The professor will see you now - visits
4 min read
In an occasional series, Professor Philip Cowley offers a political science lesson for The House’s readers. This week: visits
In June, with the election in full swing, Keir Starmer took part in a photocall at the Memorial Stadium in Bristol. Together at last: Bristol Rovers and the Labour Party, the two organisations that did more than any others to disappoint my late father during his time on this earth. Dying a few months later, he lived long enough to cheer Labour’s landslide but alas not this season’s forthcoming FA Cup and League-winning double.
Advance teams, those who scout out possible venues for events like this, are one of the many unsung heroes of election campaigns. Living for weeks on the road, surviving on takeaways and Premier Inn breakfasts, trying to persuade venues to do things they don’t want to (“can we shut your business down for a day and stop you making money?”), they aim to ensure that the leaders events go off smoothly and they are not – with luck – photographed near too many Exit signs or similar. Extreme caution needs to be taken with events in Scunthorpe.
Does any of it matter, though? A fascinating new paper, just published in Political Studies, finds that the answer is: maybe, a little. The authors examine more than 600 campaign stops taken by the Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem leaders during the four general elections from 2010 to 2019. Focussing just on England, they find distinctly patchy results. Many events take place in marginal seats, but lots do not. For some parties, local campaign expenditure seems important, for others not.
They do find leaders visits produce small electoral benefits – although a visit by Nick Clegg in 2015 seems to have been enough to put off voters – but these effects really are tiny. On the one hand, perhaps this is just as well. If we found that a 20-minute photo op in which a party leader and a group of nursey school children played with modelling clay was sufficient to sway large numbers of voters, then we would perhaps want to reconsider the worldwide experiment with democracy.
But I also think there is an issue about how we might go about measuring this. The paper uses the constituency as the unit of analysis. But many visits will have a much wider impact.
Let’s return to that Memorial Stadium visit in June. The ground is to be found in Bristol North West. Do we think that when pictures appeared on the evening news, voters in Bristol East took umbrage? “That Keir Starmer, he doesn’t care about folk like us, he’s only interested in that lot in Bristol North West”. Or do we think it’s more likely that – lacking detailed knowledge of constituency boundaries – for most Bristolians the visit instead ticked a box marked Labour Leader Visits My City.
As it happens, things are made even more complicated in this case by boundary changes. The Memorial Stadium used to be in Bristol West, now abolished. (Fun fact: of the 92 football league grounds in England and Wales it was one in the most pro-Remain constituency). That particular photo op was attended by the former MP for Bristol West, but who was now standing in Bristol Central. All very confusing. Either way, insofar as any voters were moved by it, it seems unlikely that the impact would have stopped at the constituency border.
This, I think, helps explain the slightly dampened effect. Of course, for some events, the precise constituency will really matter, but for others perhaps much less. The assumption of the research is that these visits should be seen as part of the constituency battle; they might be better off seen as part of the election air war.
Further reading: D Cutts and A Middleton, Where Do They Go and Why, How Do They Vary and What Is Their Impact: Assessing Leaders’ Campaign Visits in England 2010–2019, Political Studies (2024)
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