Challengers, incumbents and the impact of constituency campaigning in Britain

Johnston and Pattie have consistently argued that constituency campaigning in British general elections has beneficial effects on the performance of challenging parties but not on that of incumbent parties. It is difficult to explain why this should be so, however, and a more satisfactory formulation is that the impact of campaigning will vary according to the pre-existing electoral strength of a party in a constituency. This was the case in the 1992 general election, but the picture is complicated by the fact that the campaigns of the different parties had differential impacts. Furthermore, the differences between the parties in terms of campaign effect appear to be more important than differences arising from previous electoral strength. This suggests that further research in the area should take account of the receptiveness of different kinds of voters to the campaigning efforts of the parties. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd.