Campaigning in the dark: theorising campaign strategies from the 2022 Seanad by-election

ABSTRACT

Parties and election candidates are often understood to be rational actors, adapting to conditions to remain electorally competitive. However, despite the rational pursuit of goals requiring enough information with which to update one’s strategies, to our knowledge, no study has sought to examine the precise role of information in influencing party or candidate updating during campaigns. To fill this gap, we use qualitative process tracing to examine the 2022 Irish Seanad by-election, which acts as an extreme case of a low-information electoral environment that can be used for theory-building. From this analysis, we expect that the information level is a function of knowledge about voters’ intentions and the terms of political debate, in the form of an interaction between the effective number of electoral parties and the range of issues discussed by parties. From this, we hypothesise that strategic updating is least likely when information about both voters and the terms of political debate are low. Indeed, the lower the information level, the more likely candidates are to prioritise their preferred issues and ignore their competitors, even when they could acquire some rudimentary knowledge of their competitors.

KEYWORDS:

• Seanad
• campaign
• political parties
• independents

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the feedback that we received from four sources. Firstly, we presented this paper to the Political Studies Association of Ireland conference in October 2022. Secondly, in October 2022 we also presented this paper to the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe) at University College Dublin during their Seminar Series. In both presentations, we received considerable feedback covering all aspects of both this paper and our wider project. This feedback has been instrumental in developing our work, and so we would like to thank everyone who gave us feedback during these presentations. Thirdly, we would like to thank Prof. David M. Farrell for the interest that he has shown in our work, and for all his incredibly helpful advice about how to develop this project. Finally, we would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful and constructive feedback, which helped to strengthen this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 20 names appeared on the ballot, as Karin Dubsky was deemed ineligible after the ballots had been printed upon discovery that she was not an Irish citizen. Ballots listing Dubsky as a first preference were excluded, while those listing her as a lower preference were transferred to the next highest preference. Frances Donnelly also effectively (but not formally) withdrew as he was concentrating on his campaign for the Labour Panel and appealed for people not to vote for him.

2 These interviews were also given ethical approval by the relevant School.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Samuel A. T. Johnston

Samuel A. T. Johnston is a Teaching Fellow in European Comparative Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations in University College Dublin. His primary research interests lie in different forms of nationalist parties across Europe, how the EU influences political parties, and how parties behave during election campaigns. He also researches Irish politics, and party politics across Europe more generally.

Sinéad C. M. Harrington

Sinéad C. M. Harrington is a PhD candidate and Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar at the Political Science Department, Trinity College Dublin. Her research focuses primarily on party organisation and electoral competition in Western Europe. She also researches the effect of electoral systems and voting processes on voter behaviour.