What Determined Conservative Success in the 2010 U.K. General Election? A Bayesian Spatial Econometric Analysis

Christa Jensen (), Donald Lacombe () and Stuart McIntyre
Additional contact information
Christa Jensen: Department of Economics, West Virginia University
Donald Lacombe: Department of Economics, West Virginia University
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christa D. Court

No 1024, Working Papers from University of Strathclyde Business School, Department of Economics

Abstract: The Conservative Party won the recent General Election in the United Kingdom (UK), gaining the most votes and seats of any single party. Conservatives simultaneously performed particularly well in some areas of the UK and poorly in others. In attempting to explain the variation in voting behaviour during this election, we consider an analysis involving an explicit accounting of geographic considerations. The spatial econometric analysis of voting behaviour is still quite rare in the literature, and analyses using a full suite of models, as employed here, are even rarer. We use data from various sources to examine the effects of a range of economic, socio-economic, and political variables on the percentage of the vote obtained by the Conservative Party in each UK constituency in the 2010 General Election. We employ recent advances in Bayesian spatial econometric modelling to determine the appropriate model for drawing these inferences. We find that there is significant spatial error dependence in a model of the percentage of the vote obtained by the Conservative Party in the 2010 UK General Election, justifying the use of spatial econometric methods for our analysis. By explicitly modelling this spatial phenomenon, we get better estimates of the impact of our chosen economic, socio-economic, and political explanatory variables. Results that seem contrary to our prior expectations when using a non-spatial regression model change when estimated using spatial econometric techniques.

Keywords: Bayesian spatial econometric analysis; spatial voting analysis; UK General Election 2010 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 C21 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2010-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.strath.ac.uk/media/departments/economics/10-24_final.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:str:wpaper:1024

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of Strathclyde Business School, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirsty Hall ().