Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston, "Still Talking, but Is Anyone Listening? The Changing Face of Constituency Campaigning in Britain, 1997-2005," Party Politics, 15 (July, 2009), 411-434.

First paragraph:
Message and targeting are central to the postmodern election campaign (Norris, 2000). Party managers try to control how their party, its leaders, candidates and policies are presented in the media. Election messages are carefully targeted at particular strategically important groups of voters. In Britain in the 1980s and early 1990s, for instance, the Conservatives appealed to 'Essex man', aspirational and newly affluent skilled workers in the south-east of England. Similarly, before the 1997 election, one of New Labour's campaign targets was 'Worcester woman', an archetypal middleclass, middle England voter disillusioned with the Conservatives but needing reassurance that Labour was no longer the tax and spend party of old.

Figures and Tables:

Table 1. Changing electoral contexts in Great Britain, 1997-2005

Table 2. Stable geographies of constituency campaigning in England and Wales, 1997-2005: principal components analysis

Table 3. Accounting for the geography of campaign spending, 1997, 2001 and 2005: party strength

Table 4. Marginality and the geography of campaign spending, 1997-2005

Table 5. Constituency campaign effectiveness and vote share logits, 1997-2005 - the impact of time: SUR regressions

Table 6. Range of predicted vote shares for different campaign spending scenarios

Table 7. Constituency campaign effectiveness and electorate share logits, 1997-2005 - the impact of time: SUR regressions

Table 8. Range of predicted electorate shares for different campaign spending

First Paragraph of Conclusion:
The above analyses therefore reveal significant long-term stability in the geography of local campaigning by British parties. Labour and the Liberal Democrats continue to concentrate most on marginal seats, while the Conservatives still split their efforts more evenly between their safe seats and their marginals. Incumbent governments, meanwhile, concentrate campaign efforts more on marginals they currently hold and need to defend (as the Conservatives did in 1997 and Labour in 2001 and 2005), while opposition parties tend to focus more on marginals where they are the main challengers (as Labour did in 1997, and the Conservatives have done since).