The effectiveness of local party campaigns in 2005: combining evidence from
campaign spending and agent survey data
Edward Fieldhouse and David Cutts
School of Social Sciences
University of Manchester
DRAFT: Pending publication. Please do not cite without permission
Abstract
Recently there has been a renewed interest in the role of local campaigns and their
effectiveness on increasing turnout and support for political parties. However there
has been disagreement over how to best measure campaign effort. This paper
advances the current literature by using a latent variable modelling approach to utilise,
for the first time, evidence from a survey of agents, official records of campaign
spending and individual voter survey data to produce a combined measure of
campaign effort and thereby overcomes a long standing debate about which is the best
measure. We then use this measure (latent variable) in a structural equation model of
party performance to assess the effect of campaign effort of the three main parties at
the 2005 British General Election. We find that in terms of both the delivery and
effectiveness campaigns the parties behave in a way consistent with a rational model
of party behaviour, but constrained by contextual factors.
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