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Why do people living in different areas vote in different ways? Why does this change over time? How do people talk about politics with friends and neighbours, and with what effect? Does the geography of well-being influence the geography of party support? Do parties try to talk to all voters at election time, or are they interested only in the views of a small number of voters living in a small number of seats? Is electoral participation in decline, and how does the geography of the vote affect this? How can a party win a majority of seats in Parliament without a majority of votes in the country? This book explores these questions by placing the analysis of electoral behaviour into its geographical context. Using information from the latest elections, including the 2005 General Election, the book shows how both voters and parties are affected by, and seek to influence, both national and local forces. Trends are set in the context of the latest research and scholarship on electoral behaviour. The book also reports on new research findings.

A study of rhetoric and manipulation (otherwise known as heresthetics). Rhetoric is the art of making people believe that the world is as you say it is. A recent example is Margaret Thatcher's claim that ‘there is no alternative’ to her economic policies—a claim that she persuaded many to believe was true. Manipulation, or heresthetics, is the art of arranging politics so that you win. It is connected with the number of issue dimensions in politics. If most issues that come up belong in the same dimension, so that people recognize that one bundle of beliefs and practices is ‘left wing’ and another is ‘right wing’, then powerful forces will drive political outcomes towards the favourite issue positions of the median voter. But if politics is multidimensional, it may give rise to chaos, in the technical sense that the social choice may move by successive majority votes from any position to any other and back. In the spirit of W. H. Riker, this book celebrates those British politicians since 1846 who saw further than their contemporaries, and who either succeeded or heroically failed to move majority‐rule politics to a quite new issue position. The politicians mostly discussed are Sir Robert Peel, the Duke of Wellington, Benjamin Disraeli, W.E. Gladstone, Lord Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Enoch Powell, David Lloyd George, Margaret Thatcher, and Gordon Brown.

Regulation Inside Government analyses the army of inspectors, auditors, grievance‐chasers, standard‐setters, and other bodies overseeing contemporary public organizations. On the basis of a pioneering two‐year inside study of British Government by a team of leading scholars, this book provides an original analytical perspective on regulation within government. Given the limitations of orthodox constitutional checks on executive government, the courts, and elected politicians, regulation inside government deserves more attention than it has hitherto received. As one of the first comprehensive accounts of regulation inside government, this book begins to fill the gap. The empirical data for the study sets out the full range of modes of control applied to the public sector. The authors examine the relationship between formal oversight, of the traditional regulatory sort, with other forms of control based on competition, mutuality, and contrived randomness. They conclude that there is a failure in contemporary public management to deploy each of these modes of control to their full potential.

The main aim of the book is to explore electoral behaviour in Britain from 1979– 97, which covers the 18years of Conservative government with Margaret Thatcher and John Major as prime ministers of the country and ends with New Labour's landslide victory in 1997. The authors of The Rise of New Labour describe the electoral experiments in the British political spectrum in this period, assess the reasons for their success and failure and discuss their implications in the framework of the underlying theories of electoral behaviour. The analyses in the book are based on the series of British Election Surveys (BESs) that have been undertaken immediately after every election since 1964 and on the 1992–97 British Election Panel Study (BEPS).

This book presents a fascinating picture of the role of the MP during the last 150 years. The book examines the various roles of Members of Parliament since the middle of the last century. Backbench MPs have three major roles — a partisan role, a constituency role, and a scrutiny role. They increasingly expect and are expected to support their parties; to help constituents with individual problems and to look after their collective interests; and they are expected to keep a check on the government and its policies. These roles existed 150 years ago, but the balance between them has changed. The partisan role now dominates at Westminster, the constituency role has expanded beyond all recognition, and the scrutiny role is widely seen as the poor relation. Moreover, while constituency work has been virtually hived-off as a non-partisan role, the conflict between the partisan and the scrutiny role creates a dilemma at the heart of parliamentary government.

This book is a study of the Scottish National Party (SNP) immediately after it came to power in May 2007, based on a survey of the entire membership and elite interviews with over eighty senior party figures. Discussion is located within the appropriate literatures and comparisons drawn with other British parties. The image of the SNP as a youthful party, with a decentralized social movement-type organization, is challenged. The party is much older and much more male than had previously been thought and appears more like other conventional parties than its past image suggested. Its increased membership in recent years hold few clues as to how to re-engage youth as even these recent joiners are predominantly older people, often former members returning to the party. The study questions the value of the civic–ethnic dichotomy in understanding nationalism with SNP members, acknowledging different ways – ethnic and civic – of defining who belongs to the Scottish nation. The picture that emerges is of a reasonably coherent left of centre party that accepts the pragmatism of its leadership. While independence remains the key motivation for joining and being active, a sizeable minority see the party as a means of furthering Scottish interests.

For over 20 years, at the heart of Whitehall, the author worked for British leaders as they shaped Britain's European policy. He draws on his experience to trace a journey from 1982 to the present as successive British governments have wrestled with their relationship with their European Union (EU) partners. The book goes behind the scenes to tell the story of how Margaret Thatcher and her successors sought to reconcile Britain's national and European interests. Drawing on the documents of the period, it gives a unique insight into how Britain's leaders weighed the British national interest and the interests and personalities of their European counterparts. This is the story of Prime Ministers and Foreign Secretaries in intimate discussion with other EU leaders, of how politicians instruct and motivate their top officials to implement their political will and how those officials seek to turn political instruction into negotiating success. The book analyses British success and failure and shows how, despite differences of declared aim and personality, Britain's leaders have in practice followed very similar paths. Britain has been an awkward partner, often at odds with her fellow Europeans: a stranger in Europe. But with dogged determination and seriousness of purpose Britain's leaders have done much to shape and reform the modern Europe in which we live today.

This book examines the recovery of the British Liberal Democrat Party, emphasizing the role of the grassroots party members in shaping this recovery. A number of factors have contributed to the party’s resurgence, including the performances of its main rivals, the Conservative and Labour parties, and the decline in partisan attachments throughout the entire electorate. However, evidence shows that the grassroots party has played the decisive role in bringing this about. The key players are the men and women who joined the party as members, and then actively worked on its behalf by campaigning or standing in local and national elections when the political climate was cold. A major focus of the book is to examine these people. The future electoral prospects for the party are also discussed, including the question of whether or not it can replace its rivals as the second, or even the first, party of British electoral politics.