Scotland Decides: The Devolution Issue and the 1997 Referendum by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781136331756
Google: 1axQjyPSSOYC
Goodreads: 17538694
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

Further evidence that referendum campaigning was less intense than general election campaigning comes from the reports of respondents when asked to compare the referendum effort of their parties with their normal effort in elections. The results, given in Table 5.8, show that very few parties made as much effort as they normally do in a general election. Indeed around three-quarters of Conservative associations and three-fifths of Liberal Democrat associations put in less effort than they normally would in a local election. On the other hand, 41 per cent of CLPs claimed that they made a greater effort than is normal in local elections. Remembering that parties which did not campaign are included in these data and that there were many more of these in 1979 (Table 5.2), it seems that, overall, Conservatives made about the same (not very great) effort in the two referendums while Labour and the Liberal Democrats both worked harder at local campaigning. The apparent decline in effort among local SNP branches may reflect a feeling that Labour was grabbing the glory and took a clear leading role in the campaign.

One way of comparing the intensity of campaigning across parties, constituencies and elections is to compute an index of campaigning (see Denver and Hands, 1997a). Using responses to our survey of constituency secretaries we devised a simple additive index, scoring from 1 to 22, which incorporates seven different dimensions of campaigning — preparation, organisation, number of workers, the use of computers, canvassing, polling day activity and effort put into a variety of tasks.5 For comparison, we calculated the same index for Scottish constituency parties at the general election. Mean scores in the general election and the referendum are shown in Table 5.9. These data confirm that referendum campaigning was generally less intense than in the general election — with a particularly sharp drop on the part of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats — and that Labour campaigned hardest of all.

Table 5.8 Effort put into referendum campaigns

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