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Tactical Voting in Great Britain in 1983 and 1987: An Alternative Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

R. J. Johnston  and
C. J. Pattie
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Extract

The analyses presented in this note have extended earlier work on tactical voting in Great Britain by looking at variations between constituencies in the flow-of-the-vote matrix that are consistent with hypotheses of tactical voting. They have suggested that about 4 per cent of the British electorate voted tactically in 1983, as did nearly 6 per cent in 1987. The volume of tactical voting was greater in Conservative-held than in Labour-held seats, and in both was greater the more marginal the seat. In general, the opposition party with the greatest chance of unseating the incumbent, as suggested by the result of the previous election, gained from the tactical voting process, and there is evidence that greater campaign effort, as indexed by constituency spending, helped them in this.

Type
Notes and Comments
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 1991 , pp. 95 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

1 For example, Butler, D. and Stokes, D. E., Political Change in Britain, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan, 1974).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 The matrices derived from the surveys have been ‘smoothed’ using the technique which Särlvik, and Crewe, term ‘Mostellerization’Google Scholar. See Särlvik, B. and Crewe, I., Decade of Dealignment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).Google Scholar

3 Johnston, R. J. and Hay, A. M., ‘On the Parameters of Uniform Swing in Single-Member Constituency Electoral Systems’, Environment and Planning A, 14 (1982), 61–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Johnston, R. J., The Geography of English Politics (London: Croom Helm, 1985).Google Scholar

4 Johnston, R. J., Pattie, C. J. and Allsopp, J. G., A Nation Dividing? (London: Longman, 1988).Google Scholar

5 See the many references to newspaper and other articles in Galbraith, and Rae, , ‘A Test of the Importance of Tactical Voting’.Google Scholar

6 The 1979 election results for the 1983 constituencies are estimated in BBC/ITN, The BBC/ITN Guide to the New Parliamentary Constituencies (Chichester: Parliamentary Research Services 1983).Google Scholar

7 Johnsion, R. J., Money and Votes (London: Croom Helm, 1987).Google Scholar

8 Johnston, R. J., Pattie, C. J. and Johnston, L. C., ‘A Note on Constituency Campaign Spending at the 1987 General Election in Great Britain’, Electoral Studies, 8 (1989), 143–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Note that this finding occurs when marginality is held constant, so that Liberal candidates did better than their SDP counterparts, irrespective of their being allocated more of the ‘winnable’ seats within the Alliance.