Money and Electoral Politics: Local Parties and Funding at General Elections by Ron Johnston & Charles Pattie

Author:Ron Johnston & Charles Pattie [Johnston, Ron & Pattie, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781447306313
Google: tFtoDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 18526655
Publisher: Policy Press
Published: 2014-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

That this strategy was carefully targeted on places where pre-2010 campaigning could enhance the party’s prospects for the general election is shown by the geography of grants made (see Table 3.10). Very few, in any of the four years, went to local parties in ultra-safe seats where the Conservatives lost by more than 20 percentage points in 2005, and similarly there was only a very small number to local parties where they won by a similar margin then. The focus was on the marginal seats – won by less than 10 percentage points at the previous contest – especially those where the Conservatives lost and victory was necessary if they were to form the next government. In the first years of the programme, several grants were made to local parties in seats that the Conservatives won marginally in 2005 (several of them where the incumbent was not planning to stand again), to protect their hold on the seat, but as the general election approached and a Conservative victory seemed more likely, the grants to such local parties became smaller in value, and there were only three in 2010, when the focus was very much on the seats the party needed to win. There is clear evidence that the canvassing undertaken using those grants received in 2007-09 improved the Conservatives’ electoral performance at the general election; Cutts et al (2012) have shown that the party was far more likely to win in a Labour-held constituency if its local party received grants in both 2007 and 2008.

Liberal Democrat headquarters made grants to local party units, as did the Association of Liberal Democrat Councillors; the latter were for local election campaigning, but as the two types of campaign are substantially integrated by most local parties, data on them have been combined here. The amounts allocated were smaller than the Conservatives’, but comprised over 10 per cent of the local parties’ total income in each year. Given the relative importance of multi-constituency local accounting units in the party’s organisation, not surprisingly they received around one-third of all the grants in number each year, and a larger proportion of the total value in the last two (Table 3.11), reflecting the presence of marginal seats within those units (as, for example, with the Brent, Haringey and Sutton London Borough accounting units). One difference between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives is that in two of the years the former made a much larger maximum grant to a local party – £98,042 and £116,946 in 2008 and 2009 respectively. Both were to the same local party – Streatham – which was not a very marginal constituency (Labour’s lead over the second-placed Liberal Democrats in the estimated 2005 General Election was 17 percentage points).9 A further grant in 2010 was for £24,152, when the local party also attracted £51,310 in donations; there was also a grant of £31,977 in 2007 so that over the four years the local party received £290,540.10 (And the impact of all this investment

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