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Backing Badenoch: The Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2024

This article identifies and interprets the voting behaviour of Conservative parliamentarians in the leadership election that resulted in the election of Kemi Badenoch as leader of the Conservative Party. Our article utilises an original dataset of …

Broke and Broken: The Crises Facing Local Government in England

English local government faces a perilous position owing to insufficient funding, structural issues and capacity challenges. Fourteen years of austerity have significantly reduced council budgets, while increased demand for services—particularly …

Divisions within the British Parliamentary Labour Party under Keir Starmer: Results of a Cluster Analysis

This paper offers a methodologically innovative two-stage approach for studying divisions amongst parliamentary representatives. Using the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) as our case study, we construct a dataset of all Labour MPs elected in the …

The impact of local identities on voting behaviour: a Scouse case study

The political salience of local identities has received limited academic attention in the British political science literature. This paper is a step towards addressing this, through a case study of the Scouse identity. The Scouse identity is …

Trusting Truss: Conservative MPs’ Voting Preferences in the (First) British Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2022

This paper identifies the candidate preferences of Conservative parliamentarians in the final parliamentary ballot and the membership ballot of the Conservative Party leadership election of 2022. We code each parliamentarian’s candidate preference …

Selecting Sunak: Conservative MPs’ Nomination Preferences in the (Second) British Conservative Party Leadership Election

This article utilises an original dataset covering all members of the Parliamentary Conservative Party (PCP) to analyse the basis of support for Rishi Sunak, Boris Johnson and Penny Mordaunt in the October 2022 British Conservative Party leadership …

Whatever Happened to Tory Liverpool?: Success, Decline and Irrelevance since 1945

In the 1968 local elections the Liverpool Conservatives won 62 percent of the vote and 78 percent of the seats on Liverpool City Council. By 1972 the party had held a majority on Liverpool’s municipal government for 85 of the previous 100 years. But …

The United Kingdom and its disunited people

This is a chapter for the *Europe Today* textbook. The UK once prized itself on its relative stability following the Second World War - as France transitioned from the third, then the fourth, then the fifth republic, Germany was getting to grips with …

Selecting Starmer: The Nomination Preferences of Labour Parliamentarians in the 2020 Labour Party Leadership Election

This article tests the nomination preferences of Labour parliamentarians in their 2020 leadership election against a range of individual, constituency and party-political based variables. From this our article produces the following three central …

Understanding drivers of support for English city-region devolution: a case study of the Liverpool City Region

Metro mayors heading a combined authority represent the most recent innovation in English devolution. City-region devolution has been a key way in which successive Conservative governments have sought to boost local economic growth against a …