1 EPOP Exeter, August 2011 Not to be cited without the authors’ permission The Long and the Short of it: Local Campaigning at the British 2010 General Election Ron Johnston, Charles Pattie, Justin Fisher, David Cutts and Edward Fieldhouse Studies of recent British general elections have shown that the amount spent by candidates on their local campaigns is closely linked to the outcome in their constituencies; the more that they spend the better their performance. Such research has been hampered, however, by the short period to which the relevant legislation applied – basically for the month immediately preceding polling day only – although campaigning begins long before then. A change in the law means that the 2010 election is the first for which candidate spending data are available not only for that ‘short campaign’ but also for the preceding ‘long campaign’ period comprising the year’s first three months, when candidates could spend about two-and-one-half times as much as the legal limit for the ‘short campaign’. This paper presents a first analysis of those data, addressing variations in the amount spent across candidates and its impact. In particular it evaluates whether spending on the two campaign periods had separate and independent impacts, finding for the first time that intensive local campaigning – as measured by the amount spent – during the long campaign provides a vote-winning foundation on which short campaign spending then builds. Much has been learned in recent years about the changing nature, spatially-varying intensity, and impact of constituency campaigns at UK general elections. From a general belief in the 1950s-1960s that these were largely ineffective uses of local party members’ time and other resources, increasingly sophisticated analyses have shown that the more intensive is a party’s local campaign, the better its performance in the constituency. As a consequence, central party organizations became increasingly involved in organizing local campaigns – providing additional resources, for example; coordinating the publication of leaflets and other materials; appointing regional coordinators to oversee campaign activity in groups of constituencies; directing campaign workers to constituencies where their efforts were most needed; organizing visits by senior party members; canvassing electors by telephone to provide databases for local use; and so forth (Denver et al., 2003; Fisher and Denver, 2008). Much of this research has used a single measure of local campaign intensity – the amount spent by candidates, using the returns of income and expenditure required under the Representation of the People Act and subject to local maxima. Although available for virtually all candidates, these returns suffer a number of disadvantages. First, they assume