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The neighbourhood effect revisited: spatial science or

political regionalism?

R J Johnston
Dopartmont of Gnoyraphy, University of Shoffiold, Shoffiold S10 2TN, England
Rocoivod 20 Soptombor 1984; in rovisod form 21 February 1985

Abstract. The neighbourhood effect in voting studies is defined as the concentration of votes
for a party in a place which is greater than expected. It is usually accounted for as the
consequence of biased flows of relevant information through local social networks, and no
reference is made to the role of political parties in the manipulation of those flows and networks.
Such a role was referred to in pioneer geographical studies, but has largely been ignored since,
apparently because it does not readily fit into the spatial science paradigm. It is argued that
the agenda-setting role of parties and the importance of local organisation are crucial influences
on voting patterns. Parties are embedded in local cultures and are involved in their creation.

Space is presented in two very different ways in contemporary human geography and
related social sciences. In the first, and numerically dominant, approach (usually
termed 'spatial science' or Vocational analysis') the elements of space—particularly
distance—are portrayed as independent variables influencing human behaviour.
This gives space a separate existence, outside the context of the society being
analysed; it reifies variables such as distance and suggests that their influence is
universal and predictable. In the other approach space is portrayed as a human
creation, part of the organisation and reorganisation of a social formation. It has no
existence independent of that social formation.
The spatial science approach dominates human geography at present. This paper
contributes to the arguments against that domination, using as a case exemplar the
study of voting patterns in liberal democracies. Work on the geography of voting has
produced evidence of concentrations of support for parties. This is known as the
neighbourhood effect, and explanations for the effect have been provided by a spatial
science model. Those explanations fail to account for all of the observed patterns
and are based on an unconvincing model of political attitude formation. The first
sections of the paper are a review of that model and its geographical component.
Attention then turns to the work of Cox. He introduced the model to the geographical
literature, but in a much broader context than has been followed since. The need to
focus much more on the other aspects of his work is proposed in the later sections of
the paper, in which arguments are developed relating to the role of political parties
in the structuring and restructuring of local cultures.

The study of voting

The dominant paradigm in voting studies can be expressed by the following propositions.
[For a recent review, see several of the chapters in a book by Finifter (1983).]
1 Each society has one or more cleavages within it, reflecting the major political
issues and the attitudes of individuals to them.
2 Political parties exploit these cleavages by developing policy manifestoes which locate
them at a particular point of the 'issue space' into which the cleavages are mapped.
3 Individual voters identify the party closest to them in the 'issue space', and vote
accordingly.
4 The successful parties are those which get closest to the largest number of voters.
42 R J Johnston

Voting is presented as a rational activity, therefore. Voters define what they want;
parties seek to meet these needs; and voters align themselves with the parties closest
to their demands. The approach is exemplified in Downs's classic An Economic
Theory of Democracy (1957), which has stimulated a great deal of sophisticated
mathematical analysis (for example, see Enelow and Hinich, 1984).
The dominant cleavage in most liberal democracies is assumed to be social class.
Voters' attitudes to political issues are influenced by their position within the division
of labour, and they can be arranged along a unidimensional continuum with the
'working class' (usually defined as those in blue-collar occupations) on the left,
favouring an interventionist state, and the 'middle class' (white-collar occupations) on
the right, favouring laissez-faire government (see Robertson, 1976; 1984). Parties
locate themselves on this continuum, seeking to be closer to a majority of the voters
than any other party, and thereby winning any election. More than one cleavage can
be introduced (for a general review, see Taylor and Johnston, 1979, chapter 3), but
the principles remain the same. Voters define their interests and locate in the issue
space, and parties compete within that space to maximise voter support.
Such a paradigm is clearly set in the neoclassical economics view of society.
The voter is the consumer in this case, and the principle of consumer sovereignty
determines how the parties act. [For a clear example of this 'voter as consumer'
paradigm, see Himmelweit et al (1981).]
And the geography!
According to this paradigm, parties exploit the existing cleavages within society.
They identify the issue space and tailor their offerings accordingly. Thus, unless one
or more of the cleavages has a spatial element to it [urban - rural, perhaps, or regional
(Taylor and Johnston, 1979)], the only geography of voting should be a reflection of
the geography of the cleavage. But it usually is not.
To return to the simple example, in a society with a single (class) cleavage the
pattern of voting by class should be the same in all parts of a country. The only
variation in the support for a party should reflect variation in the geography of class.
This is the interpretation often placed on voting behaviour in England, whether with
regard to a simple cleavage (for example, Alford, 1963; Sarlvik and Crewe, 1983) or
a more complex one (for example, Rose, 1982). Some analyses contradict that
interpretation, however, and identify substantial variations that cannot be accounted
for solely by the geography of the basic cleavage (for example Butler and Stokes, 1974,
page 131; Curtice and Steed, 1982; Johnston, 1985a). The general interpretation of
this geographical variation is that people respond to the majority opinion in an area:
the stronger a party's base in an area, the more likely it is that members of the minority
will vote for that party, despite their general attitudes which favour another party.
This interpretation is generally termed a neighbourhood effect, and patterns of
voting consistent with it have been identified in many studies [Taylor and Johnston
(1979, chapter 5) review the literature; for a recent statement, see Johnston (1983b).]
The assumed mechanism, discussed in more detail below, is an exemplar of the
spatial science approach. The result is that the geography of voting for a party is
more polarised than the geography of the cleavage; a party does better than expected
where its base is strong, and worse than expected where it is weak.

Consumer sovereignty and political parties

The paradigm of voting research presented here allocates a relatively passive role to
political parties in terms of their relationships with the voters. Those relationships
are very much one-way: the voters decide the issues and their attitudes to them, and
the parties respond. The thesis underlying the present paper is that the parties' role
Iho noighboufhood <»ffn<:t foviuttnd 4*J

is not passive, and that the one-way relationship model should be replaced by a two-
way, parties-voters set of interrelationships that is local as well as national; if
anything it is the parties that are the more active and the voters the more passive.
The passive role of the parties permeates electoral analysis, especially the
sophisticated quantitative work of many US political scientists. But political parties
are major institutions within liberal democratic societies. They wield a great deal of
power, and many people have invested much of their lives in them. The individuals
associated with a party cannot afford to be passive responders to the market, any
more than multinational corporations can. They must influence the market,
manipulating it so that the voters want what they have to offer.
Parties are organisations and, as Schattschneider (I960) has so clearly argued,
'all organisation is bias*. They have the power to structure the political agenda.
They can organise issues onto the agenda and, by not offering choices or by simply
ignoring them, organise issues off the agenda, perhaps after private pulls taken to
identify what are sensible items to include or exclude (for example Pool et al, I960).
Bias is thus mobilised by using the parties* funds, their access to, if not dominance of,
the media, and their organisational structures.
The approach to the study of elections favoured by Schattschneider is very
different from that in the consumer-sovereignty model. It places much more attention
on the role of the parties, in an approach defined by Riker (1983, page 55) as
heresthetics, the political equivalent of rhetoric, important because it allows insights
into the dynamics of politics. In this paper I suggest that space must be brought
within that dynamic, as one of the resources manipulated by the political parties.

The neighbourhood effect

The manipulation of space by parties, and thence by other political actors, is presented
here as a better rationale for the observed variations in voting discussed above than
is the neighbourhood effect, which treats the spread of political information as
synonymous with the spread of a disease and implies a contagious process. No
detailed review of the latter is provided (see Taylor and Johnston, 1979, chapter 5).
Instead, a brief review illustrates the nature of the concept, to indicate the heresthetic
possibilities suggested in that early work which were then very largely ignored, and to
show how the proposed mechanism for the effect has been both extended and
attacked.
The pioneer works of Cox
The main source of the hypothesised neighbourhood effect in the spatial science
literature was a review article by Cox (1969c) on "The voting decision in a spatial
context". He identified the spatial clustering of voters for particular parties or
candidates and suggested, following Hagerstrand's (1967) classic work, that such
"spatial regularities convey a strong suggestion of spatial contagion1' (page 85).
From then on, he assumed the existence of such contagion and presented his task as
providing a valid account for it. He portrayed individual voting behaviour as
influenced by the information and cues dominant in the voter's area of residence
(page 97) and he suggested that this could be accounted for by relating the voting
decision of individuals at their location in an information-flow network (page 112).
Cox's model identifies every voter as a node in an information-flow network.
Each node is a receiver, processor, and sender of information, and the links between
nodes are biased by geographical distance, by membership of acquaintance circles, and
by "homo-political selectivity" (page 94). Thus information is fed into a network,
and flows along its links. Individual voters are most likely to be linked to their
neighbours, especially those they have social contacts with, and so the spatial spread
44 R J Johnston

of political information is biased by the spatial structuring of those links—just as the

spread of rumours and of measles is.
The cues come initially from the parties—presumably as indications of their positions
within the issue space—and so it is the individuals with links to these outside cues
who are the main sources of new information (see Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955).
But the parties are outside the local environment except in some examples of what
Cox calls a 'forced field bias', according to which some nodes in the information-flow
network have greater power than others, perhaps because of their economic status in
an area; Cox (1969c) quotes as examples of this the nineteenth-century rural English
squirearchy who were able to 'buy' the political support of their tenants and workers
by providing community and other benefits. Such powerful individuals may act as
political independents, dispensing patronage in return for votes, or they may be linked
to parties. He also cites (in Cox, unpublished) differences in militancy between the
Yorkshire and the Northumberland and Durham coalfields, reflecting very different
sets of trade union practices between the two.
Cox's published research at this time exemplified both the forced field and the
acquaintance-circle processes of information flow. With regard to the first, he
analysed voting patterns in Wales over the period 1861-1951, and showed how
different parts of the country were politicised in very different radical traditions.
In 'rural Wales', the Liberal Party was the focus of political action, linked to the
nonconformist chapels which provided the social networks for information flow and
for the popular dissent against the English, Tory, gentry. The Liberal Party provided
the outlet, from about 1870 on, for nonconformist opposition to the Tory landowning
gentry, in what were then unprecedented electoral challenges to the latter's status.
By the end of the century, with the extension of the franchise, the Liberal Party
dominated rural Welsh politics (especially in the main areas of Welsh language and
culture), and laid the foundation for the Party's continued strength in that area to the
present day. In urban Wales, centred on the coalfields, on the other hand,
religious - nationalist goals declined in importance and were replaced by economic
issues at the centre of the political stage. Class conflict at the workplace provided
the environment for the introduction of socialist goals to the miners' unions, by
English 'missionaries', and the Labour Party was able to capitalise on this and
mobilise the miners politically along similar lines to those developed elsewhere in
Great Britain, laying the foundations for a political hegemony that remains to the
present day. Thus, as Cox (1970, page 156) concludes, the development of the
electoral map in Wales involved the active participation of the parties, identifying and
then exploiting the interests of particular groups: one developed a locally focused
strategy, whereas the other introduced a national strategy.
The result of such forced field activity is what Cox (1969a) identified as a voting
region. The voting decision is based on information and cues received and the group
identification of the individuals involved, all of which vary from place to place. In
some situations, this is because the information and cues emanate locally and groups
are defined there, so that voting is based on place-specific factors. In others, it is
local responses to outside sources—either by the voters themselves or, more probably,
by the local political actors—which produce the place-specific milieux in which voting
decisions are made. Those responses may be specific in time as well as place, but it
is more likely that they are long-lasting, representing the enduring local political
climate. Thus distinct political regions can result from the operation of the forced
field processes.
Cox's work on the acquaintance-circle processes of information flow included
analyses of a survey of political partisanship in Columbus, OH. He hypothesised
(Cox, 1969b, page 165) that the people most likely to be influenced by the local political
I ho not{)hhoufhoo(l <ifl«t<:! rovittiluri nh

milieu are members of local informal and formal social networks* rather than those
whose main social contacts are outside their immediate home neighbourhood; those
establishing links in an area, rather than those who have lived there for some time;
and those only somewhat interested in politics, rather than either the politically
apathetic or the committed. All hypotheses found some support, and Cox concluded
that the people most influenced in their voting behaviour were those who were
members of local formal networks.
This major study focused on the individual in context, and linked social network
membership to political opinion: people who discussed politics locally were more
likely to conform to the local norm in terms of partisan identification. In other
studies, the data used referred to population aggregates as defined by census and
electoral authorities, no social networks were investigated, and the mechanism in
operation had to be inferred. Thus, from analyses of voting in London, Cox (1969d)
concluded that "suburbanism exercises effects on both party preference and
participation independent of other social contexts" (page 368), because the level of
Conservative voting in suburban constituencies was greater than predicted. This comes
about, Cox suggested, because the suburbs provide a 'communication-rich' environment:
"high proportions of men and women in the suburbs, as opposed to the central
city, appear to be married, and the occupational sex ratio is low indicating a high
proportion of women not going out to work and therefore having more time
available for neighboring" (page 363).
Thus, theory and data are consistent. Cox clearly favoured the acquaintance-circle
thesis, for he cited, and then largely overlooked, a hypothesis more clearly linked to
the forced field thesis. Some voters may be converted to Conservatism when they
move to the suburbs, in part because of the change of status that this implies for
them, in part because of the nature of their social contacts, and in part because
"The suburbs are located in areas that were once highly rural and dominated by
the right-wing political parties. Because their organization is strong, party workers
can be very effective in winning new adherents to the party among the suburbanites"
(page 361).
This final possibility, which places the party in an active role, is not followed up.
Cox favoured the approach much more in tune with the spatial science paradigm
to which he was then linked; people are influenced by the spatially biased (low of
politically relevant information through local social networks. This produces a
concentration of people of a particular persuasion, because the more partisan an area,
the more probable it is that any random social contact will involve meeting a
supporter of the majority view. Cox (1969c) quotes Segal and Mayer's (1969)
simulation data to support this view. He also criticises them, however, on two
grounds. The first is that not all contacts are local. The second is that contacts
within an area are not random (Cox, 1969c, page 107), and people are more likely to
select friends with similar political views to their own. Random social contacts are
more likely in local voluntary social organisations, however, providing some validity
for the acquaintance-circle model.
Later studies of the acquaintance-circle thesis
Since the publication of Cox's work, a substantial volume of research has reported
findings consistent with the acquaintance-circle model (for a review, see Taylor and
Johnston, 1979, chapter 5). The term 'consistent with' has been used advisedly,
because very little of the work as reported provides any direct evidence as to the
mechanisms involved. [Indeed, in one of the few pieces in which direct evidence was
sought virtually none was found (Fitton, 1973).] Thus, for example, Butler and
Stokes (1974, page 146-149) showed that locally oriented voters, who apparently get
46 R J Johnston

most of their cues from personal conversation, were much less likely to desert the
majority party in their home constituency (assuming that it lost votes nationally) than
were nationally oriented voters, who obtained their cues from the national media.
Between 1964 and 1966 this meant that, although the national swing was against the
Conservative Party, and was so among nationally oriented voters, among locally
oriented voters there was a swing to Conservative, against the national pattern.
They conclude that
"the level of support given to the parties within each class differs drastically
according to the social and political composition of constituencies ... [and] these
differences are rooted in the persuasive influence of social interaction within local
environments" (page 150),
but the second part of this statement is no more than a hypothesis, which has been
tested at the level of the empirical outcome but not with regard to the process
generating that outcome.
Recently, Huckfeldt (1984) has reported empirical findings—for the city of Detroit—
which also provide strong circumstantial evidence favouring the acquaintance-circle
hypothesis. He showed
1 that there is a greater identification with the working class among all groups, but
especially among professional and managerial workers, the greater the working-class
proportion of the local social milieu;
2 that there is greater interaction with working-class neighbours, among all groups,
the greater the working-class proportion of the local social milieu;
3 that the greater the working-class proportion of the local social milieu, the greater
the proportion of middle-class voters who identify with the Democratic Party.
Thus people living among the working class are more likely to identify with it, to
have friends drawn from that class, and to support 'its' political party. Again, this
suggests an acquaintance-circle process akin to that outlined by Cox, but, as Huckfeldt
points out, the data do not allow for discrimination between the alternative
hypotheses that: (1) individuals choose to live in milieux that fit their perceived
status and partisan identity, or (2) individuals are wooed by the local milieux. Nor
does it ask who, if the latter were the case, the wooers are.
After several decades of work, therefore, the hypothesis remains untested: we do
not know whether people are influenced through social contacts, in substantial numbers,
thereby deciding to vote for the party supported by the local majority when their
'objective' position within society suggests that they should support another party.
Researchers continue to suggest how such conversion through contact might occur,
however. For example, Miller's detailed analyses of aggregate British data (at the
constituency or group of constituencies scale) led to the conclusion that
"At a minimum, the class characteristics of the social environment have more effect
on constituency partisanship than class differences themselves, perhaps much more....
The effect of the social environment may be explained by contact models: those
who speak together vote together" (1977, page 65).
No direct evidence supporting the latter statement is provided. Instead, Miller
produces a model to account for conversion via social interaction. Within the British
class structure he identifies two 'core classes'—the pro-Conservative 'controllers' and
the pro-Labour 'anticontrollers'. Only a minority of the electorate belong to one of
these. For the remainder, their position within society is conditioned by their links to
the two core classes; the more links an individual has to one of these cores, the
more likely he or she is to vote with that core. The links are structured through the
workplace, the home, voluntary organisations, and the local environment. Their
density can be represented by the relative size of the core classes in any constituency,
leading to the prediction that the greater the percentage of controllers in the constituency
I'ho noirjhhnufhoud oiUn:\ rnvinitncf A7

(the only core class represented by census data) the greater the Conservative vote, among
all classes. The analyses validated the hypothesis, thereby lending credibility to the social
contact model—'those who speak together vote together*; but Miller does not make clear
how this conformity is produced (let alone produce evidence that they speak together).
And the acquaintance-network hypothesis
Despite the volume of evidence consistent with it, a number of writers refuse to
accept the acquaintance-circle hypothesis. Miller himself realises that the results
remain circumstantial only, recognising that
"The major component comes from the power of the environment to structure
social contacts plus the empirical fact (and it is only empirical, not logical) that
contact across class boundaries makes a consensual impact on partisan choice"
(1978, page 283).
But his minor doubts are nothing compared with the major assault launched by
Dunlcavy (1979).
Dunleavy's interpretation of the acquaintance-circle hypothesis is that residence in
an area dominated by members of another social class steers the individual's contacts
towards that class, promotes the dominant class norms, and leads to mimicking of the
majority's behaviour, including political attitudes and voting behaviour. This treatment,
he claims, is presented in a "remarkably untheoretical manner (page 411), Thus
'Theoretically, inter-personal influence models have never explained which causal
mechanisms affect political alignment, given that voting by secret ballot is hardly in
the public realm ....
Empirically, these models have never been effectively connected with any evidence
of the extensive community social interaction that is essential if they are to have
plausibility. We cannot simply assume that political alignment brushes off on
people by rubbing shoulders in the street, as exponents of 'contagion models'
invariably seem to imply" (page 413).
But the results remain consistent with those models: why?
The postulated mechanism involves the flow of information through social
networks. Cues from external sources are received (not necessarily by all members of
a network) and are processed and discussed locally, in the context of general political
beliefs. Most networks will be biased in their membership towards a particular set of
attitudes and support for a party, so that the processing of externally supplied
information will bias it towards that set—and party. The network environment will
thus focus positive attention on one party. To the extent that people are influenced
in their voting behaviour by local information and interpretations, then there should
be strong support for that party, including that of voters who, if they were not 'tuned-
in' to that network, might otherwise vote for a different party, or not vote at all.
From this mechanism, it can be deduced that, in areas with a majority supporting
one party, some voters who would not be expected to vote for that party will be won
over to it [more than are won over from the majority to the minority (Johnston,
1976)]. This can account for the observed polarisation of voting: parties do better
than expected where their social base is strong, and retain more support there over
time. The implication is that a proportion of the minority in an area are won over
by the majority. But why should they even be in contact with that majority, in
above-average volume? Take the British class cleavage. Members of the two main
classes (working and middle) are spatially segregated into separate, though not
exclusive, residential areas. The degree of segregation is no less in a dominantly
middle-class constituency (in Bournemouth, say) than in a dominantly working-class
one (in Sheffield, for example); each has large exclusively working-class council house
estates. Thus, if acquaintance circles are spatially restricted, as research shows, then
48 R J Johnston

the contents of the wider constituency environment are largely irrelevant; in all
places the local neighbourhood environment is class-specific, and there is no rationale
for greater working-class Conservative voting in Bournemouth than in Sheffield.
To counter this criticism, further variables have been introduced relating to, for
example, the size of the workplace, the nature of employer - employee relations, the
level of unionisation, and the catchment areas of voluntary organisations. All have
some merit, in certain circumstances. The concept of the deferential worker in
agriculture could account for the strong Conservatism in British rural areas, especially
those with small farms—but does the agricultural labourer discuss politics with the
farmer? Similarly, workers in small firms may be more deferential than those in large
ones—so Birmingham was more Conservative than Manchester? And in small towns,
voluntary organisations may have a wider span of class membership than their
counterparts in large cities. But such hypotheses are far from comprehensive and
conclusive, and still propose conversion via communication as a form of contagion.
Undoubtedly it happens, but the model ignores totally the forced field element in
Cox's model. Thus in the next section, I look at the activities of parties in vote
winning.

The role of the party

Political parties exist to win votes, seats, and power, and their organisations are
structured to this end. Thus they are not relatively passive participants, locating
themselves in the voter-defined issue space. Political parties are extremely active
agenda-setters, seeking to determine the basic issues in debates and to structure
attitudes accordingly, so as to win votes. They thus become part of the local milieu,
to promote their vote-winning strategies.
Local political culture
In their agenda-setting activity, political parties may address themselves for much of
the time to the national electorate. In an era dominated by mass media this is to be
expected, so that parties try to develop cleavages—temporary ones around particular
issues and, more importantly, permanent ones around general programmes—based on
clear divisions of society. Some parties realise the necessity of extending their appeal
beyond the basic cleavage, because it does not offer majority support: the British
Conservative Party, for example, seeks working-class votes for a political programme
advanced as in 'the national interest'. The British Alliance Parties argue for a
noncleavage structure. [For a very clear example of a cleavage without any base in
the social divisions of society, see Eyre's (1984) discussion of Progressive National
Party and Jamaican Labour Party 'territories' within the ghettos of Kingston, Jamaica.]
But these general processes must be backed up locally—especially in a constituency-
based electoral system where power is achieved by winning seats (Miller, 1984).
Thus parties have local as well as national organisations (in the USA they have
national as well as local). To some extent, the local organisations mirror the national.
But they may do more, establishing local agendas that differ somewhat from the
national (compare the traditional conservative Southern Democrats in the USA with
their more liberal Northern allies) and campaigning in different ways for local votes.
The view of political activity outlined in the previous paragraph suggests a
combination of national and local cleavage development, which can take place in
various combinations. The local may bolster the national, it may be separate from it
(Cox's example of Liberal activity in rural Wales), or it may modify the national in
various ways. Thus in some places, at certain times, political attitudes and voting
may be based on national cleavages only; at others, those cleavages vary slightly from
place to place; and in a third, local variations dominate. One of the clearest examples
I ho noifjhhntifhood nffnct rovisitod 49

of this is Archer and Taylor's (1981) detailed analysis of presidential voting in the
USA. They show that the parties there have at certain periods developed from
regional, or sectional, bases, and that at such times political power has been based on
welding together sectional coalitions. At other times, there has been no sectional
base and other cleavages have developed. Crucial in all of this had been the role of
the party as manipulator of the agenda, creating local political environments within
which voters are socialised.
The socialisation of voters is crucial to this agenda-setting activity, Parties depend
very much on local social networks for the transmission of information and the
winning of support. The acquaintance circle is crucial, but the party is central to it,
not outside sending cues, as with local party machines in late nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century US cities. There political power was far from ideological, but was
based on 'bought votes', obtained through a strong local organisation. Thus, if a
party can establish itself in an area, it will enter the local culture via the socialisation
process and it can then reproduce its power as the local society reproduces; it has
proved itself relevant to the local populace and is able to exploit its position in the
collective memory to retain its favoured status (Wright, 1977).
A clear example of this local agenda-setting placing a party into the local culture is
given by Key and Munger's (1959) study of a Democrat stronghold in southern
Indiana. The area was settled after 1868 by in-migrants from the South, who were
supporters of the then white-supremacist policies of the southern Democratic Party;
further north was an area settled by strongly pro-Republican German immigrants.
The political divide established after the Civil War was still there eighty years later,
long after the issues on which it was based had become much less salient. The
Democratic Party established hegemony in the southern part of the area over a highly
salient issue, thereby creating the political culture, and long after the reason for that
hegemony disappeared the party retained its local dominance through socialisation
processes. Other issues might disturb that hegemony temporarily, or even lead to the
establishment of a new one, but the initial party has a strong base for further
prosperity.
Although parties compete to create national governments, therefore, they are also
involved in local agenda-setting and political culture-creation. The result is very
considerable stability in the geography of voting behaviour over time, reflecting party
success in socialising the electorate in particular areas (see Johnston, 1983a). Indeed,
Taylor (1983; 1984) has shown how a party is able to retain the support of voters in
a particular area even when the policies it is promoting nationally are not in the
interests of those voters. Parties build and maintain a geography of voting which may
differ from their geography of power—that is, the geography of the beneficiaries of
their policies. Only when either that dissonance is recognised or the beneficiaries are
few might the party be forced to create a new geography of voting (Osei-Kwame and
Taylor, 1984).
Within a country or region, individual political parties may develop localised pockets
of strength—in many cases as the prelude to a spatial broadening of their electoral
base, although such broadening may never occur. Husbands (1983) has pointed to
this in his analysis of voting for the National Front (a right-wing racist party) in British
towns. Some places are particularly susceptible to NF candidacy and support, not only
because of their objective socioeconomic conditions (working-class areas containing
racial minorities) but also to what he terms "an intrinsic reactivity to certain types
of political stimulus" (page 34). The response comes because the stimulus—NF
candidacy at an election—triggers the recollection of similar earlier incidents.
50 R J Johnston

In parts of the East End of London, for example,

"their political and social history contains numerous incidents and episodes that are
race-related or of a racially exclusionist character. Such histories have lasted
sufficiently long for one to be able to presume that the traditions so embodied
exist independently of particular individuals within the places concerned ... a
political tradition that periodically becomes manifest and explicit because of its
intrinsic susceptibility to certain issues" (page 34).
There is nothing deterministic about the response, however. Political cultures are
created, are recreated through socialisation, and form an environmental context which
may be drawn upon under certain conditions.
Whereas the voting map of a country is largely a function of national political
sentiments, therefore, it may contain within it a mosaic of separate local political
cultures. Some political parties may actively promote such local cultures, as a way of
developing their electoral base and obtaining initial parliamentary representation. The
Liberal Party has recently pursued such a strategy in England, for example, and the
constituencies where it performed much better than expected at the 1983 general
election virtually all fell into one of two types: (1) those where it had been successful
at a by-election, as an antigovernment and antiopposition protest vote, and had
thereby developed a support and campaigning base, and (2) those covering areas
where it had been very active in local government, establishing an energetic party
organisation and choosing a parliamentary candidate who was well-known to the
electorate because of local government work (Steed and Curtice, 1983).
Similar strategies have been used by the two main nationalist parties in Great Britain
in recent years. Most studies of the Scottish National Party (SNP), according to
Agnew (1984), ignore the context of political expression and treat nationalist support
either as an individual trait or as a structural necessity. But there are clear regional
differences in SNP support at the present time, which can only be accounted for in
terms of a
"political consciousness [that] develops through the social relations that people
enter in their daily lives" (page 201).
The development of such consciousness is related to variations in class relationships
that are place-specific and provide the context for different reactions to the SNP's
programmes. The same is true in Wales where, according to Cooke (1984), support
for Plaid Cymru reflects political mobilisation of classes in particular places. Cooke
argues that
"classes do not arise consciously out of production relations but rather are
mobilized into politically conscious activity by an agency which can link grievances
and demands occurring in the workplace, the community and any other basis of
popular collective identification. The key agency of mobilization is the political
party. The success of political parties is contingent upon their capacity to connect
with members of civil society who may affiliate along class and/or religious,
linguistic, ethnic, gender or regional lines in expressing their collective identity"
(page, 562)
Thus political parties are implicated in the continuous restructuring of class
relationships. Where they are able to link them to particular local cleavages, such as
nationalism, they produce an enclave of separate partisan affiliations.
It is not only nationalist political parties that may produce separate local cultures
of this type. In many industries the nature of the class relationship varies from place
to place as a result of local responses to economic imperatives (see McDowell and
Massey, 1984). This has been true, for example, in the British coal industry. The
local branches of the National Union of Mineworkers have been much more militant
in some fields as a consequence, and a local nonmilitant culture established in the
I ho noiyhbourhoocf of fact rovmiUKl 81

Nottinghamshire field in the 1920s and 1930s (Krieger, 1983; Waller, 1983) was
reflected in the lack of support there for the 1984-1985 national strike and
Conservative victory in the Sherwood constituency at the 1983 general election
(Crewe and Fox, 1984). More generally, the linking of political party activity with
the class relationships in an area provides a basis for understanding particular voting
patterns. Thus in England, for example, it has frequently been noted (for example.
Miller, 1977) that the Labour Party does better in the mining areas and worse in the
agricultural areas, ceteris paribus. Each has a particular class and community
structure. The first has been characterised by closed cohesive communities in which
many of the white-collar positions (colliery management, school-teaching etc) are
occupied either by miners or by ex-miners who are socialised into a pro-Labour
environment which is buttressed by the strength of the trades unions. In the
agricultural areas, on the other hand, social distance between employers and
employees is much greater, the paternalistic employment system (tied housing, etc)
produces a deferential working class, and unions arc weak—in part because of the
small size of the operating units and the dispersed settlement. (It is of interest that
the main area of rural strength for the Labour Party was in the districts with the
largest farms—East Anglia; this strength has now decayed, with the decline in the
agricultural work force there.)

Party and strategy

In his pioneer work on electoral geography, Cox identified two processes whereby a
political party might obtain greater electoral support in a region than would be the
case were the processes absent. Of these—the 'acquaintance-circle1 and the 'forced
field' processes—the first has been widely accepted by electoral geographers and
others, despite the absence of clear evidence of the process in operation, because it
corresponds with the spatial science paradigm. The review presented here has shown
that, by ignoring his work on the 'forced field' process, this is a misrepresentation of
Cox's work. Further, and more importantly, it is a misrepresentation of the reality of
local political activity, in which political parties play a major 'forced field' role. Thus
future research on voting patterns should play closer attention to the activities of
parties and their agents.
Two ideal-typical political parties can be identified (Johnston et al, 1985). The
first, the individual type party, appeals to voters either as individuals who approve of
its proposed policies or as members of groups who will benefit most from those
policies. Its main channels of communication are the mass media, and it seeks to
develop electoral cleavages independent of place. The second, the community type
party, operates through a process of socialisation in place using the local social
structure as the foundation of its electoral appeal, developing local group-identification
with the party.
These two ideal types are at the poles of a continuum. At one extreme—the
individual type—voter commitment to a group, represented by the party, and its
collective interests is sought, whereas at the other the decisive criterion of voting
behaviour is commitment to the locality (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967, page 13). Few
actual parties are close to either pole; one of the closest at the present time is the
British Social Democratic Party, with its emphasis on the individual and its lack of
attention to locality (Miller, 1984). Most combine the national appeal to groups, such
as classes, with community activity conducted to secure strong local foundations and
to produce a continuity of electoral support, by place.
A key purpose of electoral geography is to elucidate how parties act locally to win
and retain support. The 'acquaintance-circle' process suggests that the parties act as
if they were of the individual type identified above. They create a national agenda,
52 R J Johnston

present it to the electorate via the mass media, and rely on the processes of social
interaction to promote the party cause. Thus, in Cox's (1969a, page 73) terms, the
party provides the information and cues at the national level but relies on group
identification, without any party activity, at the local level to interpret the information
and cues without any local activity. The 'forced field' process, on the other hand,
places the political party in the local community, actively promoting itself and
participating in the continual restructuring of economic and social relations so as to
win votes and, most importantly in many electoral systems, seats. It may well employ
strategies based on the 'acquaintance-circle' process, identifying key individuals
[opinion leaders (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955, page 32)] who are likely to influence
others. But it will not do this only during an election campaign. It will be continually
active, developing support through local government and local media, branches of
various organisations (such as trades unions), and so on. It will seek to become part
of the local culture, participating in the socialisation of individuals (locals reaching
political maturity and incomers) and creating a base that can be mobilised and drawn
upon at election times; it carries political activity into most areas of life.
A consequence of this combined strategy, with a national programme based on
an appeal to individuals and groups and a series of local programmes promoting that
appeal, is likely to be a pattern of voting that emphasises local strength. The greater
the local representation of the relevant interest groups, the greater the implication
of the party in the local culture and its role in political socialisation. The outcome is
a geography of voting which is consistent with that associated with the contagious
processes of the hypothesised neighbourhood effect. But the route to that outcome is
much less mechanistic than suggested by the hypothesis, and much more the result of
political parties being involved in the making and remaking, through continuous
socialisation processes, of local political cultures.
To a considerable extent, the discussion so far in this section offers an alternative
hypothesis to that of the neighbourhood effect. It could be interpreted as an
alternative piece of spatial science, if it were suggesting that the strength of the local
political culture is a (nonlinear) function of the local strength of various interest
groups. But it is not, for the development of political cultures is not predictable in
that way, dependent as it is on individual agency (Massey and Allen, 1984).
The strength of the local political culture thesis developed here is that its lack of a
mechanistic process base enables it to account for electoral geographies that cannot
be handled by the neighbourhood-effect hypothesis. Two types of situation are
involved. In the first, a party is much stronger than it is in comparable places (that
is, with the same socioeconomic structure). This can only be accounted for in the
neighbourhood-effect thesis by above-average rates of contagion, for reasons that are
unknown. In the political culture thesis, it can be accounted for by the nature of the
local milieux, as with the Democrat hegemony in the American South (Key, 1949)
and the strength of the British Labour Party in the South Yorkshire coalfield
(Johnston, 1985b). In the second type, the expected pattern of party strength is
absent, and another party is dominant—as in the examples quoted earlier of nationalist
parties in Scotland and Wales and the pockets of Liberal Party strength in England.
Indeed, as Gudgin and Taylor (1974) have shown, many political parties use a
community-type strategy as the first stage in a wider political programme. Establishment
of a local base provides an entree to a legislative body, from which it is easier to
launch a national appeal. Becoming part of some local political culture is a widely
used strategy in the search for political power (see also Crick, 1985).
f ho noicjhboufhood offoct rovimtoc! 53

Summary
Individuals* attitudes are culturally conditioned, but not determined; they develop
in context, A crucial component of thai context is the local milieu within which
individuals are socialised so that, as Harris (1984), Urry (1981), and others have
argued, understanding political attitudes and their reflection in voting behaviour
requires an appreciation of the links between people and those they live among.
Those links are part of the local culture, and it is the passage of politically relevant
information, cues, and interpretations along them that leads to the creation of
geographies of voting.
Recognition of those links came, for geographers, with the work of Cox in the late
1960s and early 1970s. But from the rich perspective that he provided, geographers
focused nearly all of their attention on one process, the acquaintance circle. This
fitted well with the dominant spatial science paradigm, which portrayed space as an
independent variable, existing outside society and acting upon it. As a consequence,
the creation of voting patterns was represented as a mechanistic procedure and the
complexity of related social and economic relationships was ignored. The other
process identified by Cox, the forced field, attends to those relationships, however, l>y
identifying the key actors in the local milieu and focusing on their manipulation of
the local culture for their own political goals. In this perspective, space is translated
into place by the activities of political parties, and examples have been cited of this
illustrating how voting regions are created by local political action which is fully
implicated in the structuring and restructuring of regional social formations.
The approach to electoral geography promoted here seeks to divorce it from
spatial science and to ally it with a holistic social science. There is a continuing
reciprocal interaction between voters and political parties at local (including regional)
as well as national scale. It is only through the study of this continuing local
interaction that we will obtain a full understanding of the geography of 'who votes
what, where\
Acknowledgements. I am extremely grateful to Michael Dear, Peter Taylor, and two anonymous
referees for their considerable assistance in the refinement of the arguments presented here.

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