Tactical Unwind? Changes in Party Preference Structure and Tactical Voting in Britain between 2001 and 2005

Abstract

The breakdown of the relatively close relationship between Labour and the Liberal Democrats between 2001 and 2005 provides reason to expect that both the incidence and the character of tactical voting would have been different at the 2005 general election as compared with other recent elections. Fewer voters would be expected to have voted tactically overall, and in particular fewer would be expected to have made a tactical switch between the Liberal Democrats and Labour. This paper examines whether those expectations were fulfilled. It finds that the increased hostility between the leaderships of the Labour and the Liberal Democrat parties was not reflected in the attitudes of those parties’ supporters. Nevertheless there does seem to have been some decline in tactical switching from Labour to the Liberal Democrats, engendered perhaps by an apparent decline in hostility towards the Conservatives. Otherwise, however, there is no consistent evidence that the incidence or pattern of tactical voting was different in 2005 from that in 2001.

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