Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1349128 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-01
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

Synopsis
Using systematic and objective research to provide evidence of what really occurred in the campaign, and why, this assessment of the 2001 election could become essential reading for political pundits and all fascinated by the electoral process.

Customer Reviews

Ahem
Labour's second landslide can be explained extremely easily by the fact that the House of Commons is elected using an unfair voting system. If the voting system was properly democratic, there would have been no landslide.

Polling evidence explaining the 2001 election
This is, at the present time, one of a series of three books of polling data and analysis which go a long way towards explaining how, from whom, and where New Labour obtained the votes for their three general election victories.

The three books are

Explaining Labour's Landslide (on the 1997 election)
Explaining Labour's Second Landslide (on the 2001 election)
Explaining Labour's Land slip (on the 2005 election.)

When Iain Dale approached Bob Worcester to commission this book as a sequel to "Explaining Labour's Landslide," some time before the 2001 election to which it refers, he also asked Bob what he planned to call the book. "Explaining Labour's SECOND Landslide" was the cheeky reply.

I'm going to make an equally cheeky prediction: if there is a fourth book in the series, don't bet against it being called something like "Explaining Cameron's Tory landslide".

This book tracks the polling evidence pretty much throughout the 1997 to 2001 parliament to examine which decisions by the government and opposition parties went down well and badly with the electorate, and with which parts of the electorate. It covers the great political events from the petrol crisis to Foot & Mouth, the impact of party leaders, and why sleaze did Labour so little damage (the book provides evidence that basically the electorate thought back then that the other parties were nearly as bad - something which is not what the polls show now.)

This is mainly an evidence-based book about what the electorate thought, and it mostly is not a book about what policies the Labour government should have pursued or other parties should have promoted. For example, the section "Labour tries to lose" expresses a number of opinions about areas where Labour failed, but this is largely and quite openly based on public perception rather than objective fact.

The book is fairly scathing about William Hague's leadership of the Conservative party but mostly on a similar basis, e.g. through the prism of how the public viewed him. This is slightly counterbalanced by an interesting section on how many of the publicly held impressions of Hague were complete rubbish. For example, the polls suggest people thought that William Hague is a southerner rather than a Yorkshireman, that he went to a public school rather than the state comprehensive he actually attended, and strangest of all, because cartoonists persisted in drawing him as the schoolboy he had been twenty years before when he addressed the 1977 Conservative conference, polls found that most people thought he was physically small while only 6% of voters realise that Hague is nearly 6" tall.

Two health warnings: Bob Worcester was Labour's private pollster for a time. He makes a strong and very largely successful attempt to prevent this from biasing the book, but from time to time the fact that he understands Labour better than the Conservatives or Liberals does come through.

Secondly, polling methods have continued to be refined and improved as successive polls have tended to overstate Labour support compared with real elections, slightly understate Conservative support and more markedly understate Lib/Dem support. Some of these changes in methodology have been made since this book was written. So comparing polling data in this book with current polls may fail to give an accurate picture of the change in opinions since because it will not necessarily be comparing like with like.

This does not of course mean that present polls are guaranteed to be perfect or that all the various sources of polling bias have been completely eliminated. The person I regard as Bob Worcester's current main rival for the title of Britain's most successful election forecaster, Mike Smithson who runs the "Political Betting" website, often expresses the opinion that the poll which has Labour in the worst position is the one which is most likely to be accurate.

Overall: a useful textbook for politicians, psethologists, political anoraks, and anyone else who is interested in studying how political parties succeeded and failed in appealing to the electorate.