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In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as secondorder. However, voters believe that even less is at stake in European elections than in local elections, and their behaviour is congruent with this: voters are more likely to turn out in local elections, they are more likely to 'split their ticket'; they are more likely to report that they vote on issues specific to the second-order arena. Logistic regression of party choices in the local, European and national contexts confirms this. National considerations played less part in the local election and there was some evidence that voters were influenced by the record of the locally-incumbent party. It appears that voting in the European elections has more of an expressive character, and is less instrumental than that in either local or national elections.

The authors offer a multiplicative model that provides a comprehensive framework to place the main findings of the volume. The model is based on the standard ‘expected utility maximization’ model of the economists, which can be applied for understanding election outcomes. The idea is that the voter weights the utility of a given policy by the probability of its being implemented, sums this across the different policies, and then votes for whichever party gives the greatest expected utility. However, Heath, Jowell, and Curtice emphasize the fact that the rational choice model needs to be expanded to include some of the ‘non‐rational’ processes observed in their research such as the possibility that voters’ preferences may be shaped by the political parties and should not to be treated only as independent factors. The model should also be modified to take account of other sorts of processes such as social interaction, social conformity and what the authors have termed the ‘forked‐tail’ effect related to the generalization of the disillusionment from a specific party policy into a general disillusion with the party's competence.

The 2000 British Social Attitudes survey confirmed a growing social acceptance of heterosexual cohabitation as a partnering and parenting choice and identified strong public support for reform of cohabitation law (Barlow et al., 2001). It also established the existence of a 'common law marriage' myth whereby the majority of the public, and cohabitants in particular, falsely believe that cohabiting couples who have lived together for some time have the same legal rights as married couples (Barlow et al., 2001). Even among those cohabitants who were aware of their vulnerable legal position, it was found that very few had taken appropriate steps to gain or provide legal protection despite, as we found in subsequent research, often having good intentions to do so (Barlow et al., 2005). These findings prompted widespread media interest and government concern. This led the Department for Constitutional Affairs (now the Ministry of Justice) to fund their 2004 Living Together Campaign, aimed at advising cohabitants about their legal rights and indicating practical steps they could take to gain marriage-like protection where possible. 1 Subsequently, in 2005, with Scotland having already decided to reform the law relating to cohabiting couples (see Family Law (Scotland) Act 2006), the government decided to refer the issue of whether cohabitation law should be reformed to the Law Commission for England and Wales, a decision which sparked further media interest. The attention paid to cohabitation over the last few years makes it worth revisiting the subject, to see whether, and how, behaviour and attitudes are changing. 2 So our first aim in this chapter is to examine the evolving prevalence and role of cohabitation as a relationship form in British society. Our second aim is to establish whether attitudes to cohabitation have changed, and whether legal knowledge and actions have increased following a period of sustained

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To date the Internet has apparently had limited impact on changing 'politics as usual' in election campaigns. Parties often fail to make imaginative use of the medium, while relatively few people use it to acquire information about an election. However, while it may be the case that only political activists use the Internet to acquire information about an election, these activists may then disseminate that information more widely because they are particularly likely to discuss the election with their fellow citizens. We find evidence that such a two-step flow of information may well have occurred during the 2005 British election

Environmental policy needs to give more priority to reducing the incidence of street-level incivilities and the absence of environmental goods, both of which appear to be more important for health than perceptions of large-scale infrastructural incivilities.

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