Abstract
Minor parties in English local government have largely been neglected by the research literature because of their lack of electoral success at the aggregate level. However, over the past decade minor party candidates have contested an increasing number of wards and this rise is disproportionate to their share of the vote. Developing the concept of ‘presence’ and a focus on wards rather than seats we use newly reworked data from the Elections Centre Database (University of Plymouth) to plot the proportion of wards contested by minor party candidates from 1973–2008. We argue that whilst changes in vote share are minimal throughout the period, the magnitude of the recent increase in minor party activity at the ward level is unprecedented and justifies further study. We also explore the variation in minor party activity between authority types, concluding that the explanation for the recent rise in contestation is not constant across similar authorities and electoral systems. We suggest that the explanation for minor party activity is much more complex and relative.
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Notes
1. All data on vote share and contestation were derived from the Elections Centre Database (University of Plymouth) in 2008.
2. The definition of a minor party given by the Electoral Commission is a party that only contests parish council elections in England or community council elections in Wales (see http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/guidance/resources-for-those-we-regulate/parties). However in this article we are defining minor parties as any organisation registered with the Electoral Commission apart from the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties (following the lead of Bochel and Denver Citation2008).
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Luke Sloan
Luke Sloan is a lecturer in quantitative research methods at the Cardiff School of Social Sciences. His research interests include the analysis of secondary data, linking survey data to spatial criteria and augmentation with naturally occurring data from social media sources. Recent publications include: Rallings, C., Thrasher, M., Borisyuk, G. and Sloan, L., 2012. Examination of Green Party voting in London 1982–2008, Party Politics; and Williams, M., Edwards, A., Housley, W., Burnap, P., Morgan, J., Rana, O., Avis, N. and Sloan, L., forthcoming 2013. Policing cyber-neighbourhoods: tension monitoring and social media networks, Policing (Special issue).