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This paper examines the state of the art of the Brexit negotiations in the area of financial services. It uses a two‐level game model to first explain the positions of UK and EU negotiators on the basis of the domestic constraints they face, and second, to consider the scope for final agreement based on the 'win‐set' of both sides. The paper analyses the preferences and power of three main groups of players within the UK and EU: the political authorities, financial regulators, and the financial industry. We argue that the scope for agreement on financial services has been severely hampered by political and regulatory constraints which forced UK and EU negotiators to adopt early hawkish negotiating positions, and by the absence of a unified position from the financial industry. After the 2017 general election, the position of the UK government and UK financial industry briefly converged, thereby narrowing the domestic win‐set, but also increasing the scope for agreement. However, the July 2018 'Chequers' deal represents a hardening of the UK government's position on financial services. We argue that this reflects the fact that the twin pressures facing UK negotiators—acute political constraints at home and bargaining weakness in Brussels—has become more, not less, acute over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence suggests that as public opinion towards immigration becomes more negative, so the descriptive representation of ethnic minority groups is increasingly restricted. Recently, some initial research into the causal mechanism hinted that this effect is driven by patterns of candidacy. This suggests that political parties are creating an 'ethnic penalty' of their own in the selection stage. This paper investigates the relationship between patterns of candidacy, party strategy, and public opinion in Great Britain from 1997 to 2019, and proposes that 'punitive parties' are strongly responsible for shaping the representational outcomes of minority groups. I find support for earlier suggestions that parties are increasingly likely to place ethnic minority candidates away from 'winnable' contests as anti-immigrant hostility rises. These findings are important for our conceptions of ethnic penalties, of party behaviour in selection processes, and for the study and cause of improving political representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines several methods for forecasting the next British general election on a daily basis from 20 months prior using opinion polls. It discusses their performance for previous electoral cycles and shows that the two models with the best historical record lead to substantially different predictions for 2015, but they can be averaged. The historical relationship between the polls and the vote suggests that government support rises substantially in the run up to elections, that Conservatives outperform but Labour underperform relative to the polls, and parties generally recover from low points or decline from high ones. Approximate prediction intervals and probabilities for key events are also generated. Despite the Conservatives trailing in the polls by 7 points in early October 2013, the models suggest a substantial Conservative lead at the 2015 election with a 64% chance of being the largest party and 42% chance of an overall majority. The estimated probability of a hung parliament (40%) is instructive for understanding the operation of the electoral system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In May 2012, 10 of England's largest cities, outside London, were required to hold referendums giving citizens the option of introducing a directly-elected mayor. Bristol was the only city to vote in favour of the mayoral model. This paper outlines the main themes that feature in current debates about urban leadership. It presents a framework for understanding place-based leadership and, by drawing on a current researchproject on mayoral governance in Bristol, highlights the existence of very different perceptions of how to improve city leadership and democratic accountability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Who do you think will win in your constituency? Most citizens correctly answer this question, and groups are even better at answering it. Combining individual forecasts results in the 'wisdom of crowds' explained by Condorcet's jury theorem. This paper demonstrates the accuracy of citizen forecasts in seven British General Elections between 1964 and 2010, and reports what citizens interviewed in February and March forecasted for the election in May 2015. 'Citizen forecasting' predicts vote shares and winners in constituency elections, and seat numbers and governments in national elections. The paper also introduces a new method for predicting vote shares from citizen forecasts. Citizen forecasts are direct, accurate, and comprehensible. Pollsters should collect them and communicate their results more often. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No established liberal democracy has achieved sex balance in its national legislature. Scholars agree skewed candidate pools put forward by parties during elections cause sex-disproportionate seat distribution, but disagree as to whether disproportionality is caused by too few women aspirant candidates coming forward (supply) or party selectors preferring men (demand). This paper uses a multistage method to explore supply and demand during the British Labour party's candidate selection process. Rare data from three elections and 4622 aspirants allow for an unobstructed look inside the secret garden of politics and reveal the party is not fully feminized insofar that women aspirants are disproportionally filtered out of its selection process and are disproportionally underrepresented in its candidate pool. Testing reveals a lack of selector demand for women aspirants has a greater impact on women's underrepresentation than an undersupply of women aspirants, a finding which supports using sex quotas to level imbalanced candidate slates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the traditional functions of party members is to campaign on behalf of their party at general elections. However, they are not the only people who volunteer for the job. In the context of the growing literature on ‘multi-speed membership’ parties, it is important to ask what non-members do for parties they support. This paper examines how different actors contributed to the electoral campaigns of six parties at the 2015 UK General Election, using survey data covering not only members of the Labour, Conservative, Liberal Democrat, United Kingdom Independence, Scottish Nationalist, and Green parties, but also voters who identified themselves as being close to one of those parties but did not formally belong to them. As well as exploring how much work they do during campaigns, we ask whether the two groups choose different activities and are differently motivated. We find that, at the individual level, party members do more than non-member supporters, and that this is especially true of more intensive forms of activity. We also find that constituency context and political attitudes influence levels of activity in similar ways for members and supporters. However, we find no consistent impact from demographic factors or ideological incongruence. At the aggregate level, we estimate that the campaign work done by supporters may match or even exceed that done by party members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 2019 general election gave prominence to tactical voting advice websites, particularly those projecting constituency‐level results using national polling data and sophisticated multi‐level regression and poststratification (MRP) polling models. We see tactical voting as an example of a coordination game and argue that polling‐model driven advice websites are disruptive to the existing focal points for strategic voting. Although such websites may well help identify the strongest candidate based on constituency demographics, the article argues they are unlikely to coalesce support behind that single candidate, a prerequisite for successful tactical voting. In practice, there are multiple competing models and websites as well as other key sources of information to voters. Furthermore, the heuristic of relying on tactical voting websites is vulnerable to strategic action by partisans. In short, it is argued that the emergence of these websites risks muddying the waters further for electors seeking to vote tactically, potentially splitting the tactical vote rather than unifying it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Party members are often depicted as loyal voters that supply the party with a small but steady electoral base. Research, however, suggests that party members occasionally vote for other parties in general elections. This might either be a strategic choice or an indication of their discontent, possibly preceding a choice to exit the party. Using original survey data on more than 9000 party members in Flanders (Belgium) and Britain, this article aims to extend our understanding of why party members defect. We test hypotheses that take into account both individual and party-level considerations (ideological concerns, leadership evaluations and strategic choices) and the conditioning effects of party and electoral systems. Our analysis shows that institutional settings are crucial for strategic voting, whereas ideological concerns and leadership evaluations matter equally in both countries. As such, our study provides important insights in the attitudes and behaviour of party members, contributing to current debates on the contemporary meaning of party membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sainte-Laguë index (SLI) has a strong claim to be the index that should be adopted as the standard measure of disproportionality in electoral studies. Its properties are therefore worthwhile understanding more clearly. This article provides a counterexample (the 2010 UK general election) to previous claims that the SLI satisfies Dalton's principle of transfers with respect to differences between seat shares and vote shares but not ratios of seat and vote shares. Instead, we prove that the SLI satisfies the ratio but not the difference version of the principle. This strengthens the argument for the SLI since the ratio version is the one that accords with notion of electoral disproportionality as inequality in the representation of voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zinoviev letter affair of 1924 has cast a long shadow over British domestic politics. The source, authenticity and distribution of the letter, reportedly from the head of the Communist International, Grigory Zinoviev, calling on British workers to strike, was published amid a divisive general election, embarrassing Britain's first Labour Prime Minister and reportedly resulting in the collapse of the government. This essay reviews former Foreign and Commonwealth Historian Gill Bennett's latest research on the letter and its legacy for British politics since 1924, showing that Bennett has wonderfully navigated a complex web of deception, spies, politicians and 'fake news' to get as near as we are going to get to the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The left in British electoral politics has become more fragmented, particularly in the past decade; those with economically left values are increasingly divided by cultural attitudes. It will be vital for Labour to find ways to bridge this growing divide if the party is to be electorally successful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can fixing the parliamentary term be expected to reduce electoral incumbency advantages? The United Kingdom’s 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act aims to prevent incumbents from scheduling early elections for political benefit. Yet, the view that flexible election timing gives incumbents an unfair advantage remains contested. The literature on opportunistic election calling—including the signalling effects of this strategy and the competence of governments that select it—lends support to both sides in the debate. This article examines how far the divergent arguments apply in the United Kingdom. Using observed outcomes and a potential outcomes approach, we investigate to what effect incumbents have used election timing. Our results suggest that governments can improve their re-election chances when they have discretion to time elections to favourable circumstances instead of facing voters at set intervals when conditions may not be advantageous. Fixed parliamentary terms are likely to reduce that incumbency advantage significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at how the single member plurality electoral system failed to deliver a safe overall majority to the winning party during the 2017 general election in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the electoral geography of the division of the votes cast for the Conservatives and Labour at each election since 1955, the increase in support for smaller third parties, and the changes in the pattern of population movement.

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By extending the time-tested reward–punishment hypothesis in economic voting, this article argues that rational voters hold incumbents accountable for the macroeconomic policies they pursue rather than purely for the economic climate that prevails under their tenure. Building on this premise, I first put forward a theory where business cycle fluctuations realign relative fiscal preferences among income groups. This theory’s implications predict that the aggregate electoral response to fiscal decisions evolves in a counter-cyclical fashion. Using quarterly measures of vote intention shares of incumbent parties in the United Kingdom, I provide time-series evidence from a set of error correction models supporting this proposition: at times of low unemployment, the electorate punishes profligate incumbents; in deteriorating labour market conditions, however, they reward expansionary policies. The immediate electoral impact is non-significant across the models, and most of the estimated effect is spread out across subsequent quarters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 7 December 1916, in a dramatic coup, Lloyd George supplanted Asquith and became prime minister. This marked the death of a great party and has generated huge controversy. For long, Lloyd George was condemned as the culprit but latterly his reputation has risen sharply. Asquith and Lloyd George came from very different wings of the party, imperialist and Little Englander. Asquith seemed the supreme insider, Lloyd George a supreme Welsh outsider. However in peacetime government, they formed a tremendous partnership. Their close association continued to the formation of the first coalition in May 1915. Then serious division came over military conscription, with Lloyd George moving towards his old foes, the Unionists. As minister for munitions, then secretary for war, he became publicly very critical of the conduct of the war. A great conflict arose over his demand for a new war committee. This was directed against the generals: he did not wish to become prime minister. It looked as if a compromise was possible. On 3 December 1916 Asquith agreed to such a committee but, fatally, reversed his view the next day, Crucial was his misjudgment of the Unionist leaders, especially Balfour. On 6 December the king asked Lloyd George to form a government. Asquith seriously exaggerated his own strength while Lloyd George now had growing Unionist support, the backing of Labour and of a majority of Liberal MPs mobilised by Addison. So Asquith fell and a governmental revolution followed - a new small war cabinet, a cabinet secretariat under Hankey, a secretariat of private advisors in the 'Garden Suburb' and an inexorable move towards prime ministerial (or quasi-presidential) government. In May 1918, the 'Maurice debate' saw the Liberals divided into pro- and anti-government factions; they were crushed at the subsequent general election. The party was thereafter haunted by December 1916 and responsibility was bitterly contested. Yet it should be remembered that before 7 December 1916, the two Liberal leaders formed a dynamic and commanding partnership, which changed British politics profoundly and irreversibly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does power persist within families? This article considers whether members of the UK House of Commons with longer legislative careers after 1832 were more likely to establish a political dynasty. Tenure can create opportunities to promote relatives. A regression discontinuity design for re-election races helps to rule out the confounding influence of inheritable traits. There is no evidence for a causal effect of tenure length on establishing or continuing a dynasty. Established families may have constrained further dynasty development, explaining the null result of tenure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's commonly assumed that the Brexit referendum exposed pre-existing faultlines in British society. But we need to take seriously the idea that voting produces divisions and identities, rather than simply measuring them. If we consider the sorts of subjects and identities our current modes of voting in elections and referendums produce, we might be prompted to embrace more reflective, and more deliberative, democratic practices, in order to bridge rather than entrench divisions in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three geographical elements play major roles in the operation of the UK's electoral system: the geography of support - how spatially segregated each party's voters are; the geographical clustering of those segregated areas; and the constituency boundaries within which those geographies are nested. In the period from 1970 to 2010 as a result of the interaction of these three, Britain's apparent three-party system (four-party in Scotland and Wales) was represented in a series of geographically separate two-party systems. At the 2015 election, although there was little change in support for the two largest parties from the overall situation in 2010, there were substantial changes in the volume and geography of support for the five smaller parties. Those latter changes produced very different geographies in 2015 from those in 2010, with major likely consequences for the next contest in 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and high voter turnout or revisionist accounts of apathy. Instead, evidence was found of something akin to what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call ‘stealth democracy’. Citizens thought democracy to be important and felt a duty to vote, but wished for government by experts in the national interest. This ‘stealth’ interpretation builds on existing studies of duty, populism and expertise in twentieth-century Britain. It helps to move discussion of democratic engagement after the Second World War beyond the binaries of self/collective and private/public, and to explain the paradox of high voter turnout in a context of hostility to party politics. It also promises to inform debates about declining political support in the current period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article talks about the general elections of 2015 in Great Britain that returned a majority Conservative government to power. Topics discussed include a decline in the support for the Liberal Democrats political party, the referendum on European Union membership for Britain and the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government that ruled in the five years leading up to the 2015 elections.

Since the EU referendum we've been obsessed with the 'new fault lines' in British politics - at the expense, Sarah Birch suggests, of the mobilisational aspect of the vote. Turnout was high, young people were engaged and energised - and if these new voters return to the ballot box, they may change the complexion of UK politics for a generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers reports related to politics in Great Britain. Topics discussed include the referendum and elections in various countries such as Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland, the proposed academisation of local authority schools by 2022 under the country's government, and the establishment of taskforce which are tasked to improve the access to apprenticeship programs among people with learning disabilities.

Since 2003, hundreds of open primaries for the selection of parliamentary candidates have been held by the British Conservative Party as a means of democratising party organisation and enhancing representativeness. In the run-up to the 2015 general election, only 26 primaries could be identified. This article will apply the analytical framework provided by Hazan and Rahat to demonstrate that the relative failure of the experiment in terms of intra-party competition, participation, representation and responsiveness is counterbalanced by the benefits brought by this procedure, both as a tool of party branding at the national level and as a strategy for raising the profiles of candidates at the local level. Therefore, if mainstream parties conceded that the advantages of open primaries need not necessarily be understood in terms of internal democratisation but of party self-promotion, they would realise that open primaries could also serve as a means of preempting populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is now commonplace to criticise the failings of Westminster's 'political class'. One part of this criticism regards the limited extent to which Westminster politicians reflect the social background of the voting population. Each party has addressed the problem in different ways, with Labour more likely to focus on the representation of women and the Conservatives on people with 'proper jobs' before election.1 Devolved and European elections have provided new opportunities for parties: Labour's push for more elected women has been relatively effective in the Scottish, Welsh and European elections; and, before UKIP made significant gains in European Parliament elections in 2014, it promised candidates who were 'not career politicians'. Yet, overall, new levels of elected representation have not produced a distinctive 'political class'. There is still a common pattern of professionalisation across devolved, Westminster and European parliaments, in which elected politicians have often similar kinds of education and employment background, and generally struggle to mirror the social background of their populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High school education is central to adolescent socialization and has important downstream consequences for adult life. However, scholars examining schooling's political effects have struggled to reconcile education's correlation with both more liberal social attitudes and greater income. To disentangle this relationship, I exploit a major school leaving age reform in Great Britain that caused almost half the population to remain at high school for at least an additional year. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that each additional year of late high school increases the probability of voting Conservative in later life by 12 percentage points. A similar relationship holds when pooling all cohorts, suggesting that high school education is a key determinant of voting behavior and that the reform could have significantly altered electoral outcomes. I provide evidence suggesting that, by increasing an individual's income, education increases support for right-wing economic policies and, ultimately, the Conservative Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging literature suggests that British MPs use legislative tools such as private member bills and early day motions to develop reputations with constituents, notwithstanding the common belief that individual legislative behaviour has little effect on electoral outcomes in Britain. This study demonstrates that British MPs also use parliamentary questions to respond to electoral vulnerability. Using data on written parliamentary questions asked between 1997 and 2010, it examines two possible consequences of electoral vulnerability: increased question frequency and greater focus on constituency issues in questions. It demonstrates that members ask more written parliamentary questions on average when their margin of victory decreases. In contrast, there is no meaningful evidence that MP focus on constituency issues increases with electoral marginality. These findings suggest that members use questions to signal effort to their constituents rather than attention to constituency issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study we test whether a range of online political activities undertaken during the campaign affect the propensity to engage in non-electoral types of online and offline political engagement subsequently. We develop three hypotheses accounting for this linkage based on a 'spill-over' logic about (1) the effort required for the action; (2) the type of activity undertaken (formal versus informal); and (3) the medium on which the action occurs (online or offline).We test our hypotheses with a pre/post-election panel dataset from the UK 2010 General Election. The results show that after controlling for prior political engagement, online information seeking during the campaign has a significant and positive effect on further engagement in 'softer' discussion modes of participation. The findings are seen to confirm that Internet-based political mobilisation works in a 'step-wise' manner whereby lower intensity activities spill-over to move individuals a little further up the participation ladder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do British voters look for in their candidates? We know they favour candidates who have experience serving their constituents and those with local ties. As a result, parties often emphasise these characteristics in their campaign materials. However, these materials also provide voters with the candidates' images. Using a survey where respondents are asked to evaluate real British candidates using only rapidly determined first impressions of facial images, we demonstrate that candidates who were deemed attractive enjoyed greater electoral success in the 2010 general election. Specifically, we find that candidates who are widely perceived to be more attractive had a higher vote share, even when we take into account the candidates' age, party, incumbency and campaign spending. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 arose from a specific political circumstance: the need to cement the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition formed after the May 2010 General Election, but it had a far wider significance. The Act had important implications for the constitution, raising questions about the way in which it changes and the nature of its overall development. It brought about transformations long advocated by reformers. The Act reduced the scope of the Royal Prerogative and gave both 'confidence' and 'no confidence' votes in the House of Commons a statutory footing. It introduced a new parliamentary procedure for triggering early general elections, involving among other measures a supermajority in the House of Commons. The Act was controversial both for its substance and the processes used in its introduction. Regardless of how long it may remain in force, it has already proved to be an important experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Immigration and the economy were the most salient issues in British politics at the 2010 general election, yet the relationship between them remains unclear. This article questions whether perception of the economic situation influenced hostility to immigration to Britain during the 2010 general election campaign. Method. This article employs a logistic regression model using the 2010 British Election Study to test the effect of economic perception and other previously identified factors on hostility to immigration. Results. The results show that perception of the economy did have an effect on hostility to immigration at the 2010 British general election. However, the effect is negligible. Conclusion. The findings highlight the influence of other factors in predicting hostility to immigration, particularly identity and culture, party identification, and policy-based factors. The prominence of analyzing the effect of economic concerns in determining attitudes to immigration appears misplaced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From English Votes for English Laws to the rise of Ukip, Englishness is a growing feature of British politics. Michael Kenny examines the rise of English national identity as a political force. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The low turnout of the 2012 police and crime commissioner ( PCC) elections have led to questions surrounding their legitimacy and have even led to the former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg describing the elections-elections his party helped to introduce-as a 'failed experiment'. Despite this, the election of a majority Conservative government in May 2015 appears to offer some longevity to the role of police and crime commissioners and cements next year's PCC elections in the political diary. Concerns in the immediate aftermath of the elections focused upon the costs of the elections. In this article I offer some suggestions as to what lessons could be learned from this experiment and, through exploring the attitudes of voters, political parties and the media, suggest that we can learn four lessons: (1) that spoilt ballots cannot be ignored; that (2) political parties and (3) the media's attitudes toward elections are important in encouraging people to vote; and (4) that high numbers of independent candidates cannot simply be welcomed at times of elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to theoretical debates on minority political participation in the UK, with specific reference to inter-generational variations within the South Asian Muslim community;, Contributes to the scholarly literature on the impact and effectiveness of new political parties within the British political system, through a case study of the Respect Party;, Adds to empirical primary data on strategies adopted by political parties in courting specific sections of the ethnic minority vote in the UK;, Offers an empirically-led demonstration of the changes taking place within the political sphere of South Asian Muslim diasporas in Britain., In March 2012, the Respect Party won an unexpected by-election in the British city of Bradford, previously regarded as a safe Labour seat. This article examines the party's campaign strategy and in particular how it courted South Asian Muslim voters. A dominant feature of South Asian Muslim politics in the UK has been community bloc voting along lines of kinship (biraderi). The use of kinship networks for political gain effectively disenfranchised many young people and women. We demonstrate how Respect used their experience of campaigning in constituencies with significant numbers of South Asian Muslim voters to achieve an unlikely victory in Bradford. A key strategy was to mobilise otherwise politically marginalised sections of the South Asian Muslim community by offering an alternative to the culture of patronage in Bradford whilst at the same time utilising certain community structures in order to gain their own bloc votes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Highlights and Abstract This article shows The impact of leader visits on local results in general election campaigns., The importance of party leaders in contemporary election campaigns., That leader visits impact vote share but not turnout., The extent to which incumbency plays an important part in leader visit effectiveness., 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research Highlights and Abstract This article: Examines the meaning of claims for 'recognition' and struggles against 'misrecognition' by working through aspects of Muslim political agency in contemporary British politics;, Contributes to research on the political mobilisation of Muslims in Britain by examining how civil society organisations respond to perceived stigmas and project a Muslim civic identity;, Contributes to research that investigates dilemmas of political agency between the pressure to conform to standards of neutrality and maturity, on the one hand, and creativity and opposition, on the other;, Demonstrates how minority actors manoeuvre and position themselves in the unsettled environment of contemporary British politics., It is a common complaint among Muslim civil society organisations that their presence in British politics is misconstrued. An increasing number of activists and groups are concerned to repudiate what they perceive to be the misperception of their political agency as exceptional and difficult to accommodate. Organisations and initiatives thus project and practice civic identities, to demonstrate that they are committed to the 'common good'. This article explores how a number of organisations positioned themselves in response to experiences of 'misrecognition' in the context of the General Election 2010. With this conceptual focus we explore one of the most pertinent characteristics of Muslim political agency in Britain today: how actors respond to perceived pressures, make claims and project identities in opposition to alleged misperceptions or the refusal to acknowledge their desired self-descriptions. The article draws on a set of qualitative interviews with representatives of advocacy organisations that mobilised Muslim constituents in the run-up to the General Election 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature on 'agencification', 'quangocratization', and the 'autonomization' of the state has highlighted a coordination dilemma in contemporary public governance whereby governments rely on delegated governance but are frustrated by the lack of control that arises from such structures. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election in the United Kingdom this coordination dilemma was prominent as the capacity of the Cabinet Office to exert control over arm's-length bodies, either directly or indirectly, received intense criticism. This article presents the findings of the first detailed research project to examine the subsequent Coalition Government's approach to this dilemma. It argues that in relation to the governance of public bodies, the role and capacity of the Cabinet Office has been transformed. In mapping this development the article explores the implications of the centre striking back in the context of 'post-New Public Management' reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Britain has often been held up as being a model of electoral integrity, recent controversies have suggested that this perception may not be wholly justified. This article explores overall standards of electoral administration across Britain, utilizing performance reporting data for returning officers in the 2010 general election to outline a comprehensive measure for the integrity of the administration of the electoral process. Discussion begins by outlining the question of electoral integrity and, most importantly, the issue of electoral administration. The second section considers recent British controversies, while also outlining steps taken to monitor the performance of electoral administrators. The third section introduces the performance standards and the index of electoral integrity developed from these, while the fourth section presents an analysis. The article concludes with discussion of the challenges facing electoral administrators, and highlights the utility of an index of electoral integrity in helping electoral professionals address these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Were women agents of their own political emancipation or did politicians preemptively grant rights to them in a bid for electoral success? This article claims that both electoral politics and the ordinary strategies of women’s movements explain the timing of female suffrage. Drawing on archival evidence from the United Kingdom, I show how in an electoral environment where the incumbent Liberals saw disadvantage to reform, an enterprising group of Liberal suffragists formed a pact with the Labour party, trading economic resources for the party’s promise to push for suffrage reform. The Election Fighting Fund, as the pact was called, was key to securing women’s place in the 1918 Representation of the People Act. In raising the possibility that ordinary instead of revolutionary tactics proved key to voting rights reform, women emerge as an interesting new case for the study of democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Superdiversity across Europe has focused attention on the increasing significance of ethnic minorities to electoral outcomes. We use unique Origins software to analyse a sample of minority voters in the May 2014 European elections; drawing on the work of the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), we show that the growth of non-White minorities will combine with a persistent preference for Labour to produce some unexpected consequences. We also compute the different ethnic penalties suffered by minority Labour and Conservative supporters, and demonstrate their likely trend between now and mid-century. The analysis shows the increased importance of social and cultural factors in determining political preferences, and illustrates the way in which Big Data-derived tools such as Origins can be used to produce fresh insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author looks into the interrelationship of the general election in Great Britain, the European Union (EU), and the Commonwealth countries. He alleges that the ties between the European Economic Community (EEC) and former colonies is a form of neo-colonialism. He discusses the impact of the inclusion of Great Britain in the EEC. He also talks about the concept of Euroscepticism and its role in the political culture of Great Britain.