a post by Alex Krasodomski-Jones for the DEMOS blog
A decade ago, there was one phrase we heard time and again, whether in a focus group, online or on question time – “the politicians are out of touch”. There was an overriding sense that politics was irrelevant, it was elitist and it didn’t understand or reflect the concerns of ordinary citizens.
Electoral media was limited. You had one party political broadcast to set out your vision for the country or maybe an editorial or a debate. The lawyer saw the same broadcast as the care worker, the voter in London saw the same debate as the voter in Clacton or Crewe.
Online party political campaigning has changed this entirely. Suddenly, each and every one of us sees a message directed to us and personalised to our interests. It enables a party to cut to the chase – to ensure you have the information that you need to make a decision. Archives of political advertising from the last few years include messages about fishing policy, flood defences, bull fighting and protecting polar bears. These issues might well be important to some of us, but would never have made it into a 3 minute segment on the BBC. This new era talks to a politics that really works for you.
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Showing posts with label campaigning. Show all posts
Showing posts with label campaigning. Show all posts
Tuesday, 18 December 2018
Monday, 19 November 2018
A nation of persuadables: politics and campaigning in the age of data
a post by Josh Smith for the DEMOS blog
A few days ago, I found myself talking to a woman I had just met, running through a list of facts about her family.
The week before, Demos had been challenged by the BBC to find out as much as possible about a volunteer, using only public, online data, and starting solely from their email address and a protected Twitter handle. We weren’t allowed to spend any money, or put more than a few hours into the research. “She doesn’t think there’s much out there”, we were told. “See if you can surprise her.”
It was her mother’s history, gleaned from a public social media account, which first raised an eyebrow from our volunteer. We were able to guess, correctly, which MP she had voted for in the last three elections, and the way in which she had cast her referendum ballot. We walked through the causes she’d supported over the years, and the campaigns she felt most strongly about. The internet knew her current address, the house she had moved there from, and how much the latter had sold for. It knew the shape of her signature, and her husband’s.
This experiment does not replicate the ways in which political parties prepare for a campaign. Even the best funded groups are unlikely to have the resources to conduct their own, detailed searches on every voter. The tools for doing similar work at scale, however, already exist, and are being used in political campaigns.
Continue reading
Scary but that is the way life is today.
A few days ago, I found myself talking to a woman I had just met, running through a list of facts about her family.
The week before, Demos had been challenged by the BBC to find out as much as possible about a volunteer, using only public, online data, and starting solely from their email address and a protected Twitter handle. We weren’t allowed to spend any money, or put more than a few hours into the research. “She doesn’t think there’s much out there”, we were told. “See if you can surprise her.”
It was her mother’s history, gleaned from a public social media account, which first raised an eyebrow from our volunteer. We were able to guess, correctly, which MP she had voted for in the last three elections, and the way in which she had cast her referendum ballot. We walked through the causes she’d supported over the years, and the campaigns she felt most strongly about. The internet knew her current address, the house she had moved there from, and how much the latter had sold for. It knew the shape of her signature, and her husband’s.
This experiment does not replicate the ways in which political parties prepare for a campaign. Even the best funded groups are unlikely to have the resources to conduct their own, detailed searches on every voter. The tools for doing similar work at scale, however, already exist, and are being used in political campaigns.
Continue reading
Scary but that is the way life is today.
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Legal limits on political campaigning by charities: drawing the line
an article by Debra Morris (University of Liverpool, UK)
published in Voluntary Sector Review Volume 7 Number 1 (March 2016)
Abstract
The fear for charities of being on the wrong side of the law when it comes to campaigning has always been strong. Recent UK legislation on political campaigning has caused considerable consternation, bringing some difficult issues to the fore. This paper reviews recent evidence on legislation, referring to previous regulatory experience to put new developments in a clear context of charity and electoral law. It highlights ambiguities and suggests how further regulatory guidance might help.
Full text (PDF)
Abstract
The fear for charities of being on the wrong side of the law when it comes to campaigning has always been strong. Recent UK legislation on political campaigning has caused considerable consternation, bringing some difficult issues to the fore. This paper reviews recent evidence on legislation, referring to previous regulatory experience to put new developments in a clear context of charity and electoral law. It highlights ambiguities and suggests how further regulatory guidance might help.
Full text (PDF)
Thursday, 18 August 2016
Legal limits on political campaigning by charities: drawing the line
an article by Debra Morris (University of Liverpool, UK) published in Voluntary Sector Review Volume 7 Number 1 (March 2016)
Abstract
The fear for charities of being on the wrong side of the law when it comes to campaigning has always been strong. Recent UK legislation on political campaigning has caused considerable consternation, bringing some difficult issues to the fore.
This paper reviews recent evidence on legislation, referring to previous regulatory experience to put new developments in a clear context of charity and electoral law. It highlights ambiguities and suggests how further regulatory guidance might help.
Sorry, I can’t find a link to the full article not even for payment
Abstract
The fear for charities of being on the wrong side of the law when it comes to campaigning has always been strong. Recent UK legislation on political campaigning has caused considerable consternation, bringing some difficult issues to the fore.
This paper reviews recent evidence on legislation, referring to previous regulatory experience to put new developments in a clear context of charity and electoral law. It highlights ambiguities and suggests how further regulatory guidance might help.
Sorry, I can’t find a link to the full article not even for payment
Wednesday, 3 August 2011
The politics of protest in newspaper campaigns: …
Dissent, populism and the rhetoric of authenticity
an article by Jen Birks (Department of Film, Media and Journalism, University of Stirling) published in British Politics (Volume 6 Issue 2 (June 2011))
Abstract
Newspaper campaigns embody newspapers’ most emphatic claims to speak for ‘the people’, and as such are generally regarded as populist. However, they can be oppositional, engaging in dissent of one sort or another, and often assume a certain amount of political engagement with that dissent on the part of the audience. This article examines the potential of newspaper campaigns to facilitate the political engagement of citizens through the politics of protest. It draws on qualitative content analysis of seven campaigns that ran in the Scottish press between 2000 and 2005, and semi-structured interviews with relevant journalists. The distinction between legitimate protest and manipulative populism is made in terms of: (a) the rhetoric and strategies of political representation, participation and influence and (b) the construction of political legitimacy in terms of the public interest and the moral authority of the ‘victim’. It is argued that populist impulses dominate, driving a tendency to use discourses of emotional authenticity and offence to legitimise demands for a plebiscitary response to popular or ‘victim’ preference and to close down controversy and debate, with the principle objective of marketing the newspaper as an influential community champion.
an article by Jen Birks (Department of Film, Media and Journalism, University of Stirling) published in British Politics (Volume 6 Issue 2 (June 2011))
Abstract
Newspaper campaigns embody newspapers’ most emphatic claims to speak for ‘the people’, and as such are generally regarded as populist. However, they can be oppositional, engaging in dissent of one sort or another, and often assume a certain amount of political engagement with that dissent on the part of the audience. This article examines the potential of newspaper campaigns to facilitate the political engagement of citizens through the politics of protest. It draws on qualitative content analysis of seven campaigns that ran in the Scottish press between 2000 and 2005, and semi-structured interviews with relevant journalists. The distinction between legitimate protest and manipulative populism is made in terms of: (a) the rhetoric and strategies of political representation, participation and influence and (b) the construction of political legitimacy in terms of the public interest and the moral authority of the ‘victim’. It is argued that populist impulses dominate, driving a tendency to use discourses of emotional authenticity and offence to legitimise demands for a plebiscitary response to popular or ‘victim’ preference and to close down controversy and debate, with the principle objective of marketing the newspaper as an influential community champion.
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