Local battles in a national landslide: constituency campaigning at the 2001 British General Election

Constituency campaigning is an important—though till recently relatively understudied—aspect of electioneering in Great Britain. The paper analyses new evidence of constituency campaigning at the 2001 British General Election. Not only are parties shown to be (on the whole) rational in how they utilise local campaign resources, but those local campaign efforts are also shown to have an impact on actual election outcomes. The more a party campaigns locally, the better it tends to do at an election, other things being equal. Furthermore, survey evidence demonstrates that, over the course of a campaign, whether individual voters are likely to change their electoral choices depends on the extent to which they have been contacted by the parties via constituency campaigns. Voters who are contacted in their constituency by a party are more likely to switch support to that party than are voters who are not contacted.