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Part of the book series: Contemporary Political Studies ((CONTPOLSTUD))

Abstract

The June 1983 election seemed to herald the possible demise of two-party adversarialism in British politics. For the first time since 1945, a national political force other than Labour or the Conservatives returned more than one quarter of the vote cast and threatened to break into the citadel of major party supremacy. Since the 1970s the Nationalists had managed to ensure that two-party domination was broken in Scotland, but the emergence of the Social Democratic-Liberal Alliance in England now held out the prospect that national politics might move away from its traditionally confrontational style towards the more complex pattern of coalitional competition found in many parts of continental Europe. However, in June 1987 the essentially trilateral election campaign (in England and Wales) was as adversarial as any of its predecessors; in this respect the mould remained unbroken.

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© 1992 The Macmillan Press Ltd

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Webb, P. (1992). Britain: The 1987 Campaign. In: Bowler, S., Farrell, D.M. (eds) Electoral Strategies and Political Marketing. Contemporary Political Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22411-1_3

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