The neighbourhood effect is one of the contextual variables that explains the tendency of a person to vote in a certain direction based upon the relational effects of the people living in the neighbourhood. The voting preference of a neighbourhood tends to be formed by consensus, where people tend to vote with the general trend of the neighbourhood. This consensus is formed by the personal connections a person forms in a community. There also seems to be some socio-economic correlation to voting patterns, and this has also been used to predict voting behavior.