Campaigns on the ground and online.

1. Campaigns on the ground and online. Dr. Matthew Wall, Political Campaigns: Week6/7

2. This week’s talk • A combination of two topics: • 1) Ground wars – direct political communication during political campaigns. • 2) The ‘first wave’ of studies of parties’ and candidates’ use of the internet.

3. Ground wars • Distinction between national-level ‘air war’ that takes place in national media and local-level ‘ground war’ conducted by individual candidates, supporters and party members in their area. • While the ‘air war’ element has become more and more central to political campaigns, ground wars remain a vital part of the process, and have been of considerable interest to scholars.

4. Ground wars • Ground Activities: • Local fundraising: Everything from raffles, to pub quizzes, to ‘church gate’ collections. • Postering, distribution of printed leaflets and other electoral hardware (including distribution of buttons, bumper stickers, and ‘yard signs’). • The ‘Canvass’: Door-to-door housecalls by the candidate and/or teams of volunteers. A form of core vote research: What are the most important local problems? (Query cards) Which voters are most receptive? Which residents most likely to vote? Which individuals most likely to make a campaign contribution? Collection of contact details: addresses, phone numbers, emails of likely supporters to streamline future contact. Thus data collection and management is a key feature of effective local campaigning.

5. Groundwars • Activities: • Mobilization of support on election day: • ‘Knocking up’ likely supporters (literally knocking on their doors and reminding them to vote, in some cases provision of transport to the polling centers). • Telephone and email bombs to lists of identified supporters. • Research from the USA shows that personal housecalls are considerably more effective for turnout than phonecalls, but they require far more human resources to conduct. • Also, making sure that likely supporters are registered to vote prior to election day.

6. Example of ground war materials: summary of issues collected by canvassers in an Irish local election campaign.

10. An empty ritual or a political weapon? • ‘Modernisation’ of politics from the mid 1950s onwards saw analysts more concerned with the national than the local. • Local campaigns were seen as part of the ‘ritual’ of politics, and largely as expressive, rather than instrumental. • This view was championed by British political scientists in Oxford, led by David Butler. • Argued that partisan trends/‘swings’ were largely uniform across constituencies.

11. An empty ritual or a political weapon? • However, from the early 1990s, several UK scholars have found evidence that local campaigning is a significant determinant of candidate and party performance. • Scholars have used a variety of methods to measure intensity of localized campaigns: • Voter surveys (frequency of reported contacts) • Surveys of election agents (campaign organisers) on the number of volunteers and extent of activities. • Local spending returns • Combinations of several such items. • Have consistently found that candidates with strong local campaigns perform better, though this varies across parties to some extent (Conservatives appear to perform slightly less well in this regard).

12. Targeting local campaigns • Ideally, parties seek to campaign most intensively in constituencies that are electorally ‘marginal’: i.e. where the race is close. • Resources can be somewhat wasted in ‘safe’ seats, and are of little use in ‘no hope’ seats. • Research indicates more intense local campaigning (UK) in ‘marginal’ seats, though also reports ‘inertia’ effects: more resources than ideal in ‘safe’ seats. • Simply, parties have limited capacity to move supporters to preferred constituencies (though ‘bussing in’ of canvassers/volunteers is not unheard of).

13. Significant variation in extent of ‘ground war’ activity. • Very high in countries with personalized systems (where candidates rather than parties win votes) in Ireland, the UK and the USA proportions of voters reporting personal campaign contact varies from 45% to 65% (with Ireland on the upper end). • Lower in countries with party lists – though considerably higher in countries where lists are ‘open’ rather than closed. • E.g., Only 6% of voters reported personal contact in Spanish election study).

14. Towards nationally coordinated local campaigns? • Notable increase in involvement of central party in organization and roll out of localized campaigns. • Increasing supervision of local campaign materials and messaging. • Use of centralized telephone canvassing and polling to inform the local campaign. • In some cases, appointment of campaign agent by/from the central party, rather than local organization.

15. Online campaigns – the first phase • From the mid 1990s onwards, the potential of the internet for political campaigning/activism was a source of popular and scholarly interest. • However, the process was gradual, having a campaign website was a minority phenomenon among candidates into the early 2000s. • Howard Dean’s (2004) use of internet to raise funds in USA primary showed potential – Obama 2008 arguably ‘mainstreamed’ online campaigning.

16. Online campaigns – the first phase • The internet in the period roughly from the mid 1990s to the mid 2000s provided different platforms and opportunities than the contemporary internet. • User-generated content played a far smaller role, with a small number of web site designers and a large number of consumers. • Hence, analysts in this period focused on the websites created by parties and candidates (as well as state institutions) as the key objects of interest.

17. Political takes on the internet • Two grand hypotheses of the 1990s • 1) Cyber-optimists: internet can dramatically enhance participatory democracy – facilitates participatory communication patterns (as opposed to ‘mass’ communication technologies). • Internet technology could potentially facilitate greater citizen participation in democratic decision making and accountability – especially its facility to register political preferences of large numbers of citizens. • Relatively low cost of launching a website could create a more level playing field?

18. Cyber-pessimists • 2) Cyber-pessimists: ‘Politics as usual’ (Margolis and Resnick, 2000) will prevail. • Resource imbalances offline will translate into the online sphere – larger parties, companies etc. will have both better online ‘products’ (due to access to expertise) and a greater online following (due to name recognition). • The ‘normalisation hypothesis’.

19. Practical research in the first phase • Looked at 3 principal questions: • 1) Do party/candidate websites make use of ‘bottom up’ communication capacities of the internet? • 2) What factors explain uptake of cyber-campaign by parties and candidates? • 3) Is online campaig effective in terms of winning votes?

20. 1) Do party/candidate websites make use of ‘bottom up’ communication capacities of the internet? • This question was investigated by content analysis of campaign websites. • Identified ‘information provision’ functions versus interactive functions. • Information provision functions related to the parties’ history, policies and candidates. • Early stage interactive functions included: online polls, discussion boards, facilities for new members to join online, candidate blogs that allow users to comment.

21. 1) Do party/candidate websites make use of ‘bottom up’ communication capacities of the internet? • Empirical analyses found that party sites used a far greater number of ‘information provision’ tools than ‘interactive’ ones. • One scholar (Rachel Gibson) reviewed the findings of this literature as follows: ‘websites appear to be largely mechanisms for feeding information to activists and journalists and for symbolizing the ‘cutting edge’ credentials of parties, rather than providing any meaningful interaction with voters’.

22. 2) What factors explain uptake of cyber-campaign by parties and candidates? • Researchers saw an opportunity to examine adoption of a new communication phenomenon in real time. • Research in this area tended to focus on the likelihood of individual candidates launching a campaign site (larger n for analysis). • One significant determinant was ‘demand’ candidates in regions with high levels of internet penetration were more likely to launch websites than those in low penetration areas.

23. 2) What factors explain uptake of cyber-campaign by parties and candidates? • Party factors: • 1) Resources – candidates from larger/better resourced parties were more likely to have webpages overall. Some argued that this was because central parties often paid for expertise in web design – most large parties developed a ‘site in a box’ template for their candidates. • 2) Culture – some argued that new and far left party candidates may be more likely to launch sites, little evidence that this was the case.

24. 2) What factors explain uptake of cyber-campaign by parties and candidates? • Candidate factors: • 1) Demographics – some evidence that same demographic profiles who were more likely to use web were more likely to launch sites as candidates. • 2) Competition – it was thought that candidates facing close races would be more likely to launch campaign sites. Little evidence that this was the case. • 3) ‘Peer pressure’ candidates look to other competitors and launch sites to ‘keep up’ and not look out of date in their areas.

25. 3) Web campaign effectiveness • Not a promising scenario : Web campaigning accorded low priority by candidates, least consumed and trusted medium among voters. • Moreover, election surveys indicate that party/candidate sites are visited only by a small percentage (5-10%) of voters.

26. % Frequencies of consultation of media for political news by Irish citizens. Source: INES 2007.

28. 3) Web campaigneffectiveness • However, several articles find evidence of online campaign effectiveness: D’Alessio (1997) US 1996; Gibson and MacAllister (2006, 2011) Australia 2004, 2007; Sudulich and Wall (2010) Ireland 2007. • Several explanations: • Direct effects • ‘two stage’ effect. • indirect boost in offline media coverage

29. Second phase web campaigning • Subject of next week’s lecture and one of this week’s presentations. • Movement from website only to mulilateral online campaigns on several platforms. • Increasing recognition of cyber campaigning as a mainstream activity in which vast majority of candidates participate.