“Where We Work We Win”: A Case Study of Local Liberal Democrat Campaigning

A number of studies have consistently demonstrated that where a party campaigns more intensively, relative to its opponents, it gains greater electoral payoffs. It has been claimed that a combination of local representation and grassroots campaigning is particularly salient to the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Democrats. By winning more seats locally and gaining control of more local councils, the Liberal Democrats are able to build electoral credibility and defuse any electors’ accusations of political inexperience. Given this, it could be argued that local factors are more likely to account for much more of the spatial variation in votes for the Liberal Democrats than is the case for Labour and the Conservatives. Through a localized case study, this article examines the impact of local Liberal Democrat activism on electoral outcomes. Using Seemingly Unrelated Regression to model the parties’ relative vote shares, local factors such as incumbency and intensive campaigning had significant effects on the Liberal Democrat vote in 1999 when compared against the Conservatives and, to a lesser extent, against Labour.