The impact of marketing activity on voter turnout – a study of the UK and German Euro Elections

Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in political marketing, in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. In the political science field, similar work has been undertaken – although not, of course, using the vocabulary of marketing. However, while there seems to have been research into why voters vote in the way they do i.e. for which party, there appears to have been no research into how marketing activity can influence voter turnout. Theories of voter participation in political science fall broadly into two camps: sociological influences or rational choice. In other words, voter turnout is dependent on “something about citizens” or “something about elections”, with the main focus on the character of elections. However, there is also some recognition that voters’ interaction with parties and candidates is also important. This study evaluates EU election data for the UK and Germany and examines the impact of marketing activity (party campaigning) on voter turnout. Introduction This study focuses on how party campaigning plays a role in influencing voter participation using a logistic regression analysis of individual survey data from the European Election Studies (EES) archive. Franklin has argued that “turnout is a vitally important area of research that is very poorly understood (Franklin 2004: xii) [and that] further research is essential”. The paper proceeds as follows. The political marketing literature in briefly reviewed while existing literature on voter participation, highlighting the theoretical and methodological issues encountered by previous studies, and explicating the theory of rational choice institutionalism which underpins this paper is outlined. Then, several explicit hypotheses are developed from the theory, and the methodology used to test these hypotheses is discussed. The fourth section presents and analyses the findings, and the fifth concludes with some implications and suggestions for further research. The literature reviewed Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in political marketing, in Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. Research has included such developments as strategic analysis, social propaganda, corporate lobbying and the application of marketing management techniques to referenda. More recently, work on gender in electoral decision-making, branding of candidates and parties, and segmentation strategies in electoral campaigns has been undertaken. In 1996, Wring argued that, using a standard evolutionary model of marketing, it was possible to identify three key stages in the development of political marketing. He labelled these phases the propaganda, media and marketing orientation approaches to the electorate and electioneering. Using this framework, Wring was able to identify the role that basic marketing concepts have played in UK elections since the beginning of the 20th century. He argues that, contrary to popular belief, professional advertising and image consciousness date back to that time (the first “propaganda” stage of development). The second or “media” stage began with the acknowledgement that popular television and consumer marketing in the 1950s led to the need for coherent party image management. Finally, from the late 1970s the two main UK political parties developed a strategic marketing orientation approach. In contrast, O’Shaugnessy (2001) argues that “marketing is a business discipline whose relevance lies primarily in business: we should not assume that political contexts are . analogous to business to the extent that methods can be imported and used with equal effect”. Research elsewhere (O’Cass, 1996) has suggested that the customer centred orientation of the marketing concept and approach is less significant in politics. Cass’ research in Australia found that the executive decision-making category of political respondents, in particular, felt that the role and significance of the voter was negligible in developing the political “product”. Nevertheless, research into voters from the political marketing perspective, has, of course, been undertaken. Hayes and McAllister (1996) have suggested that, rather than concentrating their efforts on floating voters – those who, in the UK make up a quarter of the electorate and who make up their minds only once an election campaign is well underway – political parties should target those voters who made up their minds in the one or two years prior to an election, using pre-campaign marketing techniques. Past research indicates that political campaigns lead to a better informed voting public, but that overall they tend to reinforce voters’ existing predispositions and comparatively few voters are influenced (McAllister, 1985; Miller, 1991). Hayes and McAllister (2001) have also studied the floating or “switch” voter, concentrating their attention on female voters in the 1997 UK general election. Using the British Election Survey data, they concluded that women were significantly more likely to delay their voting decision than men and that the campaigns of parties which targeted these voters (the so-called “Worcester woman” – female voters, usually working women, in marginal seats) appear to have been effective in mobilising their vote. Despite this apparent interest in the political campaign – the tactics of political marketing – and its influence on how voters vote, there seems to have been no research within the political marketing arena on whether political marketing is influential in determining whether the electorate votes at all. On the other hand, the political science literature makes the explicit link between voting systems and voter behaviour. Theories of voter participation fall broadly into two camps: sociological factors or rational choice (Clarke et al, 2004; Norris, 2004), essentially boiling down to whether levels of turnout are due to “something about citizens” or “something about elections” (Franklin, 2004, 3-4). In any large electorate the probability of casting a pivotal vote and influencing the electoral outcome is always so small that it discounts any potential direct benefits to the voter, so according to this model no rational individual would ever turn out to vote (Clarke et al, 2004). Thus the “paradox that ate rational choice theory” (Fiorina, 1990: 334) resulted in a renewed focus on the character of citizens rather than elections in explaining why people vote. Academics following Riker and Ordeshook (1967) developed the ‘resource-model’ of voter participation, which views voting as a habit learned (or not) during the formative years, which is determined above all by one’s education, income and class. Numerous subsequent studies have found evidence in support of demographic and/or psychological factors driving the individual decision to vote. For example, analyses of survey data have commonly found age and education to be the most important determinants of an individual’s likelihood to vote (e.g. Blais et al, 2004; Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980), since better educated and older citizens are what Wattenberg (2002: 80) terms “resource rich”. Studies showing significant correlations between voter turnout and, respectively, class (Clarke et al, 2004), housing tenure (Pattie and Johnston, 1998), income and occupation (Evans, 2003) also lend support to the resource-model of voter participation. However, explaining voter turnout in terms of ‘something about citizens’ can not account for changes in turnout over time: given the socio-demographic trends in mature democracies (wealthier, better-educated citizens), we would anticipate an increase, rather than a decline in turnout (Blais et al, 2004; Evans, 2003; Wattenberg, 2002). Rational choice institutionalisim recognises that voters’ incentives are driven both by electoral rules and by interaction with parties and candidates and stress the strategic consequences of electoral systems, such as party campaigning (or marketing) and direct mobilisation of voters. The link between campaigning and turnout has often been made: Gerber and Green (2000) and Green and Gerber (2004) find that door-to-door canvassing by party activists has a substantial influence on voter turnout in the US. In addition, Pattie et al (1995) demonstrate that increased spending on constituency campaigning in the UK increases turnout for all parties. Significantly, as with the political marketing literature reviewed above, they also find that parties spend the most in marginal seats and the least where they have little hope of winning. Studies of voter turnout encounter several methodological problems. First, several authors have noted the problematic discrepancy between conclusions based on aggregateor individual-level studies (e.g. Aldrich, 1993; Curtice, 2003; Evans, 2003; Franklin, 2004; Pattie and Johnston, 2001). For example, Whiteley et al (2001) analyse constituency-level data and find marginality to be positively related to percentage turnout; specifically, turnout is on average 10% higher in marginal seats. However, because they study aggregaterather than individual-level data, they are unable to tease out whether this phemonenon is due to the voter’s perception that her vote counts more in marginal seats, or the fact that parties campaign harder in such seats, as they recognise. Nevertheless, aggregate-level studies, using national, constituency or cohort-level data remain popular (e.g. Blais and Dobrzynska, 1998; Bowler et al, 2001; Franklin, 2004, respectively), despite the added risk of ecological fallacy. Even studies which avoid ecological fallacy by combining individual and aggregate-level data run into additional methodological problems. Cross-national studies, such as those by Norris (2004) and Siaroff and Meyer (2002), fail to control for country-specific factors that might affect turnout levels, such as the particular issue mix, national incidents, media coverage, or political corruption. As Franklin (2004: 15) points out, comparisons