Junior coalition parties in the British context: explaining the Liberal Democrat collapse at the 2015 general election

Johnson, Craig ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4627-1642 and Middleton, Alia 2016. Junior coalition parties in the British context: explaining the Liberal Democrat collapse at the 2015 general election. Electoral Studies 43 , pp. 63-71. 10.1016/j.electstud.2016.05.007

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Abstract

The Liberal Democrats’ performance in the 2015 general election provides an opportunity to examine the only case in the post-war period of a national junior coalition partner in British politics. Comparative research highlights competence, trust and leadership as three key challenges facing junior coalition parties. This article uses British Election Study data to show that the Liberal Democrats failed to convince the electorate on all three counts. The article also uses constituency-level data to examine the continued benefits of incumbency to the party and the impact of constituency campaigning. It finds that while the incumbency advantage remained for the Liberal Democrats, it was ultimately unable to mitigate the much larger national collapse.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Additional Information:	This is an open access article under the terms of the CC-BY license.
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0261-3794
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	13 February 2018
Date of Acceptance:	31 May 2016
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 14:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/109033

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