Do local campaigns matter? Campaign spending, the local canvass and party support in Canada

Carty, R. Kenneth; Eagles, Munroe

doi:10.1016/s0261-3794(98)00044-4

Cited by 71 publications

(77 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…Indeed, recent studies have detected substantial local effects in both parliamentary and presidential systems, and have gone some distance toward identifying campaign factors that seem to affect candidate success~Black, 1984; Carty and Eagles, 1999;Hands, 1997a, 1997b;Whiteley and Seyd, 1994!. Not surprisingly in these studies, financial and volunteer resources have consistently emerged as important variables in the process, at least for challenging or non-governing parties.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Local Campaign Effects: An Experiment Involving Literature Mail Drops in the 2007 Ontario Election

2010

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Abstract. An invariant feature of constituency election campaigns is the literature mail drop, usually a one-page leaflet or card left at the door profiling the candidate and appealing for electoral support. In this article, we report on a field experiment designed to assess the effects of such mail drops. The experiment was conducted during the 2007 Ontario provincial election campaign in the constituency of Cambridge and entailed distributing literature for the Green party candidate in that constituency. After randomly assigning constituency polls to treatment and control groups, and delivering the Green candidate's partisan literature only to the selected treatment group polls, we compared the candidate's support levels in the treated polls with those in the control group. Our research detected a modest effect associated with the literature drop. The effect was largely limited to constituency neighbourhoods fitting at least part of the Green party's traditional demographic, that is, those with higher than average socio-economic status.Résumé. Un trait commun des campagnes électorales au niveau des circonscriptions est la distribution de publipostages. Il s'agit habituellement d'un dépliant d'une page déposé dans la boîte aux lettres et donnant le profil du candidat tout en invitant les gens à voter pour lui. Notre article porte sur une expérience que nous avons menée pour évaluer les effets de ces publipostages sur le vote. Au cours de la campagne des élections provinciales de l'Ontario, en 2007, dans la circonscription de Cambridge. nous avons distribué des documents sur le candidat du Parti vert de cette circonscription. Les bureaux de scrutin ont étés divisés, au hasard, en deux groupes, soit un groupe de traitement et un groupe de contrôle. Nous avons distribué les documents seulement aux électeurs du premier groupe. Après l'élection, nous avons comparé les niveaux d'appui au candidat vert dans les deux groupes. Les résultats montrent un effet modeste associé à la distribution des publipostages. L'effet observé était en grande partie limité aux quartiers répondant, en partie du moins, au profil démographique traditionnellement favorable aux partis écologiques, soit les quartiers ayant un statut socio-économique plus élevé que la moyenne.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Revisiting Local Campaign Effects: An Experiment Involving Literature Mail Drops in the 2007 Ontario Election

2010

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“…This prediction is strengthened by mounting evidence to suggest that parties can gain electoral advantages from the kind of grassroots support that party members provide (Carty and Eagles 1999;Pattie and Johnston 2004;Karp et al, 2008;Tavits 2011, Tavits 2012Whiteley and Seyd, 1994. ) However, membership numbers alone do not tell us whether parties which lose members -or which never adopted the membership-based organizing style of the mass membership parties -are less capable of inspiring political participation and civic engagement among members or non-members (Allern and Pedersen, 2007).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Which members? Using cross-national surveys to study party membership

Ponce

Scarrow

2016

Party Politics

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Reports of party membership have documented steep declines in formal enrollment in many countries, but numbers alone tell us little about the systemic causes or likely implications of such drops. Existing cross-national surveys can help illuminate the extent and consequences of these changes. Unfortunately, they are difficult to use for this purpose because differences in question wording and institutional differences in the meaning of party membership produce unstable results. This paper proposes to overcome these obstacles by using behavioral measures of party membership in survey-based studies of party membership. We demonstrate that such measures produce results which are more consistent across surveys and therefore more meaningful. We then illustrate their utility by using a behaviorally-qualified measure to study how party membership decline has affected parties' ability to mobilize grassroots partisan participation. Our analysis also shows that even though reported party membership declined from the 1990s to the 2000s, there was surprisingly little change in this decade in the number of politically active partisans.

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“…Gimpel et al (2006), for example, find that parties' donor support bases are often clustered in geographical space and, in some cases, are even more spatially consolidated than those districts from which parties chiefly draw their electoral support. Huckfeldt and Sprague (1992) and Carty and Eagles (1999) demonstrate that parties target localities of proximately located voters and think about their efforts in terms of adjacent neighborhoods and districts. The strategic viability of these exercises is evident, as recently demonstrated by Tavits (2012), who argues that highly organized parties (measured by indicators such as number and strength of branch offices) tend to fare better on election day.…”

Section: Geography As Both Determinant and Mediatormentioning

confidence: 99%

Electoral strategy in geographic space: Accounting for spatial proximity in district-level party competition

Potter

Olivella

2015

Electoral Studies

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a b s t r a c tHow does a political party choose where to field candidates or party lists? Traditional models of party competition mainly focus on strategy: parties enter districts where they believe they could win many votes or seats. These strategic considerations are typically couched in terms of ideological positioning and the mechanics of the vote-to-seat translation at the district level. However, parties' entry decisions are also subject to geographical limitations and no prior study has explored the extent to which geography limits strategic entry at the district level. In this paper, we explore the severity of those limitations by modeling strategic and geographic factors side-by-side. In so doing, we find that geography limits parties' entry decisions, specifically by dampening the effects of strategic incentives to enter in geographically distant districts. We utilize a highly detailed district-level database of seven multimember European countries and tens of thousands of party entry decisions across these districts.

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Do local campaigns matter? Campaign spending, the local canvass and party support in Canada

Cited by 71 publications

References 21 publications

Revisiting Local Campaign Effects: An Experiment Involving Literature Mail Drops in the 2007 Ontario Election

Revisiting Local Campaign Effects: An Experiment Involving Literature Mail Drops in the 2007 Ontario Election

Which members? Using cross-national surveys to study party membership

Electoral strategy in geographic space: Accounting for spatial proximity in district-level party competition

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