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¹⁶ For example, Butler and Kavanagh, The British General Election of 2001; Norris and Lovenduski, ‘Why Parties Fail to Learn’; Collings and Seldon, ‘Conservatives in Opposition’; Seldon and Snowdon, ‘The Conservative Campaign’.

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²⁵ The association between Conservative party identification and vote intention is very high. The proportions of Conservative identifiers voting Conservative were 95 per cent, 87 per cent and 83 per cent in 1997, 2001 and 2005, respectively (source: 1997, 2001, 2005 BES cross-sections).

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³¹ In each case, ‘don't know’ responses are omitted, so that biases are reduced as far as possible, and party position estimates are taken from the overall mean, minimizing assimilation or projection effects.

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³³ Note that this problem also relates to the relationship of issue preferences and concerns to the vote – since parties seek to prime voters to cast their votes on favourable party issues.

³⁴ If we took this measure as a proxy for party issue emphasis, the Conservative party's top three issues (in order of emphasis) would be health > Europe > taxation. The Labour party's would be health > education > pensions. The Liberal Democrat's would be health > education > Europe. Overall, the ‘most important election issues’ were of the order: health, education, Europe, taxation, pensions, crime, economy.

³⁵ For example, all respondents, by party identification, ranked health between 9.03 and 9.35 on the 0–10 scale, all ranked taxation between 7.47 and 7.98, all ranked education between 8.59 and 9.11, and all ranked crime between 8.62 and 8.93 (total N = 4,304).

³⁶ These data were kindly made available to the author by Dr Roger Mortimore from Ipsos-MORI.

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³⁹ These were based on large sample sizes in 1997 (approx. 71) but the 2001 obtained smaller Conservative MP samples of around 30. Therefore, the total Conservative samples are reported in Table 1.

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⁴⁸ Benoit and Laver, Party Policy in Modern Democracies; Green, ‘When Voters and Parties Agree’; Clements and Bartle, ‘The European Issue and Party Choice at British General Elections’.

⁴⁹ All scales in this article have been re-coded between 0–10 where 0 = most left and 10 = most right.

⁵⁰ The 2001 BES cross-section figures for taxation are slightly but not substantially different to the figures in Table 2, which used the 2001 wave of the 1997–2001 British Election Panel Study.

⁵¹ The Liberal Democrat position is marginally but not significantly closer than the Conservative position to Labour partisans (0.17 difference between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat gap) and Liberal Democrat partisans (0.09).

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⁵³ Ironically, this may be an example where Cameron was attempting to shore up his Eurosceptic voters and supporters. Cameron withdrew Conservative MEPs from the European People's Party (the centre-right grouping in Europe) and negotiated a new grouping of Eurosceptic parties.

⁵⁴ Source: http://www.ipsos-mori.com/content/attitudes-towards-immigration.ashx. The net ‘agree minus disagree’ score was the percentage of ‘strongly agree’ and ‘tend to agree’ responses minus the percentage of ‘tend to disagree’ and ‘strongly disagree’ responses.

⁵⁵ Using the 2005 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey, and the question, ‘Do you think there are too many immigrants have been let into the country or not?’, 89.5 per cent of Conservative identifiers agreed, compared with 78.3 per cent of Labour identifiers, 66.4 per cent of Liberal Democrat identifiers, 73.7 per cent of people identifying with ‘other’ parties, and 86.5 per cent identifying with no party (total N = 2,093).

⁵⁶ Benoit and Laver, Party Policy in Modern Democracies.

⁵⁷ Post-2005 data indicate that public opinion may have subsequently moved in a low taxation direction, so that perceived Conservative policies in 2001 and 2005 would be closer. See Curtice, John, ‘Back in Contention? The Conservatives’ Electoral Prospects’, Political Quarterly, 80 (2009), 172–183CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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⁶¹ It would be possible to analyse change among the same respondents using panel data. However, since these panel study questions occur in elections, we would not be able to distinguish changes in issue salience from responsiveness to party agendas in campaigns.

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⁷³ Petrocik, ‘Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections’; Petrocik, Benoit and Hansen, ‘Issue Ownership and Presidential Campaigning’.

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⁷⁵ Green and Hobolt, ‘Owning the Issue Agenda’; Clarke, Sanders, Stewart and Whiteley, ‘Performance Politics and the British Voter’.

⁷⁶ A cattle disease, which forced farmers to destroy livestock and the government to restrict rural transport, led to the postponement of the 2001 general election by one month.

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