Patterns of voting choice in multimember districts: the case of English local elections

Analysis of plurality voting where district magnitude is greater than one offers students of electoral behaviour unique opportunities. In this paper we use aggregate voting data from English local elections to explore a number of issues concerning the relationship between parties, candidates and voters. Our first task is to measure the level of unused votes and consider the impact of party competition and electoral marginality. Multimember districts also provide the potential for intra-party comparisons of candidates. Accordingly, we measure the range of votes between candidates from the same party and consider the impact of incumbency, gender and ballot position on differential rates of electoral support. Although the empirical focus of the paper is on English local government, its findings may well prove relevant to an understanding of the relationship between voters and parties in other electoral systems where a choice about the number of votes to use and the way in which to cast them is available. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.