Parliamentary candidates and their campaign messages at the 2019 General Election

Abstract

The 2019 General Election brought about a significant change in the parliamentary balance of power. There has already been much attention devoted to how parties and their leaders campaigned in the run up to the polling day. Using original leaflet data from the OpenElections project, this study extends the focus to individual candidates by exploring the nature of local campaign communications. We find that candidates make little effort to promote their personal traits, with personalisation of leaflets remaining largely limited to offering visual cues in the shape of candidate photos. We also find that while negative campaign messages are common, they tend to relate to an opposing party more generally. Similarly, we find that highlighting the tactical situation in the constituency remains a rare practice. Our findings suggest that there is still considerable room for candidates to tailor their campaign materials to their personal attributes and the local electoral context.

Campaign communication and legislative leadership

“…We hope that our findings encourage further work on individual MP-level congruence for additional types of communication, contexts, and countries. For example, scholars could compare candidates' statements on social media (Barberá et al, 2019), campaign speeches, or election leaflets (Trumm et al, 2023) with the content of legislative speech (Proksch and Slapin, 2015), legislative posts (Bergman et al, 2022), or communication on social media (Castanho Silva and Proksch, 2022). Our finding that pledges constitute a large share of the content of manifestos opens up avenues for future research on candidates' pledge making and fulfillment, which has mainly been assessed on the party level (e.g., Thomson et al, 2017;Naurin et al, 2019).…”

“…Consequently, this precludes the use of manifestos for analyzing the specific priorities expressed by individual candidates during election campaigns. Some candidates distribute leaflets (Trumm et al, 2023). Many candidates, though not all, are active on social media (Castanho Silva and Proksch, 2022).…”