Crowdsourcing campaigns: A new dataset for studying British parties’ electoral communications Caitlin Milazzo University of Nottingham caitlin.milazzo@nottingham.ac.uk Jesse Hammond University of California, Davis jrhammond@ucdavis.edu

We know a lot about what British parties do to attract voters…

But we know less about what parties say to them Providing information one of the key components of a local campaign Parties spent more than £15 million on ‘unsolicited materials’ (40 per cent of all campaign spending) Leaflets the most of common form of election contact (2015, BES) Parties strategic about what they do, so perhaps also about what they say

Gathering data on election communications is costly Shephard (2007) – Scotland, 2001, 2005 Contact with election agents But small no. of communications (2001 N = 70, 2005 N = 51) Fisher (2005) – 223 constituencies in England, Scotland, Wales Volunteers in each constituency collected every election communication delivered 3,459 election communications

Using crowdsourced information to lower the costs

Building the dataset Python-scraping to gather images, meta-information Some leaflets discarded (local elections, incomplete leaflets) Major, widely-competitive parties CON, LAB, LD, UKIP, Greens, and SNP → All won > 1 million votes Insufficient leaflets from PC Additional (manual) coding 21 policy dimensions (UK Policy Agendas Project) Candidate traits Images Mention of opposing parties/candidates

Distribution of election leaflets Party Count Per cent Conservative 750 22.70 Green 373 11.29 Labour 891 26.97 Liberal Democrats 727 22.00 SNP 96 2.91 Ukip 467 14.13 N (leaflets) 3,304 100.00

Distribution of leaflets 429 constituencies (68 per cent) No significant political differences between sample and omitted But some (expected) demographic/regional differences

Using the data When and where do parties/candidates discuss their opponents@ Negative message = Talking about an opponent (Lau and Pomper, 2002) Parties did a lot of talking about each other in 2015

Leaflets containing at least one negative message Note: Each leaflet is weighted by the total no. of leaflets collected in the constituency.

Targets of negative messages – Major parties

Targets of negative messages – Minor parties

Using a selection model to understand when and where parties talk about their opponents 1st stage: Seat included 2010 Margin of victory (-) 2010 Incumbent party Constituency affluence (+) Population density (+) Internet take-up (+) 2nd stage: Leaflet contains message about opponent 2010 Margin of victory (-) Incumbent (-) Female candidate (-) Black or ethnic minority candidate Author party

First stage: Leaflet from seat included  Variables Coef. Std. err. 2010 Margin of victory -0.008** (0.003) 2010 constituency status (ref=Other-hold)   Conservative-hold 0.631** (0.281) Labour-hold 0.524** (0.289) Lib Dem-hold 1.012** (0.299) Constituency affluence 0.328** (0.047) Population density 0.010** (0.002) Internet take-up -0.291** (0.218) Constant 1.793** (0.302) N (Censored N) 3342 (199) ρ -1.426** Wald Χ2 [p > Χ2] 15.35 [0.0001] 

Second stage: Leaflet contains message about opponent  Variables Coef. Std. err. Predicted change 2010 Margin of victory -0.005** (0.002) +0.074** Incumbent -0.130** (0.062) -0.037** Female candidate (ref=male) -0.171** (0.053) -0.050** BME candidate (ref=white) -0.119** (0.085) -0.034** Party (ref=Labour)   Conservative (0.071) -0.014** Lib Dem 0.075** (0.072) +0.018** SNP -0.537** (0.137) -0.175** Green -1.227** (0.088) -0.445** UKIP -1.316** (0.081) -0.478**

Why do we care? Every party leader promised a positive campaign But we have few ways of evaluating how well promises were kept Objective measures of negativity are important! UKIP perceived to have the most negative campaign (YouGov) But perceptions suffer from partisan bias (Bartels, 2002) Election communications are critical in British elections But we know very little about what is in them

A new dataset for studying electoral communications No other data available that allow us to explore systematic variation in messages But, some limitations Self-reported data No knowledge of the population of leaflets Missing areas Thoughts on this are most welcome! Findings consistent with American politics, (limited) previous research in Britain