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ABSTRACT
The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalization of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalized messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalization of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.
Acknowledgement
We thank Mark Shephard, Stuart Fox, and the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments. We are also grateful to Joshua Townsley for research assistance.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Caitlin Milazzo is an associate professor in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of UKIP: Inside the Campaign to Redraw the Map of British Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015), and her articles on electoral politics and political behaviour have appeared in the Journal of Politics, Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, and Political behavior.
Jesse Hammond is an assistant professor in the Department of Defense Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School. His work has appeared in the American Political Science Review, International Studies Quarterly, and the Journal of Peace Research.
Notes
1 The files necessary to reproduce the main numerical results are available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu.
2 See McAllister (Citation2007) for an excellent summary of these arguments.
3 Dalton, McAllister, and Wattenberg (Citation2000) find that the media coverage of candidate vis-à-vis parties increased between 1952 and 1997. Likewise, Deacon and Harmer (Citation2014) conclude that the presence of party leaders in newspapers has become more pronounced since 1951, particularly following the introduction of televised leadership debates in 2010. However, other studies conclude that the evidence in favour of increasing personalization is mixed (see Karvonen Citation2010; Kriesi Citation2012; Vliegenthart, Boomgaarden, and Boumans Citation2011).
4 In Britain, an increasing personalization of politics can also be attributed to the growing presidentialization of the British premiership, particularly under Tony Blair (Foley Citation2000; Heffernan and Webb Citation2005).
5 Any communications that are sent to voters via post are defined as “unsolicited materials” by the Electoral Commission. We use the terms “leaflets” and “electoral communications” interchangeably when referring to unsolicited materials.
6 All six parties won more than one million voters and they were the only parties to exceed this threshold. For the seventh party, the Plaid Cymru, we did not acquire sufficient leaflets to perform a reliable analysis.
7 The distribution of leaflets across parties is presented in .
8 The largest share of the leaflets in our dataset was authored by the Labour Party or Labour candidates. In total, Labour – and its candidates – spent nearly £13 million on unsolicited materials, a figure that outweighed the spending of any other party in this area. We have fewer leaflets for the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, and both parties spent less on leaflets and other unsolicited materials. Our dataset contains far fewer leaflets for the minor parties, but these parties spent considerably less on unsolicited materials. Data on party and candidate spending are available at http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/.
9 Our data record a mean of 22 leaflets per constituency, with a range from 1 to 133.
10 For each candidate, we add the total spending on unsolicited materials during the long and short campaign and we compare this figure to the total number of leaflets we have for the candidate’s party in the constituency. The correlations for the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, and UKIP are 0.18, 0.22, 0.32, 0.51, and 0.18, respectively. In all cases, the correlations are statistically significant at p < .05. For the SNP the correlation is −0.05, but p > .05.
11 This category of campaign spending includes all costs that result from the design, preparation, production, and distribution of unsolicited materials. For a further discussion of the potential bias issue and additional robustness checks, see the online appendix.
12 Jim Messina, who signed on as a campaign strategy advisor to the Conservative Party in 2013, famously warned that average person thinks about politics for just four minutes a week.
13 It is important to note that candidates frequently do not have full control over the design of their election communications. Leaflet design is often overseen by the central party organization. Candidates and local party elites may be able to personalize the content, but the design is often consistent across constituencies.
14 While including an image of the party leader may entail a trade-off in the terms of text, we find no evidence that leaflets featuring an image of the party leader are less likely to include an image of the party’s local candidate.
15 The question reads, ‘How much do you like or dislike each of the following party leaders?’ Higher numbers indicate that the respondent had a more favourable impression of the leader.
16 Marginal seats are defined as constituencies where the margin of victory was less than 10 points following the 2010 general election.
17 Data on incumbency and tenure are taken from the Parliamentary Candidates UK 2015 General Election Candidates dataset, v1. Available at: www.parliamentarycandidates.org/ [accessed July 1, 2017].
18 We acknowledge that identifying local connections using leaflet content is an imperfect measure, but the lack of overlap between our data and other sources of candidate data prevented us from employing alternative measures of local ties. However, given the well-known benefits associated with having local connections, we assume that candidates choose to emphasize any connections they may have with their constituency.
19 In models 3, 4, and 5, we limit the analyses to include only the leaflets where the candidate is mentioned by name – i.e. leaflets we can be certain would have been counted against the candidate’s election expenses.
20 To identify a marginal and safe seat, we take the 10th and 90th percentiles of the margin of victory following the 2010 general election. This equates to a margin of victory of 3.6 and 34.2, respectively.
21 In supplementary analyses, we re-estimate our main analyses using a Heckman selection model to account for the fact that certain types of constituencies may be more likely to ‘select’ into our dataset. The results support the findings of our original analysis and our conclusions remain unchanged.
22 This figure outweighs the number of people who were contacted via other mediums, such as telephone (12%) or email (34%), as well as the number of people who reported that a party worker visited them in person at home (34%) or engaged with them in the street (11%). Figures are taken from wave 6 of the 2014–2017 British Election Study Internet Panel.
23 Many of these leaflets would have been of the same design, distributed to households across the country.