Friends and neighbours voting revisited: The geography of support for candidates to lead the UK’s Labour party

Abstract

Most studies of the 'friends and neighbours' effect in voting behaviour have accounted for their observed patterns using Key's classic identification of this effect as reflecting localism and voting for the 'home town boy'. This paper introduces other potential local influences, and hypothesises that there should be separate local friends', neighbours', and political friends' effects. This expanded model is successfully tested using data from elections for the leadership of the UK's Labour Party in 1994 and 2010. All three effects operated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the pattern of voting for most of the candidates.

Why Friends and Neighbors? Explaining the Electoral Appeal of Local Roots

“…Such an account would predict that the effects of local roots on voter evaluations should vary positively with the strength of local attachments, rather than 8 depending on the presence or absence of information about behavioral localism. An alternative account posits that the friends-and-neighbors effect arises due to indirect mechanisms, either because voters receive more information about local than about non-local candidates due to the way electoral information diffuses through local social and media networks (Bowler et al 1993, Johnston et al 2016, or because local candidates are able to better mobilize local activists (Rice and Macht 1987b). Such an account does not involve information about a politician's local roots having any direct effect on voter evaluations of that politician.…”

“…Yet most existing studies focus on establishing the preference for a local politician rather than testing theoretical explanations for it. The only theory to be explicitly tested so far posits an indirect mechanism: that friends-and-neighbors voting arises not because voters actively consider local roots when evaluating politicians, but because voters tend to have more information about politicians with local roots due to the way such information is diffused through local social networks and local media (Bowler et al 4 1993, Johnston et al 2016). However, recent experimental evidence shows that voters still tend to prefer politicians with local roots to those without even when presented with the same amount of information about both (Campbell and Cowley 2014).…”

A influência da geografia no comportamento eleitoral: contexto social de vizinhança

“…Mais ainda, as pessoas, quando decidem o seu voto, fazem também uma avaliação retrospectiva e prospectiva da situação econômica do lugar onde vivem, relativizando a sua condição econômica individual com a dos seus vizinhos, com a da sua região etc. (JOHNSTON;PATTIE, 2006, cap. 5).…”

The friends and neighbours voting effect and its role in explaining electoral behaviour

“…Później upowszechniło się tłumaczenie: "głosowanie przyjacielsko-sąsiedzkie" (Górecki, 2015;Gendźwiłł, 2015), przyjęte również w niniejszym tekście. W jednej z prac zagranicznych dokonano podziału na przyjaciół, sąsiadów oraz przyjaciół politycznych: pierwsi to osoby zamieszkujące w tej samej jednostce podziału terytorialnego co kandydat, drudzy -w jednostkach sąsiednich, a ostatni -w jednostkach, z których pochodzą politycy popierający kandydata (Johnston, Wickham-Jones, Pattie, Cutts, Pemberton, 2016). Pamiętać należy, że w części prac badających mechanizmy i sytuacje mieszczące się w pojęciu głosowania PS nie wykorzystuje się tego terminu, a autorzy ograniczają się do wskazania lokalności jako atrybutu mającego znaczący wpływ na wyniki wyborcze i działania kandydata/polityka.…”