The Impact of Election Outcome on the Display of Political Posters: A Field Study During Communal Elections in Flanders

Abstract

The present field study was designed to test the relationship between the election outcomes of political parties and the post‐election display of posters in favor of those parties. Two days before the Flemish communal elections on 8 October 2000, addresses of private houses in the community of Zele were registered that displayed at least one poster in support of a political party (N = 388). On the day after the elections, two observers checked whether the registered houses still displayed their poster(s). A strongly and positively linear relation was found between the proportional win/loss of each political party (compared with the previous elections) and the percentage of houses that continued to exhibit poster(s) in support of that party: The better the election result, the higher the proportion of houses that still displayed their poster(s).