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Despite the vast research on the social bias in decision-making, relatively little is known about biases in voting behaviour. The main aim of this research was to explore alternative indirect methods to observe biases in decision-making and voting behaviour. A proximity bias was first observed in the rather unusual setting of the Weakest Link TV game show, when contestants avoided casting negative votes against their closest neighbours. This proximity bias was most profound for the contestant closest to the voter. Two field experiments were designed to test whether this Neighbour Effect occurred in different social contexts, among the first-year undergraduate students. The first study asked first-year undergraduate students in a lecture (n=449) to vote for another person seated in the same row. The same Neighbour Effect occurred when the vote carried a nasty (negative) outcome for the recipient however, when the vote valence changed to a nice (positive) outcome the Neighbour Effect disappeared. In negative voting, the result of the field experiment confirmed the original observation in the Weakest Link. However, a reverse polarity voting pattern was also found in the positive voting. This suggests participants significantly favoured their closest neighbour(s). The second field experiment used Prisoner’s Dilemma with undergraduates in a lecture theatre (n= 229) to test the Neighbour Effect. The undergraduates played the game with another player seated in the same row and in the same block in a lecture theatre. The results showed a neighbour effect because the players were significantly more likely to cooperate with a neighbour that a non-neighbour. To conclude the findings from this study suggested that the Neighbour Effect is a robust bias in strategic decision-making and voting.

This thesis examines the organisational transformation of the British Labour Party since 1983. The main intellectual contributions are: (1) the development of a rational choice model of party organisation; (2) an explanation Labour's organisational reforms, a subject that has attracted little academic attention. An exchange model of party organisation is developed, focusing on leader- follower relations inside parties. It builds on previous exchange models and extends the approach to the issue of party change, on which some general propositions are offered. The model is used to examine changes in leader-follower relations in the Labour Party. It is shown that Labour's historic form of intraparty exchange consisted of that between the parliamentary elite and the leaders of the major trade unions affiliated to the party, institutionalised in the 'block vote'. Labour's problems with the unions in the 1970s and its subsequent electoral wilderness years persuaded party leaders to reduce union influence to broaden the party's electoral appeal. The strategy was to enfranchise individual members at the expense of activist cliques and unions. Three areas of decision-making are examined - policymaking, parliamentary candidate selection, and leadership contests - and two trends are evident: (1) the erosion of Labour's federal structure, based on union affiliation and its replacement by a unitary (individual membership) structure; (2) the centralisation of power with party elites. A new form of exchange, between party leaders and individual members, has increasingly replaced that between party and union leaders. This has given Labour's organisation a greater degree of electoral legitimacy by reducing its reliance on the unions (who might extract policy concessions from Labour governments). However, centralisation has gone so far that it is questionable whether party activists and unions have sufficient incentives to remain inside the party, supplying it with labour and finance. To this extent, the exchange model alerts us to the possibility that Labour may no longer possess 'equilibrium institutions'.

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This thesis takes a quantitative approach to the study of the development of party systems in English local government following its reorganisation in the early 1970s. Aggregate data, including local election results and census information, are used to identify the determinants of partisan support and the subsequent effects upon variations in local party systems. The study develops the first major classification of local party systems between 1973 and 1998, focussing principally upon factors accounting for variations in the evolution of such systems. This study provides the first clear evidence that the operation of local electoral systems contributes towards the production and maintenance of two-party dominance. However, in contrast to the national parliamentary situation, the two parties are not restricted to Conservative and Labour. The thesis highlights how third parties, particularly the Liberals, became a significant part of the local party system in a relatively large number of cases. Variations in electoral arrangements between local authorities, including differences in district magnitude and the nature of the electoral cycle, permit examination of their effects upon local party systems within a common national political culture. The effects of these variations are shown to either benefit or discriminate against the Liberals. Using aggregate data and methods of linear regression, the thesis analyses patterns of partisan voting in local government. It shows that socioeconomic factors such as class, housing and employment, theoretically identified as important for parliamentary elections, are related also to local voting for the three main parties, although the relationships are weaker for the Liberals than for the traditional two main parties. Confirmation of these findings is provided by the application of methods designed to solve the problems of ecological inference.

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