Professor David Denver

Abstract

Professor David Denver, who died in August 2024, made an outstanding contribution to the study of elections, public opinion and parties. The legacy of his scholarly work is considerable, most obviously in his pioneering work on election campaigning. Experiments are now de rigueur in the discipline, but in 1970, Denver (along with John Bochel) conducted the first field experiment in British political science, demonstrating the electoral impact of campaigns on the ground. Published in the British Journal of Political Science in 1971, this work was the first in a long line of analysis which turned on its head what was at that point the conventional approach to the analysis of British elections. Rather than being an ineffective relic, Denver showed that local campaigning had the potential to alter the outcome.