Paul Whiteley and Patrick Seyd, "Party Election Campaigning in Britain: The Labour Party," Party Politics, 9 (September 2003), 637-652.

First Paragraph:
The purpose of this article is to estimate the effects of Labour's campaigning on electoral participation and party choice in the general election of 2001. Since the impact of Labour's campaign cannot be assessed without taking into account the campaigns of its main rivals, attention is also paid to the campaigning activities of the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. But the main focus of the article is on the Labour campaign. It is important to remember that while commentators often describe a British general election campaign in the singular, general elections are actually fought out in 659 separate constituencies. While some features of election campaigning will be the same regardless of the locality, there are enough variations in campaigning efforts, styles and intensities across the country to make it necessary to describe the election in terms of a set of different campaigns. Variations in these campaigns will depend upon a range of factors, including the geographical location (for example, England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland), the closeness of the constituency contest, the state of local party organizations and the calibre and commitment of the candidates.

Figures and Tables:
Figure 1: Labour's election campaign 2001
Table 1: Elector perceptions of the campaign ni the 2001 general election
Table 2: Elector perceptions of the campaign in 2001 by party
Table 3: Conversion and reinforcement in constituency campaigns
Table 4: The mobilization scales
Table 5: Logistic regressions of mobilization on turnout in 2001
Table 6: Logistic regressions of mobilization on party choice in 2001
Table 7: Logistic regressions of mobilization on party choice in 2001: standardized effects
Table 8: Logistic regressions of mobilization on Labour voting in 2001

Last Paragraph:
These findings reinforce conclusions from earlier research that constituency campaigning is important in influencing voting behaviour. They also demonstrate the significance of party election broadcasts as part of the parties' central campaigning efforts; this is at a time when there are some doubts concerning the future format of such broadcasts. These opportunities for the parties to address the voters directly turn out to be quite important. In the context of a de-aligned electorate and a 24-hour news cycle it appears that campaigning is important and may become more important in the future. In the context of declining party membership and activism (Whiteley and Seyd, 2002) party leaderships will have to devise incentives in order to encourage volunteers to participate in these campaigns in the future. At the moment the marginalization of party members in the British political process by the Blair government (see Seyd and Whiteley, 2002) is likely to reduce the incentives for voluntary action in the Labour Party. If this continues it means that the voluntary party will be significantly weaker at the time of the next election than it was in 2001. Turning this around will not be easy, but in the long run it will mean bringing the members into partnership with the government and the party in parliament, rather than largely ignoring them. But that raises a whole new debate.