Local Electioneering

Abstract

In an election with a couple of thousand candidates, a quarter of a million party workers and forty million electors, spread over 635 constituencies, any summary of the diverse activities conducted in pursuit of votes must be unsatisfactory. Press reports and candidates’ letters, together with interviews at many levels, do however offer some picture of the main campaigning operations and their variants. But how effective they were in getting people to the poll, let alone in persuading them to change their minds, is a question that cannot be precisely answered.