The Growing Efficacy of Telephone Political Canvassing at the 2005 and 2010 British General Elections

Abstract

Partly in response to declining local party memberships, and partly as a feature of the growing modernisation and centralisation of constituency campaigns, Britain's major political parties have in recent elections turned to telephone canvassing methods to contact voters. This is despite a body of research on the efficacy of different methods of contacting citizens, which suggests that telephone contacts are much less effective in mobilising voters than face-to-face methods of canvassing. But there are grounds for believing that telephone canvassing now has a more substantial impact than previously suspected, implying that it may yet have an important role in modern campaigning. The paper therefore looks at the impact of telephone canvassing on party support during the 2005 and 2010 British general elections.