THE VALUE OF MAKING AN EXTRA EFFORT - CAMPAIGN SPENDING AND ELECTORALOUTCOMES IN RECENT BRITISH GENERAL-ELECTIONS - A DECOMPOSITION APPROACH

An increasing volume of research has shown that the amount which Briti sh political parties spend on constituency campaigns at general electi ons is related to their relative performance there. Because parties ar e better able to mobilise campaign resources where they are already el ectorally strong, and because they tend to remain strong in the same p arts of the country over long sequences of elections, however, there a re technical problems in separating out the 'real' impacts of campaign spending from those which reflect prior strength. A two-stage modelli ng procedure is introduced here which allows such separation: it provi des strong evidence that where parties spend more than the average for a constituency of a certain type, they garner electoral rewards accor dingly.