Abstract
The Conservative election victory of 2015 overturned many expectations. It had been widely expected that the fragmentation of the party system would produce yet another hung parliament, out of which would emerge another coalition or post-election deal. The era of one-party majority government seemed to be over. David Cameron’s victory also belied predictions — made, for example, by Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England — that the measures needed to deal with the economy would be so unpopular that they would keep the winner of the 2010 election out of office for a generation.1
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Notes
Andrew Gamble, ‘The Economy’ in Andrew Geddes and Jon Tonge (eds), Britain Votes 2015. Oxford University Press, 2015.
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Curtice, Fisher and Ford, ‘Appendix 2’, pp. 410–17. See also M. Thrasher, G. Borisyuk, C. Rallings and R. Johnston, ‘Electoral Bias at the 2010 General Election: Evaluating its Extent in a Three-Party System’, Electoral Studies, 21(2) (2011): 279–94.
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See C. Soper and J. Rydon, ‘Under-Representation and Electoral Prediction’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 4(1) (1958): 94–106.
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Cowley, P., Kavanagh, D. (2016). Out of the Blue: The Campaign in Retrospect. In: The British General Election of 2015. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366115_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137366115_14
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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