LOCAL PARTY CAMPAIGNING AND ELECTORAL MOBILIZATION IN BRITAIN

Research on the effects of local election campaigning by party activists on electoral behavior has been confined almost entirely to the United States, where most findings suggest that there are significant effects. This note discusses reasons why such effects are also likely to exist, and may even be stronger, in Britain than in the United States. It then goes on to estimate models of the turnout and vote share for the Labour party in the 1987 general election in Britain. The results show that local campaigning by Labour party members had a significant influence on the Labour vote share in the 1987 election, but not on turnout. A model is developed using data from a national survey of Labour party members, together with a number of control variables to test relationships. The findings are similar to those by Huckfeldt and Sprague for gubernatorial and Senate elections in the United States.