'The personal touch': Campaign personalisation in Britain

Townsley, Joshua; Trumm, Siim; Milazzo, Caitlin

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 per-sonalise 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. Incum-bents' 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.

Citation

Townsley, J., Trumm, S., & Milazzo, C. (2022). 'The personal touch': Campaign personalisation in Britain. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 24(4), 702–722. https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044646

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Jul 29, 2021
• Online Publication Date: Sep 9, 2021
• Publication Date: 2022-11
• Deposit Date: Jul 29, 2021
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 10, 2023
• Journal: British Journal of Politics and International Relations
• Print ISSN: 1369-1481
• Electronic ISSN: 1467-856X
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 24
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 702–722
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481211044646
• Keywords: campaign behaviour; personalisation; political communication; Britain
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5884483
• Publisher URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13691481211044646
• Additional Information: Copyright © The Author(s) 2021