Electoral campaigns aim to affect elections ‘outputs. While campaigning serves a multiplicity of purposes, from informing the electorate on party’s programmes and stands to reinforcing ties with members and voters, its core goal is to provide electoral gains. The literature on campaign effectiveness, at first solely concerned with US elections, expanded enormously in the last decade. However, most studies tend to be based on a single case.
This article looks at a number of elections within the UK, namely the 2010 UK general election, the 2011 Scottish Parliament election, the 2011 National Assembly for Wales election, and the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly election. By making use of spending data collected by the Electoral Commission this article seeks to disentangle the effectiveness of electoral campaigns under different electoral rules and in different electoral context. By analysing each different context, as well as the 2010 general election, this study contains a comparative dimension and aims to assess the performances of the same parties under different electoral rules. Such a set up represents a unique opportunity of evaluating effectiveness of electoral campaigns across systems as well as over different ‘level’ of electoral competition.
Finally, the availability of election studies for each and every one of these elections allows for integration of voters’ studies data with spending returns.
