Partisanship, Performance and Personality

Abstract

The study of voting behaviour is characterized by controversy about the `importance' of various explanatory themes and specific variables, but there is a widespread reluctance to assess these hypotheses in a comprehensive causal model. This article specifies a model of Labour and Conservative voting in the 2001 British General Election which incorporates a whole series of competing and complementary hypotheses. The results suggest that partisanship, prospective evaluations of competence and favourable evaluations of Tony Blair all contributed to Labour's victory, while retrospective evaluations of Labour's record on crime and asylum-seekers reduced the size of Labour's victory. Analyses that incorporate a new measure of party identification suggest that long-term partisanship may have contributed less and short-term factors correspondingly more to the aggregate election outcome.