Resourcing the constituency campaign in the UK

Abstract

Abstract:First-past-the-post electoral rules create strong incentives for parties to focus their campaigns on key marginal seats and much research has been devoted to the vote-winning potential of such activity. Less attention has been given to local party organisations' ability to mount these campaigns, however. We therefore examine recent evidence of British political parties' local campaigning capacities. Overall, Britain's grassroots party organisations are struggling. While some local parties are resource-rich, many are not: only half of all Conservative and fewer than one in six Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency parties had an annual turnover in 2010 exceeding £25,000. Many local parties are seriously underresourced: funds are limited, donations meagre, and members few. For most local parties, campaign resources depend primarily on their own local fund-raising initiatives -but their yields tend to be low. Even in key marginal constituencies, many local parties increasingly struggle to resource their campaign activities. What is more, there are substantial variations between the various political parties in the relative health of their constituency operations, and in the national parties' abilities to subsidise local activities in strategically important seats. The implications for local voter mobilization efforts in the UK are not good. Ron Johnston is Professor of Geography at Bristol University. He has written prolifically on various aspects of urban geography, the history of geography and political geography, particularly on electoral issues. Resourcing the constituency campaign in the UK Abstract First-past-the-post electoral rules create strong incentives for parties to focus their campaigns on key marginal seats and much research has been devoted to the vote-winning potential of such activity. Less attention has been given to local party organisations' ability to mount these campaigns, however. We therefore examine recent evidence of British political parties' local campaigning capacities. Overall, Britain's grassroots party organisations are struggling. While some local parties are resource-rich, many are not: only half of all Conservative and fewer than one in six Labour and Liberal Democrat constituency parties had an annual turnover in 2010 exceeding £25,000. Many local parties are seriously under-resourced: funds are limited, donations meagre, and members few. For most local parties, campaign resources depend primarily on their own local fund-raising initiatives -but their yields tend to be low. Even in key marginal constituencies, many local parties increasingly struggle to resource their campaign activities. What is more, there are substantial variations between the various political parties in the relative health of their constituency operations, and in the national parties' abilities to subsidise local activities in strategically important seats. The implications for local voter mobilization efforts in the UK are not good.

Sources of campaign funding for incumbents versus challengers in list proportional representation systems: The case of Colombia

“…Piscopo et al, 2021; Sacchet and Speck, 2012). By investigating elections in the UK, Pattie and Johnson (2016) established that candidates’ campaign budgets strongly depend on the financial capacities of their local party branches. Samuels (2001) demonstrates how the ideological position of candidates in Brazilian elections affects the amount of donations received from the business sector.…”

#Personal vs #Party: A comparative study of candidates’ new media campaigning in Japan and the United Kingdom

“…Candidates less reliant on the national party have a much greater opportunity to run independent, candidate focused campaigns (Zittel & Gschwend, 2008). In the UK for example, financing at the constituency level consistently fails to meet the needs of local parties, with this being especially true in untargeted seats at election time (Pattie & Johnston, 2016). The same is true in Japan, where the national party is not always viewed as being capable of organising effectively at the local level (Krauss & Pekkanen, 2011).…”

Not all campaigns are created equal: Temporal and spatial variability in constituency campaign spending effects in Great Britain, 1997–2015

“…Previous work has shown (unsurprisingly) that, partly as a function of central party coordination of local campaign effort (but also because most local campaign resources are local-sourced, and parties tend to have few resources in seats where they do badly), parties expend more campaign effort and resource in marginal seats (where it might help swing the result) than in safe ones (where it is unlikely to do so: see e.g. Denver and Hands, 1997;Pattie et al, 1995;Johnston and Pattie, 2014;Pattie and Johnston, 2016).…”