Understanding leadership positioning in the 2010 and 2015 British general elections

An IJMR Lecture

Time

6:00pm for a 6.30pm start

This lecture draws on research conducted at the 2010 UK general election (and published in IJMR), amplified with new findings from the 2015 general election, to explore what the voters think about the party leaders and what the parties can do about this to improve their electoral chances.

Parties now routinely use marketing strategies such as segmentation and positioning in the campaign planning: groups of target voters are identified and the best message to achieve the party’s aim with each group is sought; the same message may not be appropriate for all groups. One element in this message is the impression that the party wishes to convey of its leader, and of his or her opponents. In 2010, the voters themselves felt the leaders – Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg – to be an unusually influential factor in their voting decisions, and in 2015, the leaders were a major focus of the parties’ campaign messages; but different qualities were emphasised for different leaders, and much of the campaign material was negative, attacking an opposing leader rather than promoting a party’s own.

We show why this may have made sense for the parties and, in the process, reveal some of the dynamics that underlie voters’ decision-making in a modern election and which may help explain the result in 2015. In 2010 we found clear evidence that the voters do not necessarily judge all leaders by the same yardsticks: a particular perception may be more valuable – or more damaging – to some leaders than to others; this may mean that it does not always make sense for leaders to compete directly on the same ground. A second finding was that for both the major party leaders, Gordon Brown and David Cameron, negative impressions were much more powerful than positive ones in affecting voters’ overall attitudes, implying that negative campaigning would be more effective than positive campaigning. Both these findings may be particularly relevant in understanding the course of the 2015 election, when the natural target voting groups of the major parties did not overlap and both Conservatives and Labour concentrated on shoring up support on their flanks rather than competing as vigorously as usual for floating voters in the centre-ground. Looking in detail at aspects of the public image of the party leaders in 2015, we see how far our 2010 findings seem still to hold.

Speaker

Professor Roger Mortimore is Director of Political Analysis at Ipsos MORI and Professor of Public Opinion and Political Analysis in the Institute of Contemporary British History at King’s College London. His publications on British elections include: books (with Robert Worcester and others) analysing public opinion in each of the last four general elections (most recently Explaining Cameron's Coalition, 2011); Elections in Britain – A Voter’s Guide (with Dick Leonard - 5th edition, 2005); and co-editing the last three volumes in the Political Communications series (most recently Political Communication in Britain: The Leader Debates, The Campaign and the Media in the 2010 General Election, 2011).