Dr Alia Middleton

Rather than a widely expected autumn election, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak called one to be held on 4 July. His Conservative Party were reduced to just 121 seats, and Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer became the new Prime Minister. The change in administration led to some significant policy shifts towards the latter half of the year—in particular, the scrapping of the Rwanda scheme to tackle immigration. The new Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, held a budget in October that criticised the economic management of the previous government and scrapped winter fuel payments for pensioners.

The year 2023 saw more stability in British politics, with new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak seeking to make his mark on the policy agenda with the announcement of five key policy pledges in January. As part of seeking to address these, the government placed an increased emphasis on immigration over the year, particularly in tackling illegal crossings over the English Channel. The government also moved away from its net zero agenda. Despite this, the party's poll position did not improve. New peers were introduced by departing Prime Ministers Johnson and Truss. Boris Johnson also stepped down as a Member of Parliament, and a November Cabinet reshuffle saw former Prime Minister David Cameron re‐enter politics as Foreign Secretary.

Understanding how political leaders use social media during election campaigns is a growing area of research, with existing literature focusing on single election examinations of platform usage (Smith 2021). This paper instead conducts a longitudinal examination of political leadership on Twitter/X at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 UK general elections, focusing on the different ways in which leaders portray their competence, ordinariness and authenticity. In analysing 2694 posts during the short campaign period by the various leaders of the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats and the SNP, it enables the examination of both changing social media behaviours and individual constructions of leadership under the same party label.

Leaders' visits are now an integral part of British general election campaigns. Yet outside of a few cross-sectional explorations of leaders on the campaign trail it remains under-explored. Here we redress this imbalance. Using a unique data source collected by the authors over the four most recent British general elections, we explore where leaders visit, what determines these visits and whether the reasons have changed over time. For the first time, we also put forward an original typology of leader visits in England. Our findings detail how the type of visit varies over time according to the electoral context, by respective campaign strategies, closeness to election-day and how it is often shaped by the personalities of the leaders themselves. In the final part, our evidence suggests that leaders' visits impact party support although the effects vary for parties across elections. Political Studies Political Studies

Studies of civil society organizations (CSOs) working on international protection related issues have typically focused on those positively disposed towards refugees, without asking either whether this is the full range of dispositions in CSOs or why negatively disposed individuals appear not to mobilize in the same way. Using a novel survey of CSOs in Europe we show that most have positive dispositions, explained by attitudes towards international protection, which incentivizes such organizational forms. By contrast, those with negative dispositions are incentivized to focus their efforts on the party-political sphere, to regulate public policy to limit international protection.

Pored over by the media and used as crucial testing grounds for new candidates and campaign techniques by political parties, by-elections – or special elections – are comparatively under-studied in contemporary academic analyses. These elections, held outside the normal election cycle enable local voters to replace a departing representative, but the way in which they vote has often been dismissed as being driven by national factors. In the British case, despite the attention such contests bring, understandings of the way in which people vote in contemporary by-elections are based largely on data from over forty years ago. This article represents a substantial updating of the literature on by-elections, using data on 148 contests from the British context to examine whether pre-existing assumptions from the literature hold: namely the importance of national and local factors. It finds that by-elections no longer represent useful routes by which defeated MPs can re-enter Parliament. For both turnout and party vote share at these contests, a combination of local contextual and national factors impact by-election results, whereas contest specific factors such as having a local candidate only make a difference in a few cases.

This chapter uses a dataset covering nine newspapers over four elections, identifying mentions of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat leaders. It explores reporting on leadership—not only the prominence of particular leaders but also which dimensions of politics and election campaigning are articulated through the prism of leadership. It develops an understanding of the context surrounding reporting on leadership and what it is about leaders that the press pay attention to. It also converges with the other chapters in the book in understanding the outward-facing function of leader visits, by exploring their appearance in the national press for the first time. This enables an understanding of which visits cut through to become newsworthy and their importance as a framing tool for election reporting.

This chapter explores where party leaders go during election campaigns, examining longitudinal patterns in the campaign trails at the 2010, 2015, 2017 and 2019 elections. Using the author’s own data, it examines how many visits leaders manage over the campaign, which party holds the seats visited by a leader and the role of Brexit in shaping visits in the 2017 and 2019 campaigns. It also questions the importance of marginality in determining whether a seat is visited. This chapter goes beyond existing literature to make a substantial contribution in disaggregating distinct types of visits in the British context. In considering the symbolism behind visit locations, for the first time, the hidden messages in the British campaign trail can be seen.

The successes and failures of political leaders and their rise and fall from power are well analysed by academic studies. The roles played by former leaders however are more obscure, particularly if they continue to maintain an institutional presence. This article explores the backbench behaviour of 12 former UK prime ministers following their departure from Downing Street. We find that contemporary former prime ministers display more diverse backbench behaviour in the House of Commons, are more focused on performing constituency representation in the chamber and engage in a form of statecraft focused on real time assessments of their successors. This is significant as it suggests that our traditional assumptions of post leadership careers may need reinterpreting. It also demonstrates an ongoing democratic benefit to the presence of former leaders within legislatures.

Turmoil characterised politics in the United Kingdom in 2022, with the year seeing three Prime Ministers, the death of Queen Elizabeth II and a deepening economic crisis. Partygate continued to loom large over the Johnson administration, and after a tumultuous few days with mass ministerial resignations in July, Johnson resigned. His successor, Liz Truss, became the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history, resigning after 49 days. Rishi Sunak became the third Prime Minister since the 2019 general election. The economy was a key area of concern in 2022, with rising inflation worsening a cost of living crisis and fuelling a series of public sector strikes.

This chapter uses individual-level data from British voters to explore the role that leaders play in contemporary British voting behaviour. It firstly examines a dimension rarely touched on in the existing literature—that of self-expressed leader effects, where voters attribute their vote choice to the leader. Differentials between voter opinions on leaders and their parties are used to explore whether British voters can disentangle the two. The role of the campaign is also explored by assessing whether voters feel differently about a leader before and after the election campaign. To understand the impact that leaders have, the voter behaviour decision is modelled, before those seats visited by a party leader are isolated to explore whether visits may amplify or dampen voter reactions to leaders.

The chapter begins by exploring how and why constituencies are classified in existing literature, delineating a gap for a new understanding. A visit-based typology of constituencies is then introduced, explaining the four classifications and the composition of each. A detailed exploration of each classification in turn follows, illustrated by real-life constituency examples. As a key component of the four classifications, contrasts between national and local publications in campaign trail reporting are examined. In giving a tangible sense of diverging experiences of leadership, strategy and reporting, this typology offers an opportunity to reflect on a constituency-level experience of contemporary British election campaigns.

Elections are often key drivers of social change—junctures in a nation’s history, held at times of recovery, rapid change and peace. In democracies they are opportunities for voters to express their opinion and change the direction of their country; in less democratic regimes, elections may still be held as a pseudo-democratic veil for the machinations of true power. They are times at which—in varying degrees—the eyes of the media become trained on a cluster of people—party leaders, their families, their colleagues and their advisers. Rather like a beauty contest, politicians are trotted out onto various televised interview programmes, participate in stunts of sometimes dubious value and speak of their hopes for the future.

In Britain there is no official role equivalent to the First Lady, which in itself is largely governed by convention; this means that British political partners have a freedom to be defined in a way that suits the wider campaign. This chapter considers how the private life of party leaders comes to the fore in election campaigns through the increased visibility of their partners. It explores how we can understand reporting on political partners in different electoral contexts as well as the impact of gender. It explores shifts in reporting on partners, from the dampening of coverage when a female leader is in power, to the move from a passive, supportive role to an increased appreciation of a politically active partner.

During the 2017 general election campaign, the Conservative and Labour leaders toured the country. While Theresa May operated a conventional approach, encapsulated by limited interactions with the public, Jeremy Corbyn participated in public rallies and appeared at music festivals. This article examines the strategic decisions underpinning leader visits in the 2017 campaign trail. It finds that May and Corbyn’s electoral strategies had more in common than at first sight. The article adds to existing studies by using new interview data from local party campaigners to understand visit organisation and impact on the local campaign. It also makes an important step towards unpicking the causal mechanism through which these visits may affect voter behaviour.

At each election, some MPs decide to step down. Irrespective of their motivation, retirement has an electoral impact; their party’s constituency vote share experiences a 'slump'. Conventional wisdom attributes this underperformance to the loss of the retiring MP’s personal vote. This article uses aggregate-level data covering UK General Elections between 1987 and 2010 to demonstrate whether this explanation is supported. It also examines whether political parties can mediate such underperformances by considering the electoral experience and local connections of candidates contesting the post-retirement election. The article finds mixed evidence for the link between personal votes and underperformance. However, parties should pay close attention to the candidates selected to fight the post-retirement election. If an inheritor wants to win a national government or opposition seat, experience and local ties can be harmful. Also, schooling and other local ties enable candidates to mount effective challenges to government and opposition inheritors.

The war in Ukraine has put energy security front and centre once again. Energy transformations have bubbled away in the EU with predictable familiarity: rising and falling in tandem with geopolitical shifts or climate change pressures. 2022 however has been an epochal year in European energy terms, and 2023 and beyond are likely to be just as seismic. The EU has folded energy security, sustainability, foreign and security policy, strategic autonomy and trade into one enormous package, and used it to both cohere itself as anegotiating actor, and render itself influential with regional and global powers, from Ukraine and Russia to the US, NATO and the UN. Some turning points are long overdue, including the broader area of European energy security. Others, in terms of possibilities by which to overhaul the European oil, gas, electricity and renewable markets, have come online in a more radical fashion. There are however, two clear themes to be considered. First, the largely joint efforts made by the EU to break the asymmetric dependence on Russian fossil fuels. Second, the collective approach to tackling the consequent energy crisis brought on by the interruption of gas supplies at regional, market and individual levels. As this CBE Policy Paper explores, there is much context that needs to be set out, in order to fully understand the sweeping nature of some of the energy mobilisation that has taken place in the EU’s attempt to move towards a form of energy independence. It is easy enough to cite the statistical drop in numbers of imported Russian gas to the EU from roughly 40% to 9%, or list the series of EU policies that have arisen throughout 2022, including REPowerEU, the revamped ‘Fit For 55’ and European Green Deal. But the wider transition that the EU is now embarking upon requires reflection, before identifying the current challenges and proposing policy options. As the Policy Paper illustrates, energy security itself is a highly contested definition, depending on which end of the metaphorical pipeline one finds oneself. Each Member State is also approaching the energy crisis from different standpoints, whether they be geographical (e.g. proximity to Russia), financial, political and domestic. Some are keener on energy autonomy – and the costs incurred - than others. Some are independently-minded in approaching the ensuing changes, others are keen to work with the EU, still others are determined to ensure market forces and energy actors take precedence over policies. The results will need to produce an EU far more effective in managing its energy needs autonomously than previously, combining ambitions for strategic autonomy to robustly bolster its foreign and security policy, with demands for a socially just and equitable transition in implementing an ambitious climate policy. Whatever the outcome, what lies ahead is an unparalleled opportunity for the EU to recast itself as a coherent regional energy actor.

The Liberal Democrats’ performance in the 2015 general election provides an opportunity to examine the only case in the post-war period of a national junior coalition partner in British politics. Comparative research highlights competence, trust and leadership as three key challenges facing junior coalition parties. This article uses British Election Study data to show that the Liberal Democrats failed to convince the electorate on all three counts. The article also uses constituency-level data to examine the continued benefits of incumbency to the party and the impact of constituency campaigning. It finds that while the incumbency advantage remained for the Liberal Democrats, it was ultimately unable to mitigate the much larger national collapse.

This chapter offers the opportunity to examine the impact of leader visits not only in individual elections, but also across a time period of four elections. It explores the impact that leader visits can have on local electoral outcomes around the country, largely at the aggregate level. It does this by concentrating the analysis on four main aspects: whether visits can convert floating voters, whether visits can be an important mobiliationary tool to encourage people to the polls, whether the timing of a visit matters and whether the type of visit makes a distinct difference.

This book has aimed to explore the strategising and communication of leadership in contemporary British elections, particularly relating to the campaign trail. What this chapter does is to reflect on the findings developed over previous chapters by taking influence from the range of data sources as well as the extensive data collection used here in relation to the importance of leadership as both a strategic and a communicatory tool. In doing so, it is possible to identify the importance of leadership in attracting attention, providing frames of reference and understanding the way in which leaders—and those around them—are framed by the press for public consumption.

Scotland and Wales went to the polls on the same day in 2016, the former in a post- independence referendum environment and the latter shortly after receiving further devolved powers. Despite this horizontal simultaneity, the results in these elections displayed considerable diversity. Sub-state elections are often classified as second-order and as such are characterized by lower turnouts, anti-government voting and small party support. However regional elections in the United Kingdom sit uncomfortably in this definition. This article focuses on the experience of Scotland and Wales, exploring regional and national factors that help to explain regional electoral outcomes. It examines valence models, multi-level blame attribution, and relative national and regional party leader support. In a second stage, a multinomial logistic regression is undertaken, finding that the relative importance of regional and national factors differs between the two regions.