Party organizational resources and election campaigns: Explaining party contacting

Abstract

Which voters do parties target when they campaign, and to what extent are these efforts affected by their organizational resources? This paper seeks to answer these questions by pairing data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems with party organizational data from the Political Party and V-Party Databases. Our study evaluates face-to-face and digital contacting in terms of its extensiveness (how many potential voters get contacted) and in terms of whose supporters get contacted. Using a novel approach that considers the partisan preferences of those who were contacted, we find evidence that both local organizational strength and central party finances matter for boosting parties’ face-to-face and digital contacts. We also find that greater resources are associated with greater targeting of contacts, with different types of resources favoring different types of targeting, including mobilization contacting aimed at likely supporters and persuasive contacting that targets all likely voters. These results offer clues about how parties translate organizational resources into electoral advantages.