Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston, "Local Economic Contexts and Changing Party Allegiances at the 1992 British General Election," Party Politics , 3 (January 1997), 79-96.

First Paragraph:
In recent years, the role of regional context in British electoral behaviour has been a subject of scholarly debate, as the electoral divide between the Labour-voting north and major cities and the Conservative-voting south, suburbs and rural areas waxed during the 1980s and waned (but did not disappear) in the 1990s. Academic debate has concentrated on accounting for the regional geography of British voting. For some, the electoral geography is the result of contextual effects, produced because voters are influenced by the circumstances, norms and traditions of the local societies within which they live. For others, local context is an irrelevance, the geography of the vote is simply the product of the geography of individual voters, and the important factors underlying voting decisions are all due to personal circumstances, experiences and inclinations which are unrelated to local conditions and contexts.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1: Party loyalists: logit regression models. Vote switches at the 1992 election and regional evaluations, controlling for individual background.
Table 2: Party defectors: logit regression models. Vote switches at the 1992 election and regional evaluations, controlling for individual background.
Table 3: Changing support to parties: logit regression models. Vote switches at the 1992 election and regional evaluations, controlling for individual background.

Last Paragraph:
The electoral implications are also clear. During the 1980s, the Conservative government managed the apparently striking feat of winning elections when record numbers were out of work. They managed to do it again in 1992. However, during the 1980s, voters who lived in declining regions also generally lived in regions that were becoming less important as support bases for the government. To an extent, the Conservatives could afford to see their vote there decline, so long as their southern heartland was becoming more affluent. However, at the 1992 election, the new recession was hitting home in the previously affluent south. By the time of the next election, this may well have filtered through to change southern voters' overall assessment of how their region has performed relative to the national average. From being an asset for the Conservatives, the regional economy of southern England could become a liability.