Overview and Background:
The past few decades in British politics have seen much discussion relating to the polarisation of voters and parties, with growing accusations of electoral bubbles and depreciating political engagement. The partisan nature of the British legislature is by no means a new phenomenon, with factional infighting commonplace in all parliaments be they Conservative and Labour, Whig and Tory, Yorkist and Lancastrian. For the majority of our history, however, these factions were confined to the voting lobby, and played a lesser role in the electorate’s minds than they do today. Prior to the political mass-movements of the late 19th century, voters selected their candidate by a mixture of factors, among them personality, individual views, and locality. In an era before mass communication, the individual candidate was the primary source of information about why one ought to vote for him, and thus he cultivated a personal vote, which varied from candidate to candidate regardless of his party.
My project seeks to identify and map out this shift from the personal to the partisan, making use of a candidate-level dataset provided by my supervisor, covering every parliamentary election since 1832. Partisan voting rests at the heart of our modern system, and tracing its development may contribute to our understanding of contemporary shifts in its nature.
Methodology:
Through statistical regression analysis in the language R, my project will utilise as many control variables as feasibly possible within the given dataset, and take the resultant residual error term as an estimate for the personal vote. Though a crude measure, conducting analysis over a range of 150+ years eliminates a number of variables due to inconsistency and availability. My regression will hopefully account for partisan swings between elections, the normal vote of the constituency, incumbency effects, and the cabinet membership of each incumbent candidate. Tracing the residual across the period will provide a time-shifting model of the personal vote.
Following a comprehensive literature review and theoretical grounding, I aim to use my statistical results to reach some rudimentary conclusions as to the causes of this shift, and its link with party centralisation across the period. Building upon previous regressions in the literature, I hope the unique breadth of my study will contribute to our understanding of the personal vote, voter motivation in Britain, and the direction of party centralisation into the 21st century.
Objectives:
- Understand how the personal vote (caluclated as a residual) has varied as a portion of vote share throughout the period, and present this graphically
- Conduct theoretical analysis to investigate the causes of major shifts
- Identify a direction and summise a future for the personal vote in British politics