Political Choice in Britain uses data from the 1964 to 2001 British election studies (BES), 1992 to 2002 monthly Gallup polls, and numerous other national surveys conducted over the past four decades to test the explanatory power of rival sociological and individual rationality models of electoral turnout and party choice. Analyses endorse a valence politics model that challenges the long-dominant social class model. British voters make their choices by evaluating the performance of parties and party leaders in economic and other important policy areas. Although these evaluations may be largely products of events that occur long before an election campaign officially begins, parties’ national and local campaign activities are also influential. Consistent with the valence politics model, partisan attachments display individual- and aggregate-level dynamics that reflect ongoing judgements about the managerial abilities of parties and their leaders. A general incentives model provides the best explanation of turnout. Calculations of the costs and influence-discounted benefits of voting and sense of civic duty are key variables in this model. Significantly, the decline in turnout in recent elections does not reflect more general negative trends in public attitudes about the political system. Voters judge the performance of British democracy in much the same way as they evaluate its parties and politicians. Support at all levels of the political system is a renewable resource, but one that must be renewed.

What matters most to voters when they choose their leaders? This book suggests that performance politics is at the heart of contemporary democracy, with voters forming judgments about how well competing parties and leaders perform on important issues. Given the high stakes and uncertainty involved, voters rely heavily on partisan cues and party leader images as guides to electoral choice. However, the authors argue that the issue agenda of British politics has changed markedly in recent years. A cluster of concerns about crime, immigration and terrorism now mix with perennial economic and public service issues. Since voters and parties often share the same positions on these issues, political competition focuses on who can do the best job. This book shows that a model emphasizing flexible partisan attachments, party leader images and judgments of party competence on key issues can explain electoral choice in Britain and elsewhere.

Outlets of river basins located on fault blocks often show a regular spacing. This regularity is most pronounced for fault blocks with linear ridge crests and a constant half-width, measured perpendicular to the ridge crest. The ratio of the half-width of the fault block and the outlet spacing is used in this study to characterize the average shape (or spacing ratio) of 31 sets of drainage basins. These fault-block spacing ratios are compared with similar data from smallscale flume experiments and large-scale mountain belts. Fault-block spacing ratios are much more variable than those measured for mountain belts. Differences between fault-block spacing ratios are attributed to variability in factors influencing the initial spacing of channel heads and subsequent rates of channel incision during the early stages of channel network growth (e.g. initial slope and uplift rate, precipitation, runoff efficiency and substrate erodibility). Widening or narrowing of fault blocks during ongoing faulting will also make spacing ratios more variable. It is enigmatic that some of these factors do not produce similar variability in mountain belt spacing ratios. Flume experiments in which drainage networks were grown on static topography show a strong correlation between spacing ratios and surface gradient. Spacing ratios on fault blocks are unaffected by variations in present-day gradients. Drainage basins on the Wheeler Ridge anticline in central California, which have formed on surfaces progressively uplifted by thrust faulting during the last 14 kyr, demonstrate that outlet spacing is likely to be determined during the early stages of drainage growth. This dependency on initial conditions may explain the lack of correlation between spacing ratios of fault blocks and slopes measured at the present day.Spacing ratios determine the location of sediment supply points to adjacent areas of deposition, and hence strongly influence the spatial scale of lateral facies variations in the proximal parts of sedimentary basins. Spacing ratios may be used to estimate this length scale in ancient sedimentary basins if the width of adjacent topography is known. Spacing ratio variability makes these estimates much less precise for fault blocks than for mountain belts.Regularity in drainage basin shape and outlet spacing

Introduces the principal questions–why British citizens vote, why they make the party choices that they do, to what extent do they engage with the political process beyond participation in elections, and what does the pattern of engagement over the last four decades tell us about the health of contemporary British democracy–that structure the analyses in various chapters. Chapter 1 also presents an overview of the two major competing theoretical frameworks, the sociological and individual-rationality frameworks, and various specific models located in these frameworks, which are used to answer these questions. The 2001 BES data set and various other data sets employed in the analyses are described, and the content of the several chapters that follow is summarized.

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Although political scientists have begun to investigate the properties of Internet surveys, much remains to be learned about the utility of the Internet mode for conducting major survey research projects such as national election studies. This paper addresses this topic by presenting the results of an extensive survey comparison experiment conducted as part of the 2005 British Election Study. Analyses show statistically significant, but generally small, differences in distributions of key explanatory variables in models of turnout and party choice. Estimating model parameters reveals that there are few statistically significant differences between coefficients generated using the in-person and Internet data, and the relative explanatory power of rival models is virtually identical for the two types of data. In general, the in-person and Internet data tell very similar stories about what matters for turnout and party preference in Britain. Determining if similar findings obtain in other countries should have high priority on the research agenda for national election studies.

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