General Election 2005 – What the Voters Saw

Introduction

Despite the intense media scrutiny of national campaigns, very little attention is generally paid to the campaigning material delivered through potential voters� letterboxes or to the contact they have with parties on the telephone or the doorstep. This project set out to analyse both the quality and quantity of literature delivered by the parties in Great Britain during the General Election campaign.

313 volunteers in 223 constituencies recorded every contact they received from political parties. They collected 3,459 letters and leaflets as well as logging all doorstep contacts and telephone calls.This is the largest study of General Election campaigning material in British history.The information was collated by the New Politics Network, who completed the statistical analysis and case study examples. Dr Justin Fisher carried out the analysis of subject matter and style.

The study does not take account of media advertising or poster campaigns, and it should be remembered that these will have played at least an equal role in the public�s perceptions of the parties.Despite this,the results provide the largest ever overview of a British election campaign and allow us unprecedented insight into what voters across the nation saw of each of the parties in the run up to the election.As such, they are an invaluable tool for assessing the health of local activism, of political parties and of our democracy as a whole.

Executive Summary

The first chapter is an analysis of the number of letters and leaflets delivered to our monitors and of the number of personal contacts they received from the parties. The results show that very few monitors were contacted either by telephone or on the doorstep.They also confirm that voters in safe seats receive far fewer contacts than those in

marginals and that the number of contacts does correlate with turnout.These findings highlight the problem with an electoral system which incentivises parties to target campaigning only on certain seats. They also raise the

question of political parties� capacity for large-scale canvassing which is heavily dependant on an ever-shrinking supply of volunteers. Some potential solutions to these problems are considered.

In the second chapter, Dr Justin Fisher looks at the content of the literature and examines the level of positive and negative campaigning, personal attacks and local issues in the campaigns of the three main parties. He also analyses

the emphasis which each of these parties placed on different policy areas, especially immigration and asylum and the EU. He finds that there was generally more positive than negative campaigning but that the latter was more prevalent in marginal seats. Of the three main parties, Conservative leaflets were the most negative and Labour�s were the most positive. The Liberal Democrats were the least �local� party. And although Conservative coverage of immigration and asylum was predominately negative, it featured in fewer leaflets than other policy areas, was not universally negative and (unlike their coverage of Europe) did not vary by marginality.

In the third and fourth chapters, Emily Robinson analyses the content of leaflets delivered by the Scottish and Welsh national parties, and by the smaller UK-wide parties. She also considers the use of immigration and asylum issues in election material.

The final chapter is a detailed analysis of the literature received by monitors in five very different campaigns. Lancaster and Wyre, Edinburgh South and Skipton and Ripon were chosen as fairly typical constituencies ranging from the very marginal to the very safe – including one which fell somewhere in between.We also looked at Hornsey and Wood Green and Bethnal Green and Bow, as examples of previously safe Labour seats which changed hands as a result of fierce targeted campaigns from the Liberal Democrats and the Respect-Unity Coalition.

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ISBN: 0 9545982 7 X