'Yes, the census': The 2011 UK referendum campaign on the alternative vote

For the Liberal Democrats, the debacle that was the AV Referendum campaign engendered demands from within the party for an official investigation into what was termed a 'living nightmare'. However, utilising LeDuc's conceptual map of the elements involved in a referendum campaign, in particular the role of the official groups, political parties, their leaders and the media, this article examines the AV Referendum campaign of 2011 and demonstrates that it was always likely that such a campaign would mirror the partisan bias found at that time. Thus, with a concomitant conservative bias towards the status quo for such plebiscitary questions, it shows that it should also have been obvious, not least to the Liberal Democrat party, that the goal of electoral reform, as refracted through such a referendum campaign, was doomed from the outset.