As part of our recent Customer Needs and Solutions political marketing issue Mitch Lovett, a professor at the University of Rochester, describes key issues in empirical political marketing research.
Key Empirical Political Marketing Research Data Sources
Lovett outlines key data sources. These include the (US) National Election Studies and polls. Voting behavior/intentions can be combined with another source of data — such as television viewership. As a result, some exciting research questions can be answered. The researcher can then class these topics under major headings. Headings such as the impact of advertising, how news coverage influences an election, and, increasingly, the impact of social media. An exciting source of data is field experiments. Such data can be especially useful in helping to better understand the impact of tactical political marketing actions.
Voter Turnout
One problem Lovett addresses is the challenge of understanding turnout. Whether a potential voter actually votes. This contrasts with the more obvious problem of relative choice. When they vote who do they vote for? This gets to a big argument with some profound implications for the nature of political parties. Can you win elections by turning out your base? Or do you have to make yourself as appealing as possible to the median voter? Read arguments between politicians in the same party. Look for these arguments. They are normally there somewhere.
I am pretty cynical about claims that a party will win on turnout. Okay. I think they are mostly BS wishful thinking. People who won’t grow up and be serious. Exhibit A is Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader in Britain. He apparently enthused a load of young people. Did they turn up? Maybe a few. But more turned up to not vote for him. The result? He, and the Labour Party, lost badly. Twice. He claimed to have won the argument. That was nice for him. Terrible for everyone who needed him to win. But nice for him.
That said, modeling the separate effects of turnout and median voter appeal can be a great challenge. The big picture strategic questions — will a more to the extreme in our policies motivate voters who don’t usually vote? — can be very hard to measure.
Advertising Effects
We can break advertising effects down into two impacts.
…later work overwhelmingly finds that total advertising has a negligible effect on turnout. …relative candidate choice effects are estimated to be large enough to be pivotal in relatively close races.
Lovett, 2019
Advertising does matter but don’t necessarily expect it to get out those who don’t usually vote.
Given this how then to get people out to vote? Field experiments suggest that “…face-to-face contacts produce measurable turnout effects” (Lovett, 2019). The story can get quite complex. Data is messy. Very messy.
Research Potential Remains
There are plenty of important questions in political marketing and data is only becoming more available. I’ve said this before but, in conclusion, empirical work in this area has an awful lot of potential.
For more on political marketing research see here and here.
Read: Mitchell Lovett, (2019), Empirical Research on Political Marketing: A Selected Review, Customer Needs and Solutions, December 2019, Volume 6, Issue 3–4, pp 49–56