parties can mediate such underperformances by considering the electoral experience and local connections of candidates contesting the post-retirement election. The article finds mixed evidence for the link between personal votes and underperformance. However, parties should pay close attention to the candidates selected to fight the post-retirement election. If an inheritor wants to win a national government or opposition seat, experience and local ties can be harmful. Also, schooling and other local ties enable candidates to mount effective challenges to government and opposition inheritors.

The Liberal Democrats’ performance in the 2015 general election provides an opportunity to examine the only case in the post-war period of a national junior coalition partner in British politics. Comparative research highlights competence, trust and leadership as three key challenges facing junior coalition parties. This article uses British Election Study data to show that the Liberal Democrats failed to convince the electorate on all three counts. The article also uses constituency-level data to examine the continued benefits of incumbency to the party and the impact of constituency campaigning. It finds that while the incumbency advantage remained for the Liberal Democrats, it was ultimately unable to mitigate the much larger national collapse

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The leaders of the three largest political parties in the UK spent a significant proportion of the 2010 general election campaign touring constituencies. However, the potential impact of such visits upon local party vote share and constituency turnout has remained relatively unstudied. This article, using original data collected in 2010, is the first to examine leader visits during UK election campaigns. The constituencies visited are typically marginal, and while Gordon Brown mostly limited his visits to Labour-held constituencies, the leaders of the other two parties ran more expansionist visit strategies. Exploring the ability of leader visits to affect turnout and vote share, the analysis shows that visits made no impact on local turnout, but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats received a boost in vote share in constituencies when their leaders visited. Disaggregating this further, these boosts were received primarily in seats held by Labour prior to the election

During the 2017 general election campaign, the Conservative and Labour leaders toured the country. While Theresa May operated a conventional approach, encapsulated by limited interactions with the public, Jeremy Corbyn participated in public rallies and appeared at music festivals. This article examines the strategic decisions underpinning leader visits in the 2017 campaign trail. It finds that May and Corbyn’s electoral strategies had more in common than at first sight. The article adds to existing studies by using new interview data from local party campaigners to understand visit organisation and impact on the local campaign. It also makes an important step towards unpicking the causal mechanism through which these visits may affect voter behaviour.