Implementing a multi-criteria decision-making approach to a new party's election campaign – A case study

Abstract

During pre-election campaigns, parties make great efforts to persuade constituents to vote for them. Usually, new parties have smaller budgets and fewer resources than veteran parties. In particular, the more heterogeneous the party's electorate, the more critical the issue of resource allocation is. This paper presents a method to allocate new party's campaign advertising resources efficiently to maximize its voters. The model developed uses Pareto principle and multi-criteria approach and integrates party's confidential data together with an official open-to-all data. The model produced clear and unbiased results, and these advantages made it effective and user-friendly for the strategic team and campaign managers. We implemented the model on a specific new party during the intensive political period before the April 2019 elections in Israel.•This paper analyses the issue of allocating new party's campaign advertising resources efficiently to maximize its voters.•Our model integrates Pareto principle with multi-criteria decision-making approach and uses the party's confidential data together with official open to all state data.•The model produced clear and unbiased results, and these advantages made it effective and user-friendly for the strategic team and campaign managers.