The “Hollowed-Out Election,” or Where Did All the Policy Go?

Abstract

An increasing emphasis on personalities, at the expense of party policies, is a trend that has been apparent in UK General Elections for the past two decades. However, the 2010 election saw that trend reach new heights in what is here described as a “hollowed out” election. This article, based on research that investigates the news agendas of the parties and contrasts these with those of the media and the public, seeks to demonstrate the extent to which, with the exception of generalized debate about the state of the economy, there was an almost total absence of policy discussion by the parties and the media during the 2010 campaign. This is attributed to three factors: the impact of the first-ever leaders' televised debates, ideological convergence between the parties, and the fact that the two issues of greatest concern to the public—government spending cuts and immigration—were issues that the parties felt were “too hot to handle.”

KEYWORDS:

• elections
• political campaigning
• news agendas
• policy debates
• leaders

INTRODUCTION

Much of the political communications debate following the 2010 General Election has focussed on two related phenomena: the dominance of the televised leaders' debates and the lack of impact made by the social media. But there was another aspect of the campaign that merits attention: With the exception of the debate around the economy, it was virtually a policy-free election. Whether there is a link among all three phenomena is one of the questions that will be explored in this paper, which will set out the evidence for the claim that the campaign was “policy-lite” and then demonstrate that this can be attributed to three factors:

	First, that the TV debates ensured that the campaign was focused on leadership rather than policies.
	Second, that there was a convergence of ideology among the three main parties that led to a narrowing of policy disagreement.
	Third, that the two most important issues for the public—the economy and immigration—were topics that the politicians were reluctant to engage with.

In seeking to measure campaign agendas and the policy priorities of the parties, the public and the media in the 2010 campaign will be evaluated and compared with those of the 2005 election (Gaber 2006). Data for the public's agenda are drawn from the British Election Study 2010, which measured voters' concerns by asking “What is the most important issue facing the country?” (Clarke et al. 2010). In 2005, analysis of the media's election news agenda was based on the research undertaken at Loughborough University (Deacon, Wring, and Golding 2006). On this occasion, these data were not available, so the research undertaken for the Nuffield Election Study (Scammell and Beckett 2010), which tabulates newspaper front-page election stories and editorials, has been utilized instead. ¹ For evaluating the parties' news agenda, both in 2005 and 2010, the unit of measurement used is the parties' press releases, as posted on the news sections of their websites.

THE EVIDENCE: PRESS RELEASES

All press releases issued nationally by the three main UK-wide parties between April 6, 2010, the day when the election was called, until May 6, election day, and that they posted on their national websites, were examined. It is important to note that while the main focus of any general election campaign is national, all three parties have separate Welsh and Scottish operations that, to some extent, run their own campaigns and put out their own press releases. (The three main parties do not, with rare exceptions, campaign in Northern Ireland.) The press releases used in this analysis were only those that emanated from the national campaign headquarters and were posted on their national websites. Arguably, there might have been some differences in the campaigns in Wales and Scotland but in the UK's highly centralized media system, it is this national debate that really matters.

The releases were coded into specific topic categories, and these were then consolidated into broader subject categories. So, for example (Table 1), the Conservatives issued releases covering employment, the banks, taxation, and inflation, but these were consolidated into a single “economy” subject category. It is instructive to note that none of the parties issued any press releases that could be categorized as “public spending cuts.” As in 2005, only categories receiving two or more releases were included in the analysis. Over this period the Conservatives issued 65 releases covering 29 topics, Labour issued 64 covering 16 topics, and the Liberal Democrats 68 covering 19 topics (Table 1). One can speculate that the far wider range of topics emanating from the Conservatives might be indicative of their attempts to reach wider segments of the audience than they had done in the past.

TABLE 1 Comparison of Subject Categories Covered by Party Press Releases 2005 and 2010 (Based on Those Subjects Covered Twice or More by Each Party; See Gaber 2006)

	Labour 2010	Labour 2005	Conservative 2010	Conservative 2005	Liberal democrat 2010	Liberal democrat 2005
1	Attacking Con/LD	Attacking	Pro Cons	Attacking	Economy	Attacking
2	Pro Labour	Pro Labour	Economy	Crime	Attacking	Economy
3	Economy	Economy	Attacking	Tax	Health	Iraq
4	Crime	Health	Civil Liberties	Pro Cons	Pro Lib Dem	Health
5	Social Security	Education	Crime	Health	Trident	Education
6	Equality	Immigration	TV debates	Economy	Green	Pro Lib Dem
7	Health	Crime	Schools	Immigration	Crime	Pensions
8	Education	Housing	Soc. Security	Education	Scotland	Tax
9		Women	Sport/youth	Pensions	Rural Affairs	Environment
10			Health	Voting irregs.		Ethnic issues
11			Rural Affairs	Iraq		Voting irregs.
12			Pol. Reform
13			Hung Parl.
14			Volcanic ash

Analyzing party press releases is an effective way of measuring parties' policy priorities during a campaign (Gaber 2006; Brandenburg 2006). This is because although press releases in themselves do not necessarily make a direct impact on the media, they do give a strong indication of what issues the parties are keen to promote on any particular campaign day. This in itself reflects the campaign grid that all parties now use as part of their election planning process. The grid sets out which issues, and on which days, the parties will be seeking to highlight by means of press conferences, interviews, photo opportunities, and press releases.

Direct comparability with 2005 has proved problematic for two reasons. First, in that campaign the three parties posted all their press releases on their websites, but in 2010 they made a selection of which releases to post although, as argued later, the selection in itself can be seen as significant. Second, there was a definitional problem in 2010 that did not exist in previous elections. Up until 2010, even though the mode of delivery might have changed—from paper to fax to e-mail to website posting—what constituted a press release was not in dispute. However, in 2010, in addition to these more traditional means of communication, the party press teams made frequent use of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, SMS messaging, and other social media to communicate their messages to journalists. Sometimes these messages were conventional press releases, but on other occasions they might simply have been a one-sentence rebuttal quote, a link to a Party Election Broadcast on YouTube, or an announcement of a “flash press conference” as unscheduled briefings became known.

Despite that, as indicated above, the three parties gave less priority to their websites as one of their means of communicating with journalists, they still posted an average of around two releases every campaign day, and they are therefore a useful way of establishing party campaign priorities. This is because the decision to place a press release on the website represents a considered judgement, reflecting both the shifting news agenda in play at any one time and the parties' predetermined campaign grids. There is a constantly moving game in play in which parties start off the day hoping to focus on one particular issue but have to rethink and change gear if their issue fails to gain any coverage, in response to a breaking news event, or if opposition parties produce statements or initiatives that require rebuttal. Henry Macrory, who ran the Conservatives' news operation, described the press releases posted on their website as, “our shop window, the first port of call to enable journalists to find out what we were saying on any particular day” (Macrory 2010). Hence, although the press release data for 2010 are not as comprehensive as they were for the 2005 study, they still represent a significant pointer to those campaign agenda items that the individual parties were keen to promote.

The following (Table 1) are the topics that, in 2010, were covered by at least two press releases on the party websites (with figures for 2005 for comparison). The most striking, but hardly surprising, aspect of these data is that they demonstrate that there was unanimity among the three parties that, outside of tactical press releases (attack, defense, and promotional), the economy was the single most important policy issue in the campaign.

Crime featured in all the parties' top 10 items, and the same went for health. However, after that there is significant divergence. And while public opinion and, to a lesser extent, the press saw immigration as a second key issue, the parties sidestepped it, at least as far as their press releases were concerned.

The largest category of Labour press releases was devoted to attacking the other two parties, overwhelmingly the Conservatives, with a leitmotif of fear of what a Conservative victory might bring; an example of this came in a release about Labour's first press conference of the campaign, that began, “Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling and Peter Mandelson issued a stark warning to voters that the Tories' economic plan has the strength of a house of cards which would risk the recovery” (Labour Party 2010). Promotion of the achievements of the Labour Government was the party's second highest topic, the same position it occupied in 2005. The economy came next followed by crime, not usually regarded as a traditional Labour issue. In all, Labour devoted two or more press releases to just eight topics, a much tighter focus than that of the other two parties.

The Conservatives, arguably, ran a more positive campaign, with their largest category being the promotion of the party and its leader. The economy was in second place and their attack initiatives third, with Labour the main target. It is perhaps significant that the next largest category was “civil liberties,” not a subject traditionally associated with the Conservatives but perhaps indicative of the extent to which, under David Cameron, they have sought to soften their image. A similar motive can perhaps be gleaned from the fact that in 2005 immigration was the Conservatives' seventh most important topic, while in 2010 it did not feature at all despite the importance of the issue to the public, as measured by the British Election Study (Clarke et al. 2010).

The Liberal Democrats were the only one of the three major parties to devote more releases to a policy, as opposed to a tactical, issue, in this case the economy. In both campaigns they were virtually alone in highlighting defense-related topics; in 2005 they ran the Iraq issue strongly, and in 2010 they focused on their opposition to the Trident nuclear system.

The press releases also give a good indication as to the extent to which the campaign was dominated by the leadership issue, particularly in comparison with 2005. A detailed breakdown of the parties' press releases containing references to leaders shows the following (Table 2). During the 2010 campaign, Labour referred to David Cameron 74 times, while Gordon Brown featured only 65 times. The Conservatives fought a more positive campaign, referring to Brown 35 times but to Cameron 44 times. And the Liberal Democrats were similarly more positive, making 55 references to Clegg and only 19 and 24, respectively, to Brown and Cameron. In overall terms, in 2005 Labour made 47 references to party leaders, while this time round, on the basis of half the number of releases, they made 144 such references, with David Cameron being referenced three times as frequently as his predecessor, Michael Howard. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats also increased references to leaders between 2005 and 2010, but not nearly to the same extent as did Labour (Gaber 2006).

If we now turn to a comparison of the party's top five agenda items and compare them to those of the press and the public (Table 3), we find the following. Using the British Election Study's finding of the five topics that the public regarded as most important, one sees that none of the parties managed to cover more than three of the public's concerns. It is significant that in 2005 the parties were far closer in aligning their priorities with those of the public than in 2010. In 2005 both Labour and the Conservatives succeeded in aligning their top five issue priorities with the public's (though not in the same order) while the Liberal Democrats succeeded with just three (Gaber 2006). The press in 2010 did better matching three of the public's top five agenda items, whereas in 2005 they matched only one.

TABLE 2 Comparison of References to Own and Other Party Leaders in 2010 Press Releases (See Gaber 2006)

References to:	2010			2005
	Brown	Cameron	Clegg	Blair	Howard	Kennedy
By Labour	65	74	5	19	25	3
By Conservative	37	44	3	32	28	1
By Liberal Democrats	19	24	55	13	7	30

TABLE 3 Comparison of Party Policy Priorities With Those of the Public and the Press (Sources: Clarke et al. 2010; Labour Party 2010; Conservative Party 2010; Liberal Democrats 2010; Scammell and Becket 2010)

Ranking	Public Opinion (British election study)	Labour	Conservative	Liberal democrat	Press
1	Economy	Economy	Economy	Economy	Economy
2	Immigration	Crime	Civil liberties/ Equality	Health	Hung Parliament
3	Afghanistan	Social Security	Crime	Defence (Trident)	Immigration
4	Crime	Equality	Education	Environment	Health
5	Health	Health	Social Security	Crime	Defense

THE KEY ISSUES

If the 2010 campaign was, with the exception of the economy, virtually “policy-free,” the question remains: Why? Of course, to say that the election was almost policy-free is to ignore the fact that throughout the campaign there was a great deal of discussion about the state of the UK economy. The Clinton campaign team's famous aphorism “It's the economy stupid” (Hedegus and Pennebaker 1993) has, in many quarters, come to be accepted as a universal truth in electoral politics. But it is far from applicable to all recent UK elections. In the polls of 1997, 2001, and 2005, according to the British Election Study, the National Health Service was the single most important issue for the majority of voters (Clarke et al. 2006). But in 2010, with Britain just recovering from the worst global recession since the 1930s, it is hardly surprising that the economy dominated the campaign: It was named by 26% of respondents as the single most important issue facing Britain. And if other related concerns—the financial crisis, unemployment, etc.—are included, then the total putting the economy as their top priority rises to 53%. In second place was immigration, with 14% of respondents naming it as their most important issue, followed by “law and order” for 6% and the NHS for 4% (Clarke et al. 2010).

What is interesting about the economy and immigration, and perhaps goes some way in explaining the hollowed-out nature of the election, is that both were issues that all three major national parties were reluctant to address head-on, despite their relevance to the British electorate. All three parties argued that Britain's public spending deficit would have to be addressed, and there was a consensus was that this could only be achieved, in the short term at least, by a mix of increased taxes and major cuts in public expenditure. But these are not themes that any political party seeking to win an election is likely to embrace with great enthusiasm. Sky News' political correspondent Glen O'Glaza noted on air: “Economy? This is the key issue of this election [and] it is remarkable really how little we have heard about it” (O'Glaza 2010). A remark echoed by Tom Price, Labour's Deputy Head of News during the campaign, said: “We were aware that some journalists thought that none of the parties were giving them sufficient details about where any proposed cuts might fall” (Price 2010). This lack of detail is evidenced by this study of the parties' campaign press releases. A search for the phrase “cuts in public expenditure” reveals that it does not appear even once, and searching for any mention of “cuts” (but excluding “tax cuts”) produces some interesting results.

Labour's press release website validates Price's comment. The releases there mention “cuts” 59 times (excluding references to tax cuts). Of these, there are just two referring to the cuts a future Labour Government might introduce. The Liberal Democrats made 16 references to spending cuts, including five about the cuts an incoming Liberal Democrat Government would make. But it is the Conservatives' approach to the issue of spending cuts that is, perhaps, most revealing. For despite the new coalition government almost immediately embarking on a program of major cuts in public spending, the Conservatives refer to spending cuts just nine times, and only once (and then obliquely, if not ambiguously) to their own plans. This comes when the then–Shadow Health Secretary Andrew Lansley is quoted as saying they would both protect budgets and cut staff at the same time: “Only the Conservatives will protect the whole of the NHS budget,” he said ” … both Labour and the Lib Dems have refused to do so. We will cut NHS bureaucracy by a third and we will make sure frontline patient care comes first” (Lansley 2010).

There was similar “shyness” around the issue of immigration, a major public concern but a subject that all three parties and, with some exceptions, the media, tiptoed around. Writing in the Daily Telegraph, former Labour minister and advisor to the Conservative Government Frank Field commented: “ … despite brief mentions in the manifestos, immigration is the issue that dare not speak its name” (Field 2010). Apart from the fear of being labeled “racist,” there was also some consternation that highlighting the immigration issue might improve the electoral prospects of the far-right British National Party. The Conservatives, the one party that might have expected to make most of the issue, did not post a single press release about immigration throughout the campaign. Indeed, the word “immigration” only appears twice in all the Conservatives' news releases posted: once within a broad statement of party policy and once in a release bemoaning alleged poor morale with the UK Border Agency. This compares with their campaign in 2005, when immigration was their seventh most important topic, and is perhaps indicative of the changed image of the party that “Team Cameron” sought to project. It was only Labour that featured the issue as the centerpiece of a press release; this was based on a speech Gordon Brown made in London (Brown 2010). The Liberal Democrats devoted no press releases to the subject.

Hence, we had a situation in which the two major issues of public concern were, for the reasons outlined above, ones that none of the major parties wanted to address. But this is still some way from explaining why policy matters overall featured so little during the campaign; for that explanation, we have to turn to the biggest single issue of the 2010 election.

THE LEADERS' DEBATES

The single most important explanation for the absence of any substantive policy debate during the campaign is, in all probability, the existence of the televised debates. 2010 was an election in which the personal qualities of the party leaders became far more important than the policies they were promoting.

Before the campaign began, there was some expectation that the 4.5 hours of televised debate among the party leaders might lead to the parties' policies taking center stage, but that was not to be. The debates represented a classic case of presentation trumping substance. As Observer political columnist Andrew Rawnsley put it: “The debates sucked the oxygen out of all the other campaign events and focused too much attention on the trivialities of personality” (Rawnsley 2010). There are a number of reasons this was the case, the most obvious being the sheer novelty of the situation. In light of the fact that it had taken more than 50 years since the “the first TV election” for such televised confrontations to take place, it was hardly surprising that the debates attracted so much attention. And this attention was dramatically heightened when, following the first debate, the poll ratings of the Liberal Democrats jumped six points, not because of any particular Liberal Democrat policy resonating with the public, but because of favorable reaction to party leader Nick Clegg's on-screen performance.

Another factor was simply that the debates consumed so much media time and space that they drove out other aspects of the campaign. (The volcanic ash cloud that brought world aviation to a halt during the period of the campaign also competed strongly with the election for media attention.) Understandably, the media is only ever going to devote a certain amount of space and time to the election, and if a large chunk is taken up by the debates, that much less time and space is available for coverage of policy issues.

Looking at press coverage of the campaign, the Nuffield Study's research into newspaper coverage of the previous campaign in 2005 found that the quality of the party leaders accounted for 13% of all front-page election stories and 14% of all election editorials. The comparable figures for the 2010 election (Table 4) are 40% of front pages and 30% of editorials being about the leaders or the leader debates; no other subject came anywhere near that figure. In second place was the state of the economy with 12% and 14%, respectively, and the next policy issue was immigration at 5% and 5%, respectively (Scammell and Beckett 2010).

TABLE 4 Analysis of Front Page and Editorials in All National Newspapers During the 2010 Campaign (Scammell and Beckett 2010)

Topic	Number of front pages and editorials
TV Debates and leaders	150
Economy/deficit	58
Hung parliament	33
Manifestos	26
Exhortation/advice to vote	25
Immigration	19
Health	12
Defense	3
Political reform	2
Crime	1
Other	11
Total	111

Commenting on their findings, Scammell and Beckett write, ” … the TV debates led directly to two highly distinctive characteristics of this election. First, this was an extraordinarily leader-focussed contest, even by recent standards of personalised campaigns. It was not just that the debates themselves intensified attention to the leaders and their performances; it was also that they cast a presidential framing over the entire contest” (Scammell and Beckett 2010).

The very fact of the debates meant that for the middle three weeks of the campaign, the party leaders and their advisors devoted enormous amounts of their time, and most of their emotional energy, to preparing for the televised confrontations. This left little opportunity to build up campaigns around other issues. As Jonny Oates, Director of Communications at the Liberal Democrats, put it, “Once they began, the debates dominated. We had planned to have more set-piece events but in the event the debates became the big story” (Oates 2010).

Douglas Alexander, Labour's campaign coordinator, correctly predicted that, with the debates scheduled for Thursdays, the media's agendas on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of the relevant weeks would be totally dominated by the debates and hence lost to other campaign coverage. Discounting the weekend, this left only 2 full days of campaigning a week (Alexander 2010). According to one Labour Party press officer, “The silence of the Labour press office on the days of the debates was eerie with all media at the ‘extraordinary political village’ of the debate sites” (Thorogood 2010). The debates also dominated the campaign lives of the political reporters, who were required to file stories not just about the debates themselves but about the build-up, the aftermath, and the planning for the next debate (Donaldson 2010). And physically, political reporters could not stay in London but had to follow the debating caravan around the country as it moved from Bristol to Birmingham and on to Manchester.

Further evidence that policies were less important in the 2010 campaign than in any preceding one—at least any since 1987—can be found in what Ipsos MORI characterizes as “the political triangle” (Table 5) (Ipsos MORI 2010). This is a measure of the varying importance that electors attribute to leaders, policies, and parties when it comes to making their voting decision. In every election from 1987 to 2010, Ipsos MORI has asked respondents:

TABLE 5 Ipsos MORI “Political Triangle”: Responses to Question Asking, “Out of 10, How Much Would Respondents Attribute to Leaders' Parties' and Policies' in Making Their Voting Decisions, 1987–2010 (Ipsos MORI 2010; Figures in Table Are Mean Average Scores Given by Respondents)

All mean		Conservative mean	Labour mean	Liberal democrat mean
1987
Leaders	3.5	n/a	n/a	n/a
Policies	4.4	n/a	n/a	n/a
Parties	2.1	n/a	n/a	n/a
1992
Leaders	3.2	3.5	2.9	3.4
Policies	4.4	4.3	4.5	4.2
Parties	2.0	2.0	2.4	2.2
1997
Leaders	3.4	3.6	3.6	3.3
Policies	4.1	4.2	3.8	4.3
Parties	2.3	2.2	2.5	2.3
2001
Leaders	3.2	2.9	3.4	3.2
Policies	4.2	4.4	3.9	4.4
Parties	2.4	2.5	2.3	2.3
2005
Leaders	3.0	3.0	3.4	2.9
Policies	4.7	4.8	4.4	5.1
Parties	2.1	2.2	2.3	2.0
2010
Leaders	3.8	3.9	4.0	3.6
Policies	3.8	3.8	3.5	4.0
Parties	2.2	2.1	2.2	2.2

“I want you to think about what it is that most attracted you to … party. Some people are attracted mainly by the policies of the party, some by the leaders of the party and some because they identify with the party as a whole. If you had a total of ten points to allocate according to how important each of these was to you, how many points would you allocate to the leaders of the party you intend voting for, how many to its policies, and how many to the party as a whole? Please bear in mind that the total of all your points should add up to ten.”

These data indicate that between the 1987 and 2005 elections, respondents were consistent in saying that the policies of the parties were a more important factor in helping them decide how to vote than the image of the leaders or the image of the parties. In this period, party policies received a weighting (out of 10) averaging 4.3, the leader 3.3, and the party 2.2. Yet in 2010 this changed, with voters saying for the first time that the leaders were as important as the policies in deciding how to vote.

POLICY CONVERGENCE

Another factor that can be invoked to explain why issues were so little discussed during the 2010 campaign is that, in policy terms, this was a highly converged election, with there being few substantive issues dividing the parties, other than the speed and magnitude of the required public spending cuts. Labour has been moving toward what it perceived to be the center ground of British politics from 1983 onward, first under the leadership of Neil Kinnock and then with the election of Tony Blair and the success of the New Labour project (Gould 1998). For some time, New Labour was the sole occupiers of this space at the center. The Conservatives, after losing power in 1997, maintained their right-wing stance, electing successively three leaders—William Hague, Ian Duncan-Smith, and Michael Howard—all clearly linked to that section of the party. The Liberal Democrats, led by Paddy Ashdown, Charles Kennedy, and Menzies Campbell, maintained their position as a center-left party (arguably to the left of New Labour).

However, in 2010 there were three new leaders in post, all focusing on the same centre ground. Gordon Brown, having succeeded Tony Blair, was intent on signaling that although he was a new occupant of Downing Street, Labour remained New Labour. The Conservatives, in electing David Cameron, had clearly accepted frontbencher Theresa May's urgings for them to discard the tag of being “the nasty party” (May 2002); indeed David Cameron made no secret of the fact that his mission was to lead the Tories back to the center (Cameron 2007). Meanwhile, the decision by the Liberal Democrats to elect Nick Clegg, one of the authors of the “Orange Book” (which argued for a less collectivist approach to economic policy), as leader, signaled a move on their part toward the center. Hence, 2010 was an election in which it was difficult to argue that there was substantial clear water—red, blue, or yellow—between the three parties.

Thus, in the absence of any clear political dividing lines, the quality and quantity of the parties' marketing efforts inevitably came to the fore. As Lees-Marshment (2008: 1) notes, political parties in the UK ” … no longer pursue grand ideologies, fervently arguing for what they believe in and trying to persuade the masses to follow then. They increasingly expend money, time and effort trying to gauge public opinion and formulate a strategically designed product to suit their demands.” This absence of policy in the 2010 election on the one hand put a greater premium on the Conservatives' newfound presentational skills (based, as it was, on the unlikely triumvirate of David Cameron, strategist Steve Hilton, and communications chief Andy Coulson) and, on the other, made Gordon Brown's well-documented presentational shortcomings significantly more important. This importance was underlined by Brown's failure to make any real impact in the three leadership debates despite his undoubted command of most areas of policy. Cameron and Clegg, the two leaders who were deemed to have done best in the debates, clearly saw that their personal presentation styles were going to be more important in winning audiences over than any command of policy they might demonstrate.

CONCLUSION

So whether the “policy-lite” or “leader-led” election of 2010 comes to be seen as merely an aberration or the heightening of a trend that has been apparent in British elections since 1979 might well come to depend not only on the continuation of the current convergent trajectory of the three major parties but also on the recognition that televised leadership debates are now, and will be for the foreseeable future, a central feature of UK election campaigns. In these circumstances, the prospects of British campaigns becoming less focused on personalities and more concerned with policies remains unlikely.

This article has sought to argue that the 2010 election was characterized by a hollowed-out campaign, with policy differences between the parties drowned out by the noise of the leaders' debates. But this noise also drowned out any suggestion that this process was actually taking place. In a little-noticed press release during the campaign, the Labour Party sought to draw the broadcasters' attention to the fact that their campaign coverage was concentrating on the leaders at the expenses of coverage of wider policy issues. They wrote to the other main parties seeking a joint approach to the broadcasters to express concern about this trend, but when that approach was rebuffed they published extracts from the letter, which argued that the focus on the debates had “dramatically reduced” the airtime given to policy issues. They went on to claim ” … that whilst our manifestos were fully, fairly and properly covered, since then the usual specialist examination of specific policy areas has not been done. If the public are not exposed to the different policy details and arguments which we are presenting, we are concerned that you will not be fulfilling your traditional duty of explaining and probing the plans of all the main parties. … If the public don't hear the arguments, we believe that, despite the impact of the debates, many will still be in the dark as to the differences between our plans and values” (Watt and Wintour 2010). Despite being written two weeks before polling day, this statement from the Labour Party stands as an appropriate epitaph on the hollowed-out campaign of 2010 which, if it is to be the model for the future, represents a trend that has worrying implications for the future democratic content of British election campaigns.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ivor Gaber

Ivor Gaber is research professor in Media and Politics at the University of Bedfordshire, Luton, and professor of Political Journalism at City University London, London, United Kingdom. He has published widely on a range of political communications topics including relations between politicians, parties and journalists. Recent relevant publications include (with Margaretten, M.) The Crisis in Public Communications and the Pursuit of Authenticity: An Analysis of the Twitter Feeds of Scottish MPs 2008–2010 in Parliamentary Affairs, 2012 and ‘The Transformation of Campaign Reporting: The 2010 General Election, Evolution or Revolution’ chapter in Wring, D. et al. (Eds.), 2011, Political Communication in Britain: The 2010 Election, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave.

Notes

1. The author is very grateful to Maggie Scammell and Charlie Beckett for allowing pre-publication access to their data on the press coverage of the 2010 election.