Still talking, but is anyone listening? The changing face of constituency campaigning in britain, 1997ĝ€"2005

Constituency electioneering has become established as an important element of postmodern political campaigning, allowing parties and candidates to focus effort on targeted seats. A substantial literature has developed, showing the efficacy of such targeting: other things being equal, the harder parties campaign locally, the more votes they win relative to their rivals. However, on the whole, such studies have taken a relatively static view of local campaigning, concentrating on particular elections. Yet there are a priori grounds to expect the efficacy of local campaigns to vary from party to party and from election to election. In this article, we therefore analyse dynamic trends in constituency campaigning using a pooled data set of British constituency electioneering between 1997 and 2005. The results illustrate important and substantial variations over time and across parties in the impact of local election campaigning.