Friends and neighbours voting revisited: The geography of support for candidates to lead the UK's Labour party

Most studies of the ‘friends and neighbours’ effect in voting behaviour have accounted for their observed patterns using Key's classic identification of this effect as reflecting localism and voting for the ‘home town boy’. This paper introduces other potential local influences, and hypothesizes that there should be separate local friends', neighbours', and political friends' effects. This expanded model is successfully tested using data from elections for the leadership of the UK's Labour Party in 1994 and 2010. All three effects operated, to a greater or lesser extent, in the pattern of voting for most of the candidates.