An examination of candidate-level campaign spending by the three major parties?

University of Edinburgh, Challenges to Campaigning Conference

Chris Terry (Electoral Reform Society) and Michael Turner (Plymouth University)

Chris.Terry@electoral-reform.org.ukMichael.Turner@Plymouth.ac.uk

The idea…

A more fluid seat strategy

The notion of ‘target seats’ is perhaps an outdated or at least more fluid concept in modern politics

As Fisher et al (2010 & 2011) describe, what has emerged in contemporary elections is not necessarily a static and/or binary view of whether a seat will be seriously contested by a party, but instead the central party focus is based on a shifting set of identified and graded seats based on criteria that is perceived to be relevant

Political and electoral circumstances will undoubtedly shift these seats in and out of the focus of party strategists, thus there may be increasing shades of grey in assessing where parties spent their money

The up sum from existing research…• Campaign financing is a useful proxy for a measure of campaign intensity

as figures are easily available from bodies such as the UK’s Electoral Commission, because they are relatively objective and comparable.

• The first work into campaign financing mostly tended to concentrate on the issues of who donated, how much they donated and what the money was used for (EG Heard (1960), Alexander (1972), Dunn (1972).

• More recent work has begun to touch on the issue of party strategy. Johnston and Pattie (2011) found that a vote ‘cost’ around 43 pence in the 2005 election and 33 pence in 1997 (which meant a rise basically in line with inflation). They also demonstrate that the challenger party (Labour in 1997 and the Conservatives in 2005) benefitted more from additional spending to a considerable extent. They view this as another element of the incumbency/challenger effect covered in previous research in this area

The up sum from existing research…• Similarly Fieldhouse and Cutts (2009) demonstrate that political

parties generally spend money in a way that is consistent with a rational view of party behaviour, and Fisher, Cutts and Fieldhouse (2011) demonstrate that Labour’s 2010 campaign appeared to be more ‘effective’ despite the electoral context suggesting that good campaign management can produce strong yields for parties even in unfavourable circumstances.

• Most recently the work of Sudulich, has looked at disaggregating spending returns in Ireland (Sudulich and Wall (2011)) and the UK (Sudulich (2013). Sudulich’s work suggests that the most effective campaign strategy is to diversify spending.

• Yet a question not answered by the literature is which kind of spending has the biggest effect and how parties differ in the use of that spending. Those are the key research questions of this paper.

Objective

There are three main objectives from this paper clearly defined:

1. To identify the different spending strategies of the three major parties at GE 2010

2. To model the efficacy of spending and types of spend on electoral outcome

Data & Methods

Data, spending categories & target seats

The Data

• Electoral Commission dataset detailing spending returns

• Including advertising, unsolicited returns (leaflets, direct mailings), etc.

• Combined with election results

Overview of Candidate-Level Spending

How much was spent, on what and who?

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Overview of Spending

Model Results

models of electoral success candidate-level campaign spends

Multivariate Results

Multivariate Results

Up sum from the models:• Models generally suggest that incumbency is a

particularly strong factor.• As expected most things are significant• But Lib Dem model significantly different• Unsolicited long campaign seems to have

insignificant effect• Small money also appears to point in the

unexpected direction

Discussion

Campaign spending makes a difference

Discussion

• Conservative spending efforts were more likely to fail in seats where spending was responded to by Labour and the Liberal Democrats

• Particularly in seats where the parties were established

Discussion

• Campaign spending during the short campaign is highly associated with electoral success

• Particularly Advertising, Unsolicited and Agents & Staff

• The Liberal Democrats don’t follow the trend of the two major parties

• This may be due to their spending strategy and/or their unique electoral situation

Further Research

• What are we going to do to improve the research frame?

• How will this heuristic research help further our overall research?

• Comments welcome on how to better explore the spending data