This paper establishes a model of likely campaign effectiveness, before examining the intensity of constituency campaigning at the 2010 General Election in Britain and its subsequent impact on electoral outcomes, using both aggregate and individual level data. It shows that constituency campaigning yielded benefits in varying degrees for all three main parties and that Labour's constituency campaign efforts were effective despite the electoral context, and ultimately affected the overall outcome of the election. These findings have significant implications for our understanding of the circumstances under which campaigns are likely to be more or less effective, and provide further evidence that a carefully managed campaign stands the most chance of delivering tangible electoral payoffs.Keywords: Campaigning; Political Parties; 2010 General Election; Britain; Campaign Management; Electoral Impact Introduction -The growing importance and potential for campaign effectsIn studies of the past few elections, a broad consensus has developed to suggest that election campaigning may be electorally effective in Britain (Clarke et al, 2004(Clarke et al, , 2009Whiteley & Seyd, 1994;Pattie, et al., 1995;Denver et al., 2003). Indeed, there are several contextual effects that heighten the potential for campaign payoffs. First, the strength of partisan identification in Britain has declined in intensity, and to a lesser extent in overall volume though the core of fairly strong partisans has remained relatively constant (see Figure 1). Secondly, voter hesitancy has increased (see Figure 2). In 2010, fully 37% of respondents to the British Election Study post-election survey indicated that they had made their decision on how to vote during the campaign, with a further 13% indicating that their decision had been taken since the turn of the year. Given that all parties engage in 'longterm' campaigning -especially in target seats (Fisher & Denver, 2008) -there would appear to be significant potential at least for constituency campaigning to be electorally significant. 1.1In this paper we seek to measure the electoral impact of the three main British parties' campaigns at the 2010 election (Conservative, Labour and the Liberal Democrats).Aggregate data are drawn from a survey of all electoral agents of the five major parties in Great Britain -the Conservatives, Labour, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and the Scottish National Party (N=1,993). 2 1,079 valid responses were received -an overall response rate of 54%. Details of responses by party are shown in the Appendix. These illustrate a representative spread of constituencies. In order to confirm this, however, means were compared in respect of candidate spending (percentage of maximum spent) during the regulated long and short campaigns. For all parties, the results indicate that our sample is robust (see Appendix). In addition, in depth interviews were conducted with the parties at national level, as well as with agents in constituencies selected on the basis of their elec...
Constituency (local) campaigning in British general elections has been transformed over the last ten years or so. Firstly, national party headquarters have taken an increasingly large role in planning and managing constituency campaigns. Although the pace of change has varied across the major parties, all are heading down the same road. Secondly, campaigning on the ground has also changed. Technological and other changes have led to a decline in the use of traditional campaign techniques and increased use of new methods, especially in 'key' seats.These developments are charted using data derived from a unique set of nation-wide surveys of election agents at the last three general elections. Finally, the paper returns (briefly) to the debate about the electoral effects of constituency campaigning, presenting data relating to its impact in each of the three elections concerned.
Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.6%), but women did not (0.3% and -0.3%). The procedure used in those replications served as the basis for this multilab Registered Replication Report. A total of 40 laboratories collected data for this project, and 23 of these laboratories met all inclusion criteria. Here we report the meta-analytic results for those 23 direct replications (total N = 4,493), which tested whether performance on a 30-item general-knowledge trivia task differed between these two priming conditions (results of supplementary analyses of the data from all 40 labs, N = 6,454, are also reported). We observed no overall difference in trivia performance between participants primed with the "professor" category and those primed with the "hooligan" category (0.14%) and no moderation by gender.
Few questions in political science have received more attention in recent times than the role of trust in democracy, democratic government and political participation. In Britain this has become a particular concern as levels of democratic engagement in traditional politics have declined, exacerbated by media reports of politicians' untrustworthy behaviour. A common feature of previous empirical work on political trust is that trust is treated as a single theoretical concept. Scholars have assumed that trust operates in a similar fashion across different political institutions-that citizens' trust mechanisms are the same for trusting parliament, the prime minister or the European Union. As a consequence, the operationalisation of trust has generally been through a single measure. In this article we draw on recent research from political theory, where different forms of judgements whether to trust-strategic, moral and deliberative-have been conceptualised, to argue that trust judgements may vary in application and significance depending upon the institution under examination. Using specially designed data sets generated from YouGov's weekly omnibus and the British Election Study's Continuous Monitoring Panel, we operationalise these three forms of trust judgements to examine trust in two British institutions-political parties and politicians. We find, as hypothesised, that different forms of trust judgements are of differing significance depending upon the institution under consideration.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.