Campaigning in the dark: theorising campaign strategies from the 2022 Seanad by-election

Abstract

ABSTRACT Parties and election candidates are often understood to be rational actors, adapting to conditions to remain electorally competitive. However, despite the rational pursuit of goals requiring enough information with which to update one’s strategies, to our knowledge, no study has sought to examine the precise role of information in influencing party or candidate updating during campaigns. To fill this gap, we use qualitative process tracing to examine the 2022 Irish Seanad by-election, which acts as an extreme case of a low-information electoral environment that can be used for theory-building. From this analysis, we expect that the information level is a function of knowledge about voters’ intentions and the terms of political debate, in the form of an interaction between the effective number of electoral parties and the range of issues discussed by parties. From this, we hypothesise that strategic updating is least likely when information about both voters and the terms of political debate are low. Indeed, the lower the information level, the more likely candidates are to prioritise their preferred issues and ignore their competitors, even when they could acquire some rudimentary knowledge of their competitors.