Constituency Campaigning in the 2001 General Election

<p>Abstract copyright UK Data Service and data collection copyright owner.</p>Over the last decade, there has been a renewal of interest in, and revaluation of, the effects of local constituency campaigning on the part of both academics and political parties. From the 1950s to the 1980s, as campaigning became more 'nationalised' - dominated by party leaders and focused almost exclusively on the national mass media - local constituency campaigns came to be seen as rather meaningless side-shows. During the 1980s, however, a significant 'revisionist' literature appeared, suggesting that effective and intense constituency campaigning could have a significant impact in terms of improved electoral performance by the parties and, partly as a consequence of this, the parties themselves have recently placed much more emphasis on local campaigning.<br> <br> Four studies have been conducted in this series so far and are currently available from the UK Data Archive. These cover the 1992 election (held under SN 3587), the 1997 election (SN 3922), 2001 election (SN 4508) and the 2010 election (SN 6830).<br>This study, the third in the series, builds upon previous research by Denver and Hands. They showed that during the 1990s, a much more professional approach to local campaigning was adopted and increased resources were devoted to the activity. The aim of this project was to assess and chart the continuing developments in campaigning (such as the increased use of telephone canvassing, direct mail, etc.). The 2001 general election was particularly interesting in terms of campaigning, because of the very different electoral context - the Conservatives were on the attack, Labour on the defensive. As in 1992 and 1997, the data also allowed the principal investigators to construct an index of campaign intensity for each party in each constituency, which was then used in conjunction with election results to determine whether local campaigning continues to have a significant impact on electoral outcomes.<br> Interviews with key national campaign strategists and with regional/local officials were also undertaken, which added qualitative depth to the quantitative findings (only the survey data is held at the UK Data Archive).<B>Main Topics</B>:<br> The file contains responses to a postal survey of constituency election agents/campaign organisers for all the major parties in Great Britain (Conservative, Labour, Liberal Democrat, Scottish National Party and Plaid Cymru) at the 2001 general election. The survey asked respondents a range of questions on the preparations for the campaign, campaign organisation and strategy, campaign activities, polling day activities, etc. To protect anonymity, all questions relating to the personal characteristics of the respondents have been omitted from the dataset. A number of questions (relating to trade union activity) were asked only of Labour election agents. The dataset also contains constituency names and Press Association numbers, allowing the data to be used in conjunction with earlier datasets in the series and other constituency level datasets (such as election results). Users of the data are required to sign an undertaking that they will not publish any information that can be attributable to individual constituencies. Opinion data have also been removed from the file to prevent identification of individual respondents