The growing efficacy of telephone political canvassing at the 2005 and 2010 British general elections

Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston

Partly in response to declining local party memberships, and partly as a feature of the growing modernisation and centralisation of constituency campaigns, Britain's major political parties have in recent elections turned to telephone canvassing methods to contact voters.

The growing efficacy of telephone political canvassing at the 2005 and 2010 British general elections

Charles Pattie

University of Sheffield

Ron Johnston

University of Bristol

Introduction

Constituency campaigning presents British political parties with a dilemma. On the one hand, local campaigns yield results. The more effective the local battle, the greater the reward in terms of votes won in a seat (Johnston 1986; Pattie et al. 1994; Denver & Hands 1997; Pattie & Johnston 2003a; Denver et al. 2004; Karp et al.2007). But on the other hand, grass-roots parties are in decline, with falling...

WARC subscribers can sign in to keep reading

Not a subscriber?

Schedule your live demo with our team today

WARC helps you to plan, create and deliver more effective marketing

  • Prove your case and back-up your idea

  • Get expert guidance on strategic challenges

  • Tackle current and emerging marketing themes

We’re long-term subscribers to WARC and it’s a tool we use extensively. We use it to source case studies and best practice for the purposes of internal training, as well as for putting persuasive cases to clients. In compiling a recent case for long-term, sustained investment in brand, we were able to support key marketing principles with numerous case studies sourced from WARC. It helped bring what could have been a relatively dry deck to life with recognisable brand successes from across a broad number of categories. It’s incredibly efficient to have such a wealth of insight in one place.

Insights Team
Bray Leino

You’re in good company

We work with 80% of Forbes' most valuable brands* and 80% of the world's top top-of-the-class agencies.

* Top 10 brands