1. Crowdsourcing campaigns: A new dataset for studying British parties’ electoral communications
Caitlin Milazzo
University of Nottingham
Jesse Hammond
University of California, Davis

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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Using crowdsourced information to lower the costs

6. 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

7. 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

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

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

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

11. Targets of negative messages – Major parties

12. Targets of negative messages – Minor parties

13. 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

14. 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] 

15. 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**

16. 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

17. 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