‘The personal touch’: Campaign personalisation in Britain
| Author | Joshua Townsley,Siim Trumm,Caitlin Milazzo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044646 |
| Published date | 01 November 2022 |
| Date | 01 November 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044646
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(4) 702 –722
© The Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481211044646
journals.sagepub.com/home/bpi
‘The personal touch’:
Campaign personalisation
in Britain
Joshua Townsley , Siim Trumm
and Caitlin Milazzo
Abstract
Parliamentary candidates face choices about the extent to which they personalise their election
campaigns. They must strike a balance between promoting their party’s message and their own
personal appeal, and they must decide how much effort to invest in developing personalised
campaign activities. These decisions determine the nature of the campaigns that candidates run,
and therefore, voters’ experience during elections. In this article, we use individual-level survey
data from the British Representation Study to explore the extent to which candidates personalise
their election campaigns in terms of messaging focus and activities. We find that candidates who
live in the area they seek to represent, and those who are more positive about their electoral
chances, run more personalised campaigns, in terms of focus and activities. Incumbents’ campaigns,
meanwhile, are more personalised in their focus only, while candidates who have held national
party office tend to use a greater range of personalised campaign activities.
Keywords
Britain, campaign behaviour, personalisation, political communication
Introduction
Contemporary British politics is often characterised by voter discontent and disillusion-
ment with politicians (Allen and Birch, 2015; Jennings et al., 2017; Lee and Young,
2013). Against this backdrop, the role of campaigns is increasingly important in fostering
engagement with democratic politics. After all, evidence shows that effective campaigns
can encourage citizens to turn out (e.g. Aldrich et al., 2016; Fieldhouse et al., 2013; Foos
and de Rooij, 2017), influence their vote choice (e.g. Druckman, 2004; Fisher et al.,
2011a; Goodwin et al., 2018), and can affect their perception of parties, as well as party
leaders (Aaldering et al., 2018). In short, campaigns matter.
School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Corresponding author:
Joshua Townsley, School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG7
2RD, UK.
Email: joshuahtownsley@gmail.com
1044646BPI0010.1177/13691481211044646The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsTownsley et al.
research-article2021
Original Article
Townsley et al. 703
It is also increasingly evident that personalised election campaigns are effective at
engaging voters.1 The personal traits that candidates possess – and the traits that candi-
dates choose to emphasise to voters – represent a growing area of political science
research (Stiers, 2019). The identity and attributes of individual politicians are now a
common feature of the information that voters are exposed to and seek during campaigns
(Dalton et al., 2000; Deacon and Harmer, 2014; Milazzo and Hammond, 2017).
Candidates’ personal characteristics are increasingly important in influencing for whom
voters cast their ballot (Arzheimer and Evans, 2012; Campbell and Cowley, 2014;
Renwick and Pilet, 2016). These include aspects of candidates’ personal and political
profile such as gender (Dittmar, 2019), race and ethnicity (Fisher et al., 2011b; Norris
et al., 1992), occupational background (Campbell and Cowley, 2014; Coffe and Theiss-
Morse, 2016), personality (Laustsen, 2017), and even perceived attractiveness (King and
Leigh, 2009; Lutz, 2010; Milazzo and Mattes, 2016). Voters also pay particular attention
to candidates’ localness (e.g. Campbell and Cowley, 2014; Middleton, 2018; Von Schoultz
and Papageoriou, 2019).
But what factors explain the extent to which candidates in Britain personalise their
campaigns?
Carey and Shugart (1995) argue that the first-past-the-post electoral system used for
elections to the UK House of Commons – where parties retain control over access to the
ballot and there is no need for candidates to compete against members of their own party
to gain their seat – offers less encouragement for candidates to emphasise their personal
attributes. In the absence of intra-party competition, candidates should enjoy greater
electoral benefits from emphasising the party label, rather than their own personal repu-
tation. At the same time, there is evidence that single member districts, which are gener-
ally smaller in terms of population size and geography, provide incentives for
geographical or locally focused campaigning (Sudulich and Trumm, 2019).2 On this
basis, a candidate may gain an electoral payoff from emphasising her own attributes,
rather than relying exclusively on her party’s national profile. Given the conflicting pres-
sures provided by the electoral context, we would expect to observe a great degree of
variation in candidate behaviour. Such heterogeneity in behaviour is consistent with
previous research showing that the policy platforms of British candidates frequently dif-
fer from those of their party (Buttice and Milazzo, 2011), even when it comes to the most
salient issues of the day (Trumm et al., 2020). Moreover, recent analysis of campaign
leaflets also suggests that there is considerable variation in the extent to which they
emphasise the personal background and characteristics of individual candidates (Milazzo
and Townsley, 2020).
This paper builds on this growing body of literature on individual-level campaign
behaviour in Britain. Using data from the 2017 British Representation Study, we explore
the extent to which candidates choose to run personalised campaigns and what factors
explain variation in the level of campaign personalisation across candidates. We focus on
two key aspects of campaign personalisation: (1) the extent to which candidates focus
their campaign messages on themselves rather than their party, and (2) the extent to which
candidates utilise personal campaign activities. In terms of the explanatory factors, we
rely on two key areas. First, we capture candidates’ personal and political profile, which
includes gender, incumbency, their experience within the party, and self-perceived elec-
toral chances. Second, we look at the nature of their relationship with their principals –
their party and constituency. Specifically, we analyse the role of ideological distance
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