Mobilising support when the stakes are high: Mass emails affect constituent‐to‐legislator lobbying

Abstract

Mass emails are frequently used by advocacy groups to mobilise supporters to lobby legislators. But how effective are they at inducing constituent-to-legislator lobbying when the stakes are high? We test the efficacy of a large-scale email campaign conducted by the UK's main anti-Brexit organisation. In 2019, the group prominently displayed a 'Write to your MP' tool on their website and assigned 119,362 supporters represented by legislators with incongruent views to one of four email messages encouraging them to write to their MP or a control condition (no email). Messages varied across two factors: whether the MP's incongruent position was highlighted, and if urgency was emphasised. We find that 3.4 per cent of treatment subjects contacted their representative, compared to 0.1 per cent of those in the control, representing an additional 3,344 emails sent to MPs. We show that there was no substitution away from the most frequently used online legislator contact platform in the United Kingdom. While, on average, position and urgency cues had no marginal effects above the standard email, the most engaged supporters were more mobilised when informed that their MP held incongruent views. This study shows that advocacy groups can use low-cost communication techniques to mobilise supporters to lobby representatives when the stakes are high.

The Use of AI by Election Campaigns

“…Generative AI in the near future: The role of campaign volunteer Political campaigns have long used digital technologies such as mass emails (Turnbull-Dugarte et al, 2022;Lawall et al, 2024), peer-to-peer messaging apps (Moura and Michelson, 2017;Schein et al, 2021) and of course social media platforms such as Facebook (Foos et al, 2021) or X (Coppock, Guess and Ternovski, 2016) with the intent to mobilise supporters to donate, volunteer, or engage in other forms of campaign activism, offline and online. They have also used social media platforms to reach out to voters via digital ads in order to persuade or mobilise them to vote (Coppock, Green and Porter, 2022).…”

Lobbyierende Kantone

“…«lobbying tactics», «advocacy tactics», «political strategies»), «Einfluss» (syn. Erfolg) als deren Ziel und «Kontext» als Rahmenbedingungen, unter denen sich (versuchte) politische Einflussnahme vollzieht (u. a. Baumgartner und Leech, 1998;Hojnacki und Kimball, 1999;Hall und Deardorff, 2006;Beyers et al, 2008;Baumgartner et al, 2009;Dür, 2008;Hojnacki et al, 2012;de Figueiredo und Richter, 2014;Pedersen et al, 2014;Klüver, 2013b;Constantelos, 2018;Binderkrantz und Pedersen, 2019;Junk, 2019Junk, , 2020aBinderkrantz et al, 2020;Junk et al, 2022;Crepaz et al, 2023;Turnbull-Dugarte et al, 2022). Wie der vielzitierte, breit wahrgenommene Überblicksartikel Advances in Empirical Research on Lobbying von de Figueiredo und Richter (2014, 164)…”

“…McFarland, 2004McFarland, , 2010Beyers et al, 2008;Hojnacki et al, 2012;Grossmann, 2013). Eine Forschungstradition indes, die jüngst auch wesentliche methodische Ausdifferenzierung erfuhr -und weiterhin erfährt: Das Arsenal an methodischen Zugängen verbreiterte sich sukzessive; es umfasst gegenwärtig qualitativethnografische Zugänge wie teilnehmende Beobachtungen (Phinney, 2017;Tyllström, 2017) ebenso wie quasi-experimentelle Auswertungsverfahren für «Big Data» und/oder komplexe Netzwerkstrukturen (Heaney und Leifeld, 2018;Turnbull-Dugarte et al, 2022).…”