Electoral campaigns aim to affect the outcome of elections. While campaigning serves a multiplicity of purposes, from informing the electorate on a party’s programme 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, has expanded enormously over the last decade.
However, most studies tend to be based on a single case. This article, instead, looks at a number of elections within the UK: the 2010 UK general election, the 2011 elections for the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly. 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 contexts. By analysing each different context, as well as the 2010 general election, this study contains a comparative dimension and aims to assess the performance of the same parties under these different electoral rules. Such a set up represents a unique opportunity to evaluate the effectiveness of electoral campaigns across systems as well as over different ‘levels’ of electoral competition.
Finally, the availability of election studies for each and every one of these elections allows for the integration of data on studies on voters with spending returns.
