This article analyses what makes political candidates run a party‐focused or personalised election campaign. Prior work shows that candidates face incentives from voters and the media to personalise their campaign rhetoric and promises at the expense of party policy. This has raised concerns about the capacity of parties to govern effectively and voters’ ability to hold individual politicians accountable. This article builds on the literature on party organisation and considers the possible constraints candidates face from their party in personalising their election campaigns. Specifically, it is argued that party control over the candidate nomination process and campaign financing constrains most political candidates in following electoral incentives for campaign personalisation. Using candidate survey data from the 2009 EP election campaign in 27 countries, the article shows how candidates from parties in which party officials exerted greater control over the nomination process and campaign finances were less likely to engage in personalised campaigning at the expense of the party programme. The findings imply that most parties, as central gatekeepers and resource suppliers, hold important control mechanisms for countering the electoral pressure for personalisation and advance our understanding of the incentives and constraints candidates face when communicating with voters. The article discusses how recent democratic reforms, paradoxically, might induce candidate personalisation with potential negative democratic consequences.

Do social media offer more opportunities for parliamentary opposition and independent candidates to reach voters in electoral autocracies? Social media have been seen as a great liberation tool, facilitating the mobilisation of disenfranchised citizens. However, scholarship on electoral autocracies highlights how they are well-versed in subverting democratic innovations. Taking the 2021 legislative campaign in Uganda as a case, we show that social media offer a range of opportunities for the opposition to campaign, while also providing new ways for the regime to try to maintain its dominance. Our findings rely on insights from 35 interviews with legislative candidates combined with data collected from their Facebook pages and Twitter profiles as well as from those of their opponents. We contribute to the literature on electoral autocracy and on candidates' use of social media in electoral campaigns by identifying the opportunities social media offer for both the regime and its opposition.

In this article, we introduce an innovative approach to examining campaign themes in Italy, by performing an original corpus linguistic analysis of the party manifestos related to the crucial 2022 election. Through its systematicity and flexibility, our approach allows us to gauge theory-driven propositions using a large amount of so far unexplored textual data. As anticipated, the 2022 Italian party manifestos are characterised by a somewhat balanced configuration of emphasis across a variety of themes, of which some are more controversial and others more widely shared among voters and parties. Further, we also corroborate that parties primarily focus on those themes that historically fit them best, ideologically and in terms of perceived competence. Lastly, salient ‘issues of the day’ are differently emphasised by Italian parties, which particularly avoid devoting considerable attention to the highly sensitive Russian-Ukrainian war.

La communication politique conventionnelle occulte l’usage des symboles culturels de l’apparence que sont les vêtements lors des campagnes électorales. Or le vêtement est incorporé à l’œuvre de conquête et de conservation du pouvoir politique du fait de son potentiel de séduction. En prenant pour site d’observation la campagne pour l’élection présidentielle camerounaise d’octobre 2018, cet article entreprend de rendre intelligible le comportement vestimentaire des candidats. Les données de cette étude sont issues d’une observation participante lors de meetings et de l’analyse des affiches de campagnes de cette élection. Il en ressort que le vêtement est un média de l’expression de la personnalité et des stratégies de séduction des candidats qui agit davantage comme un stimuli de la mobilisation que comme un déterminant du vote.

This study evaluates dyadic representation, that is, the link between the policy preferences of the constituencies and their representatives in the Japanese Lower House (LH). More specifically, this study examines how the within-party variation in policy positions among party candidates corresponds with that across their districts. By examining a series of candidate surveys conducted between 2003 and 2012 as well as the local employment structure, this study maps the association between the policy preferences of constituencies and those of their district candidates for two major parties. Specifically, candidates were found to take more rural-oriented positions on economic policies when running in districts with rural employment structures, while there remained a clear difference between parties. Moreover, this study demonstrates that constituencies accord more votes to candidates who better represent their preferences, strengthening the link by electing those who fulfill the responsibility beyond their party label.

Cet article fait état des pratiques marketing de quatre partis politiques (Coalition avenir Québec, Parti libéral du Québec, Parti québécois, Québec solidaire) en vue de l’élection générale québécoise de 2018. La couverture médiatique sur la pratique du marketing politique au Québec laissait présager une adoption plus marquée de l'approche marketing en 2018, notamment grâce à une utilisation soutenue des données numériques. Pour vérifier cette hypothèse, des entrevues semi-dirigées ont été menées auprès du personnel de campagne de ces formations. Nos résultats stipulent que la planification électorale se fait bel et bien dans un esprit de marketing politique. Les partis pratiquent toutefois un marketing partiel : ils mobilisent principalement l'intelligence de marché à des fins tactiques. Le numérique entraîne un raffinement de cette approche publicitaire. Finalement, l'application du concept de data-driven campaign n'est pas encore pleinement intégrée au Québec.

La littérature sur les tempêtes médiatiques n'a jamais évalué leurs effets sur l'opinion publique de manière systématique. Cet article vise à combler ce vide en mobilisant des données de sondage pour évaluer l’évolution de l'opinion publique en regard de la crise des réfugiés, une tempête médiatique survenue durant la campagne fédérale canadienne de 2015. Les résultats montrent que la période de tempête médiatique a influencé les attitudes citoyennes à l’égard de certains cadres liés à la question et que l'effet a persisté jusqu’à la fin de la campagne. Ils révèlent par ailleurs que certaines opinions politiques en viennent à constituer des éléments déterminants de l'intention de vote et du choix de vote final. Ces éléments de preuve montrent que les citoyens sont réceptifs aux tempêtes médiatiques et constituent un exemple concret de la manière dont la logique de marché médiatique devient parfois prépondérante dans les rapports de force qui caractérisent la sphère publique.

This article examines the effects of electoral systems on issue ownership. This study argues that electoral rules significantly affect issue ownership because they prompt candidates to adopt different types of electoral campaigns. Compared to the single non-transferable vote (SNTV) system, the mixed-member majoritarian (MMM) system prods candidates to change the pattern of electoral campaigns from candidate-centred to issue-centred competition. In particular, partisan issue effects are more effective in gaining votes under the MMM. To support the argument, I find evidence from content analyses of party manifestos and multinomial logistic regression models of electoral surveys between the pre-reform and post-reform elections in Japan.