The Quantity and Quality of Individual Campaign Linkage. Constituency Candidates in Comparative Perspective

Political campaigns are major means to link citizens and the state. Campaigns inform voters about past achievements in politics, stake out key visions to guide future policy-making, and provide avenues for participation. Surprisingly, we have little comparative insights on the quantity and quality of campaign linkage that could unveil cross-national differences and also explore the conditions of vital campaign linkage. This paper stresses constituency candidates on the campaign trail as one important component of campaign linkage. It explores the campaign efforts and styles of constituency candidates that it considers to be distinct and crucial dimensions of campaign linkage. Among others, it focuses on candidates’ resource investments, the extent to which they employ active campaign strategies to engage voters, and the extent to which they stress issues important to their constituents. Advancing from these descriptive concerns, the paper addresses those factors that most affect variance in candidates’ campaign efforts and styles. It does so from a comparative perspective to better understand the systemic but also individual level prerequisites of campaign linkage. While past students of campaign linkage emphasized the parties’ dominance of the campaign process, recent work on constituency candidates stressed individual agency and intra-party heterogeneity as a visible component in constituency campaigns. We explore the patterns and conditions of individual level campaign linkage on the basis of a pooled data set that includes recent German and British candidate studies. Comparing Germany and the UK allows to provide crucial variance at the party organizational and electoral levels that are widely considered to be key factors in explaining the quantity and quality of campaign linkage.