A note on local spending in the 1983 general election: differences between the Liberal and SDP parties in England.

Information is an important ingredient in electoral success: a political party must sell itself to the voters to build up a core of support. This paper is a look at the role of local information in the first general election fought by a new political party in England, the Social Democratic Party. The party chose to spread its spending on information widely, but in places where the level of spending was relatively high - because central grants were boosted by local fund-raising - the electoral returns were significant. Local concentrations of information produced local concentrations of votes.-Author