The epidemiology of the Liberal Democrat vote

Accounting for the success of the Liberal Democrat party in recent local elections herd in Britain has proved difficult. Traditionally the electoral system has operated to disadvantage third parties but the Liberal Democrats. appear successfully to have surmounted that obstacle to winning representation. Ths paper introduces the reader to issues of contemporary British electoral geography and analyses a number of factors, socio-economic, political and spatial, in terms of their contribution towards a better understanding of Liberal Democrat successes at the local government level. Compared with the vote for both the Conservative and Labour parties, that for the Liberal Democrats is not easily explained using ward level socio-economic census data. Additionally, models of uniform swing are nor effective in projecting likely Liberal Democrat seat gains with the party consistently doing better than forecasted. The final part of the analysis, therefore, looks for any spatial patterns in the development and spread of the Liberal Democrat vote. The evidence suggests that Liberal Democrat victories are most likely to occur in areas neighbouring wards which the party has already won. This leads us to conjecture that there is some element of a spatial contagion effect to the Liberal Democrat vote which stems from the party's campaigning style in local elections. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.