Voter mobilisation in context

Abstract

This special issue arose from a collaboration between researchers at the University of Manchester and Duke University that was funded by the Economic Social and Research Council [ES/J019453/1]. The project sought to examine the nature of voter contact in the digital age in comparative context. In particular we were interested to understand the extent to which parties and candidates were seeking to mobilise voters during national election campaigns in the US and UK using new communication channels such as email, sms/text messages, and social media. After benchmarking the use of these tactics in national campaigns we also wanted to address the 64 million dollar question of whether these methods actually worked. Does online contact actually increase the likelihood that someone will turn out to vote? And if so, how effective is it in comparison with other more conventional methods? Our interest in researching these questions was triggered by the general growth in use of these tools across both countries and particularly the high profile e-campaign of Barack Obama to reach the White House in 2008. In the course of conducting our research on the effects of new forms of voter contact we faced some immediate questions about the extent to which internet-based methods can be meaningfully compared with more traditional offline modes. Given the rapid proliferation in the types of online communication channels now available, how far can a simple binary division into online and offline channels really capture this new complexity? How do we take account of the increasingly complex and indirect web of connections through which parties’ online messages can be conveyed and also the extent to which parties themselves can control this? While email is perhaps the closest approximation to the more conventional ‘surgical’ methods that parties use such as direct mail and phone calls, platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are more than simply conduits for content but are themselves immersive new social spaces. The idea of the internet and particularly social media serving as a new context for mobilisation prompted us to think more generally about how far the field had moved and broadened both substantively and methodologically since the seminal work of Rosenstone and Hansen in the early 1990s. What new forces now impinge on voter contacting and how far do the old channels remain potent? In particular, how have advances in technology affected parties’ strategies and improved their capacity to target voters? What are some of the ‘new’ contextual factors that we might need to consider, particularly beyond expressly political and institutional channels? And finally what new methods are available to best capture this wider complexity of affective forces? To explore these questions we invited leading scholars within the field to reflect on the current and past state of voter mobilisation research as well as to provide us with some fresh empirical evidence about the relevance of context in shaping parties’ GOTV efforts. The papers gathered here represent the fruits of that effort and provide a rich insight into and update on the impact of a variety of technological, social, economic and political influences on parties’ GOTV efforts.