A new era of political campaigning? An analysis of campaign spending at the 2019 UK General Election

Modern election campaigns are increasingly said to rely upon digital technology and platforms. According to this narrative, political parties are turning towards digital technology to understand more about their voters and target them with greater precision, and that as a consequence they are allocating more of their resources towards commissioning suppliers who can provide these services. However, research in this area has typically struggled to quantify the extent of this transformation. Through an analysis of a unique dataset of over 13,000 invoices recording campaign spending at the 2019 UK General Election, we examine the importance that contemporary campaigns are attaching to this form of activity. We only find evidence of a very small number of organisations who are explicitly providing digital services to campaigns, although these companies also tend to attract high levels of spend, particularly for services related to social media advertising. More generally, a much greater proportion of campaign expenditure came in the form of more traditional methods of electioneering, most notably through the printing and distribution of campaign literature. This paper offers a counterweight to accounts suggesting that parties are attaching less importance to offline methods of campaigning.