The power of the environment to structure social contacts, plus the empirical fact that contact across class boundaries makes a consensual impact on partisan choice (Miller (1978) Brit. J. Pol. Sci. 8). McAllister et al. (2003) Brit. J. Pol. Sci. 31 provide ‘very strong’ evidence that members of each social class in the UK were much more likely to vote Labour than Conservative in the low-status than in the high-status areas. ‘This is entirely consistent with the concept of the neighbourhood effect, but alternative explanations are feasible.’ Johnston et al. (2004) Polit. Geog. 23, 4 find that neighbourhood effects are among the strongest influences on voting patterns. This term is not to be confused with neighbourhood effects, such as ‘the hypothesized negative effects of living in poverty concentration neighbourhoods on various individual outcomes such as employment, earnings, school performances, and “deviant’ behaviour,”’ (Hedman et al. (2013) J Econ. Geogr. DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbt042.