British politics has provided political science with many insights in recent years. The political landscape was redrawn when Tony Blair entered power in 1997. The once “natural party of government,” the Conservative Party, was unelectable for a decade. The country entered an unpopular war and endured an economic recession. Now, Britain witnesses its first formal coalition since the two world wars.

The British Election Study (BES) book series, which follows each general election and is written by each study's Principal Investigators, offers important theoretical and empirical insights for the discipline as a whole. Performance Politics and the British Voter—the volume following the 2005 general election—is no exception. It sets the bar extremely high for later iterations. This book provides a tour de force in each chapter, offering the discipline new theory, vast amounts of new empirical evidence, new ideas and research questions—tested in Britain but of relevance far beyond—and all with honest attention to rival models and null hypotheses, and executed with skillful deployment of a wide range of sophisticated methodological tools.

The book's central thesis is that the dynamics of party choice in the years leading up to the election, during the days of the campaign, and in the decision to turn out to vote can best be explained by voters' trust in parties and leaders, their evaluations of performance, and their ratings of the best party on the most important issues of the day: all indicators of the concept of “valence,” a concept this book develops in important ways. In these respects, Performance Politics builds upon the 2004 volume, Political Choice in Britain, but the new volume deepens the analysis over the shorter time frame of the intervening years between the 2001 and 2005 election, and of the campaign period, and it extends the analysis to a wider range of dependent variables, extending the concept of valence to effects beyond the vote.

The concept of valence is thoughtfully developed in the book. Harold Clarke and his colleagues employ leader evaluations, issue ratings, and party identification (in the “running tally” tradition) as ways in which voters cope with complexity and proxies for evaluating the effects of valence on British vote choices, turnout, and system-level support. The valence measures raise interesting direct and indirect interrelationships, which are important in themselves.

For example, the authors highlight the indirect consequences of an unpopular war. As public opinion coalesced around opposition to the Iraq War, this “valence issue” eroded public trust in the prime minister, Tony Blair, with damaging electoral consequences. Policy performance and a loss of trust operate through leader evaluations to the vote, and the analyses show how leader effects vary with political sophistication. The effect of gender on attitudes to the war also operates indirectly in the analysis: Women arrived at their lack of support for the war via a different assessment of the moral case and of the costs and benefits of the war. A simple direct effect of valence issues acting via salience on the vote also receives mixed support. The changing British issue agenda—from public service issues to internal security—operated via a mix of emotional, experiential, and cognitive judgments, effects revealed by the new battery of questions designed by the authors. The concept of valence and a new range of indicators provide many questions for future research, and the authors provide a strong basis for pursuing those questions.

The book also takes us through a classic and wide-reaching analysis of the effectiveness of the 2005 campaign, with important implications for the British parties. It introduces ideas about the replacement of turnout with “boycotting,” setting British findings in comparative context, and revealing a strong parallel relationship among forms of participation within the wealthier northern European countries. It significantly extends the scope of analysis of valence effects, innovatively applying valence explanations in models of turnout and other forms of participation, finding strong empirical support for these theoretical and empirical extensions. In a fascinating chapter (8), the authors further reveal that valence judgments of leaders, the economy, and policy issues can account for evaluations of the political system itself. In all these respects, the analyses explore rival explanations, based on social orientations, ideology, and demographics, finding valence models to provide important explanations, although combined composite models offer superior model fit.

It is difficult to overstate the comprehensive nature of the analyses and breadth of theoretical motivation in all of the chapters. The authors make a series of choices about what can—and cannot—be dealt with in the book, and those are entirely appropriate. Just a couple of questions remained unanswered as I read the final pages.

Clarke and his colleagues build their theoretical motivation from the concept of valence issues. Their valence models also contain leader evaluations, party identification, and sometimes, the economy. However, it does not take a staunch defender of the party identification-as-social-identity interpretation to concede that party identification measures contain at least some spatial and affective component, or an element of social class or geographical affiliation. Leader ratings and economic effects have been taken seriously for many years. Parsing out the contribution of valence issues alone with those of leaders, economic judgments, and party identification, and juxtaposing those effects with spatial predictors, could perhaps help us assess the comparative advantage of a valence issues explanation of British politics, relative to the spatial tradition. Performance is clearly important, but to what degree does a move toward valence issues alone offer greater explanatory force?

The 2005 election result represented a high point for the third party in British politics—the Liberal Democrats—and the devolved parliament of Scotland and the Assembly of Wales had by then bedded down their policy delivery. The cognitive ease (or lack thereof) with which voters use valence heuristics to evaluate this third party and these relatively new forms of government would give rise to some interesting and politically relevant theoretical tests. The authors find fewer effects of valence judgments on the Liberal Democrat versus Labour vote, suggesting that Liberal Democrat support in 2005 (and in 2010) may have originated via different motivating assumptions. The 2010 election bore out the relevance of asking these additional questions, and the devolved nature and strongly regional differences in British electoral politics require greater understanding in the future.

The authors have performed an admirable service to the broader academic community by providing a range of new measures: monthly data collated throughout the 2000–5 period; a daily campaign panel, with pre- and postelection samples; a pre- and postelection face-to-face survey; and subsequent follow-up panels of broad-ranging data. They address their analyses of the British general election in a theoretically motivated way, exposing new findings for the broader scholarship on political behavior, in additional to elucidating key aspects of the British political scene. The analyses employ a wide range of statistical methods, but the combination of multivariate analysis and descriptive data, as well as political context, makes this a must-read for students and scholars alike. The authors showcase the vast array of questions that can be analyzed with the British Election Study data. Any reader of Performance Politics will surely want to use these data and will also eagerly await the next volume by these authors on the 2010 British general election.