Do party leadership contests forecast British general elections?

Modeling Party Competition in General Elections

Popular elections are the central political act of democracies, and citizens in all advanced democracies organize their political competition through parties that compete in general elections. While political historians have studied parties for many years, it is remarkable that only in the last decade or so have there been serious attempts at abstract conceptualizations—that is, formal models—o...

Modeling Party Competition in General Elections

Issues, Economics and the Dynamics of Multi-party Elections: the British 1987 General Election

This paper ooers a model of three-party elections which allows voters to combine retrospective economic evaluations with considerations of the positions of the parties in the issue-space as well as the issue-preferences of the voters. We describe a model of British elections which allows voters to consider simultaneously all three parties, rather than limiting voters to choices among pairs of p...

Unsung Heroes: Constituency Election Agents in British General Elections

Despite their central role in the electoral process, constituency agents have been largely overlooked by political scientists and this article seeks to rectify the omission. It sketches the origins and development of the role of agent from the late nineteenth century and suggests that a serious re-think of the role took place in the 1990s. Survey-based evidence about the social characteristics ...

1996 Party Leadership

In a country where only two political parties — the Democrats and Republicans — have dominated electoral politics since the Civil War, any electoral headway by a third party or candidate is a noteworthy event. Setting aside Teddy Roosevelt’s Bull Moose Party effort, Perot’s 18.9% of the popular vote in 1992 was the largest third party popular vote since the Civil War. By running again in 1996 a...