Winning votes and influencing people: campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

Using comparative data, we find that direct contact with voters is lower in CEE than elsewhere, although there are stark differences between CEE countries. Leafleting was the main form of contact, but the use of social media was higher in CEE than in Western Europe. Perennial parties are the most likely to contact citizens using personalised modes while the “accepted truth” that new entrants are more likely to use social media does not hold up. Our study shows the importance of direct contact on turnout which has significant ramifications for addressing the level of voter engagement in CEE countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Campaigning
• turnout
• political parties
• personalisation
• social media

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to fellow panellists and audience members at the 2018 MPSA conference in Chicago, and Cees van der Eijk, Nic Cheeseman, Fernando Casal Bértoa, Caitlin Milazzo and other participants at a REPRESENT seminar at the University of Nottingham in May 2018, and to the anonymous reviewers and editors of the journal for their constructive criticism and suggestions on the original submission.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Eibl and Gregor’s (2019) volume is an exception. It provides an overview of trends and legal frameworks of campaigning in 18 countries in Central and Eastern Europe.

2 https://www.sds.si/novica/slovenijo-bomo-postavili-na-prvo-mesto-15834.

3 The ten countries in the sample from Western Europe are: Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland. The other countries (rest of the world) included in the sample are: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Republic of Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey and the United States of America. Full details of the sample and contact Ns (unweighted) are provided in the appendix.

4 It is worth noting that overall mean contact across the 37 countries surveyed was 24.3%. Contact in 2001–2006 was therefore just over 10 percentage points lower than the overall mean. Modes of contact were not asked on the 2001–2006 survey so these could not be compared.

5 Feeding into our discussion below on types of parties, the decline in contact in the first two countries may be a product of the changing patterns of party politics. The Czech Republic in 2013 and Slovenia in 2014 witnessed elections in which new parties broke through to a considerable degree. In Slovenia, a party formed a matter of weeks before the elections won just shy of 35% of the vote and in the Czech Republic two new parties scooped up a quarter of the vote. In contrast, the 2015 elections in Poland saw two parties formed at the beginning of the century (PO and PiS were founded in 2001) continue to dominate politics.

6 As evident from the data shown, some respondents would have been contacted by more than one mode. For example, in CEE our data suggests that respondents were most likely to be contacted by mail/leaflets and canvassing. There is some overlap – 65.0% were contacted by mail and not canvassing and vice versa while just over a fifth (20.3%) was contacted by both modes. Of those contacted, 14.7% were contacted by other modes but not canvassing or leaflets.

7 The purpose of Figure 3 is to descriptively assess modes of direct party contact according to whether the respondent was contacted by a particular party type only e.g. Perennials, RE or New parties or by a combination of two or more party types. The overall contact percentages for each party classification type is shown in Figure 3 and the cell Ns are stated in Table A3 (appendix). While the overall Ns are adequate, occasionally the cell N for a particular contact mode within a party classification (e.g. Recently Established only) is relatively small. In such cases, obvious caveats apply but these are included for brevity so one can compare against the overall contact mean.

8 For brevity, we ran the same models for all countries excluding CEE (overall N = 43145). We converted the coefficients into odds and derived the AMEs and found hardly any differences – all the same variables were significant and the probabilities were similar to Model 1 (Figure 5). For the model without CEE included, the AMEs are as follows: Degree nine percentage points; living in a city or large town six percentage points; union members four percentage points; partisanship thirteen percentage points previous turnout four percentage points higher than non-voters; feel voting makes a difference are seven times more likely to be contacted. All findings are available on request from the authors.

9 We provide full variable descriptions, codings and descriptives in Table A5.

10 We ran the same turnout models for all countries excluding CEE (overall N = 43145). All the same variables were significant and the probabilities were similar to those reported in Figures 6 and 7. For the model without CEE included: contact increased the probability of voting by seven percentage points; having a degree, being over 45, married, a union member, attending a place of worship once a week all have a significant effects. Those who are satisfied with democracy and believe their vote makes a difference are also significantly more likely to vote (seven percentage points). Partisans are twelve times more likely to vote than those who are not. All findings are available on request from the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Cutts

David Cutts is a Professor in Political Science at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on political behaviour, party and political campaigning with numerous articles in leading journals including the American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, European Journal of Political Research and the British Journal of Political Science.

Tim Haughton

Tim Haughton is Reader (Associate Professor) of European Politics at the University of Birmingham. He has published widely on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe, particularly Slovakia, Slovenia and the Czech Republic. He was the co-editor of the JCMS Annual Review of the European Union (2008–2016), editor of Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe: Does EU Membership Matter? (2011) and is co-writing a book, The New Party Challenge, with Kevin Deegan-Krause for Oxford University Press.