How Political Parties Use Group-Based Appeals: Evidence from Britain 1964

Abstract

Political parties often appeal to groups. Yet, existing work does not consider how such group-based appeals are used, presumably because they are thought to have grown ineffective. Contrary to this, I argue that group-based appeals are central to party electoral strategy, and that time has only strengthened the incentive to use them. Using original data on 10,000 group-based appeals found in sentence-by-sentence coding of British election manifestos, I demonstrate an increasing use of group-based appeals from 1964 to 2015. Furthermore, I show that the range of groups emphasized, the concentration of group emphasis, and the specific group categories targeted also follow the electoral incentives prevalent over this 50-year period. These findings shed new light on how political parties appeal for votes and suggest that we view group-based appeals as a distinctive feature of party electoral strategy. I discuss the implications for our broader understanding of electoral competition.

Keywords

party electoral strategy group-based appeals social identity election manifestos Britain

Political parties and their candidates often talk of groups. Recent elections in United States and France, for example, saw Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton praising the efforts of “mothers” (Clinton, 2016) and Front National’s Marine Le Pen defending the impoverished “working classes” (Le Pen, 2017). This way of appealing to voters is not new. Four decades ago, in Britain, the Labour Party campaigned on shifting power “in favour of working people” (Labour, 1979), while the Conservative Party promised to alter policies “where they damage smaller businesses” (Conservatives, 1979).

Presumably, political parties use such group-based appeals in the hopes of winning votes. Yet, scholars of party electoral strategy have paid surprisingly little attention to them. One reason for this could be that some believe that politics has lost its group basis. For years, comparative electoral studies have been documenting declining levels of class and religious voting (e.g. Franklin et al., 1992; Thomassen, 2005). In most advanced industrial democracies, the dealignment of electoral politics has meant that social cleavages no longer structure voting patterns as they did in the 1960s and 1970s (Dalton, 2014: 174). Seemingly, voting behavior has become less collective and more individual. From this, it is tempting to infer, as one study does, that election-oriented parties “increasingly forgo appeals to social groups” (Stoll, 2010: 452).

In this article, I challenge this idea and demonstrate that political parties make not only widespread but also strategic use of group-based appeals. I argue that while some groups may have lost political relevance, this does not imply that voters are less dependent on group orientations as such. Many studies have shown that people inherently rely on collective identities, group sentiment, and social categorization to make decisions in politics (e.g. Achen and Bartels, 2016; Butler and Stokes, 1974; Campbell et al., 1960; Kinder and Kam, 2009; Walsh, 2012). As parties and their candidates are evaluated, one thing voters consider is which parties represent what groups because this “linking information” lets them use their intuitive feelings toward social groups to guide otherwise complicated political decisions (Converse, 1964: 236–237). Important from the perspective of parties, these group–party linkages are not set in stone. Existing ones can be emphasized or de-emphasized, and new ones can be built (Miller et al., 1991: 1147; Nelson and Kinder, 1996: 1057). We should expect election-oriented elites to try to do so. Group-based appeals should represent a distinctive and persistent feature of party electoral strategy.

Importantly, I make no claim that dealignment processes are irrelevant to the way political parties behave. If we view group-based appeals as an electoral strategy, its specific use should indeed reflect how electoral incentives evolve. But contrary to the idea that electoral change has made group-based appeals less relevant, I argue that developments like declining partisanship, eroding cleavage voting, and the rise of new politics have only served to strengthen the incentives that motivate parties’ use of group-based appeals. Precisely, because political parties can no longer “take the support of any one group for granted” (Mair et al., 2004: 12), they now feel a stronger push to highlight which categories of people they represent.

To substantiate my arguments, I analyze unique data on more than 10,000 group-based appeals made by the two major British parties between 1964 and 2015. To collect these data, I carried out an original content analysis in which all election manifestos published by the Conservative Party and the Labour Party during this 50-year period were hand coded sentence by sentence. The empirical analysis demonstrates an increasing use of group-based appeals since the 1960s in Britain, as expected. Similarly, it shows that the range of group categories targeted, the concentration of group emphasis, and the actual targets in group-based appeals are responsive to well-known developments in the electoral market as well. Across several different measures, I find that political parties use group-based appeals the way we would expect from an electoral strategy.

This article contributes new insights on what seems an evident if overlooked aspect of how political parties appeal to voters and suggests that we view group-based appeals as one distinct feature of party electoral strategy. As I will discuss, adopting this view opens an intriguing avenue for further research on the interplay of electoral strategies. Particularly, how group-based appeals relate to the policy-based appeals that we so often study is one immediate question whose answer could have major implications for our broader understanding of electoral competition.

Party Electoral Strategy and Group-Based Appeals

There are good reasons to think that political parties may use group-based appeals when campaigning for votes. Indeed, if electoral strategies are made to fit with voter decision-making—as we typically assume (e.g. Adams, 2012)—group-based appeals should feature prominently in them. Although scholars of party strategy have failed to consider them, group-based appeals have not gone entirely unnoticed more generally. Some studies, for example, reveal how political elites refer to groups based on religion or race (Domke and Coe, 2008; McIlwain and Caliendo, 2011). Other studies have examined the extent to which leftist parties still refer to class-based groups (e.g. Evans and Tilley, 2017; Rhodes and Johnson, 2017). Yet, while this work contributes to the study of religious politics, racial politics, and class politics, respectively, it cannot tell us whether group-based appeals represent a more generic feature of party electoral strategy. For that we need the broader perspective adopted here.

But what are group-based appeals? I define group-based appeals as explicit statements that link a political party to some category of people. They consist of three parts: (1) some political party (2) is associated or dissociated (3) with some group. Take the statement by the Labour Party from above: “We seek to bring about a fundamental change in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families.” Here, the Labour Party associates itself with working people. This way, group-based appeals essentially provide voters that “interstitial ‘linking’ information indicating why a given party or policy [proposed by that party] is relevant to [a given] group” (Converse, 1964: 236–237). Political parties may of course appeal to groups in many ways—including through the policies they propose, the legislation they pass, or the candidates they run—and I do not aim to cover all of these. Rather, I focus on group-based appeals as one overlooked kind of electoral appeal.

Both theoretically and empirically, my approach is inspired by recent work on policy-based appeals. Martin Dolezal et al. (2014), for example, has defined and measured policy-based appeals in a comparable way focusing on statements that indicate whether some political party is for or against some policy (Dolezal et al., 2014: 64; see also Kriesi et al., 2008: 68). What distinguishes the two is simply that one refers to groups, whereas the other refers to policies. Of course, empirically they may overlap. Sometimes parties refer to groups alone, as when they claim to look after or listen to certain groups. Other times group references and policy information are included in the same statement, as when parties justify policies by their group implications or claim to represent certain groups with reference to particular policy stances. Specifically, the content analysis conducted indicated that about two-thirds of all group-based appeals recorded contained explicit policy information in addition to the group reference. This confirms that group-based appeals are more than proxies for policies but it also raises some intriguing questions about the interplay of electoral strategies that I return to in the discussion. Before pursuing these, however, a more fundamental task is to demonstrate that political parties do in fact use group-based appeals the way we would expect from an electoral strategy. That is the purpose of this article.

Why Do Group-Based Appeals Matter?

Political parties use group-based appeals to win votes. Simply put, such appeals work because they resonate with their audience. Voters often think in terms of group categories when it comes to politics, and parties can take advantage of this. As Paul Lazarsfeld et al. (1948: 27) famously wrote, “a person thinks, politically, as he is, socially.” More precisely, research suggests that group-based appeals work in two related ways. First, they enable effective communication with the electorate as such. Second, and most importantly, they hold the potential to attract some voters in particular.

Effective communication is important to parties. Whether aiming to mobilize loyalists, convince the undecided, or steal opposition support, political parties need initially to get their message across. They want to “connect” with the electorate, and one key function of group-based appeals is to enable this. A long line of research has found that people organize political inputs according to social categories (Achen and Bartels, 2016; Conover, 1988; Converse, 1964; Popkin, 1994: chapter 3; Wlezien and Miller, 1997; see Redlawsk and Lau, 2013). People do so because politics is complicated, while group life and social relations are intuitive. Social cues and group references serve as cognitive shortcuts in information processing and decision-making. As Samuel Popkin (1994: 218) argues, relying on such shortcuts is “an inescapable fact of life [that] will occur no matter how educated we are, how much information we have, and how much thinking we do.”

Although voting patterns today show less of a group basis than in the 1960s (e.g. Franklin et al., 1992; Thomassen, 2005), this does not imply that people no longer see politics through social categories. Empirical evidence suggests declining political significance of group categories based on class or religion but not the irrelevance of groups as such. Indeed, one leading explanation of declining cleavage voting is that electoral choice is now based on so many, often cross-cutting, group attachments that behavioral patterns have become blurred (Dalton, 2014: 164). Thus, one reason why parties refer to categories of people is simply that this makes for good communication. Voters relate more easily to parties and the things they say and do when politics is explained in group-based terms.

However, group-based appeals do more than inform voters. They potentially influence them. Research on political opinion formation has long since documented that political choice is highly susceptible to the ways in which current events, specific policies, or parties themselves are presented at the time of decision-making (e.g. Chong and Druckman, 2007; Zaller, 1992). Given their privileged place in democratic politics, this means that political parties are in an ideal position to influence how the public evaluates them. This is also what agenda-setting scholars as EE Schattschneider (1975) pointed out long ago. One way parties do this is through their group-based appeals. Group-centric reasoning is not only a matter of information processing. Rather, voters also rely, consciously or unconsciously, on their social identities and group sentiments in political decision-making (e.g. Achen and Bartels, 2016; Butler and Stokes, 1974; Campbell et al., 1960; Heath, 2015; Kinder and Kam, 2009; Walsh, 2012: see Huddy, 2013). Citizens’ policy opinions, for example, are often based on deep-seated group sentiments, and many studies suggest that parties can influence opinions to their advantage using group-based campaigns (Kinder and Kam, 2009; Klar, 2013; Nelson and Kinder, 1996). The same is true of preferences for the parties themselves. Whether based on social identification or group sentiment more generally, people’s attitudes toward “the groups the public associates with political parties structure their evaluations of the parties” (Miller et al., 1991: 1147; see also Kam and Kinder, 2012).

Thus, political elites not only have incentives to talk in terms that people understand but they also have a strong impetus to target citizens’ group sentiments and turn these into support for themselves. Parties use policy-based appeals to position themselves favorably and to influence the election agenda (e.g. Green-Pedersen, 2007). Similarly, we should expect them to use group-based appeals to signal representative ties with selected group categories and to make elections about preferred groups over others. In other words, group-based appeals should be central to how political parties appeal for votes.

Change and Stability in the Electoral Incentives behind Group-Based Appeals

It is one thing to show that parties use group-based appeals, and it is another to demonstrate that these are used strategically. The approach I take is to examine whether political parties employ group-based appeals the way electoral market incentives would lead us to expect. If this is really an electoral strategy, it should be responsive to change and stability in the underlying incentives. To demonstrate this, I study trends in group-based appeals in the following ways.

Frequency

Against the view that group-based appeals may have become less relevant to political parties, I consider first the frequency of appeals. As citizens continue to think about politics in terms of social categories (e.g. Achen and Bartels, 2016), group-based appeals have the same strategic value they have always had. Political parties want to connect with voters and, if they can, attract their support. To this end, they present themselves, their past achievements, and future plans in terms that people can easily comprehend. Parties provide explicit cues about which groups they stand for in order “to make politics more ‘user-friendly’” (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000: 7) and to take advantage of “deep-seated habits of thinking” (Kam and Kinder, 2012: 337). The fundamental incentives driving parties’ use of group-based appeals are constant. However, over the past five decades, electoral politics has also changed. One of the more striking changes is partisan dealignment (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000; Klingemann and Fuchs, 1995). Due to modernization processes and the weakening of formal organizations like unions or churches, the number of loyal partisans has been steadily declining. This means that parties can no longer take their support for granted (e.g. Mair et al., 2004). More voters must be convinced to choose a given party, and unions and churches are less able to mobilize support for the parties. This way, incentives have changed, but they have strengthened rather than weakened. Contrary to what Heather Stoll (2010) predicts, the response from political parties should be to increase their group-based appeals.

Range

I also consider the range of different group categories targeted. Beyond partisan dealignment, another change in electoral markets involves the pressure on parties from alternative forms of interest representation. As Peter Mair (2013) argues, social movements in particular are threatening parties on their very existence. Modernization processes and the rise of “new politics” (Franklin et al., 1992) have spurred many new, often narrower, groups of people seeking recognition. As the emergence of numerous social movements and advocacy groups attests (Binderkrantz et al., 2016; Kriesi et al., 1995), such groups may find alternative forms of interest aggregation if parties are not successful in framing themselves as their representatives. Political parties must act on this changing demand to remain competitive and relevant. If group-based appeals are used strategically, we should see an increasing range of categories being targeted.

Concentration

Next, the concentration of appeals across group categories is considered. Although changes in the electorate should bring change in how much and how widely parties appeal, this is not necessarily the case with concentration. Whereas range refers to how many different groups are emphasized, concentration concerns how even (or uneven) emphasis is spread across these groups (see Boydstun et al., 2014). Time has not altered what Schattschneider (1975) called “the conflict of conflicts.” Attention remains a scarce resource for campaigning parties, and just as some policies are always emphasized over others, so should groups be “selectively emphasized” (Budge and Farlie, 1983). We should expect more stability than change in the concentration of group-based appeals.

Targets

Finally, I focus on the targets, that is, on which group categories are emphasized. Here, market incentives have clearly changed. Indeed, this is most likely the change that underlies the inattention to group-based appeals in current research. The erosion of cleavage voting and the decreasing loyalty of traditional constituencies may in itself lead parties to orient themselves toward other groups. But loyal or not, most traditional constituencies are just not as “electorally relevant” as they once were (Best, 2011: 282). Large-scale compositional change in Western electorates has made many traditional group constituencies less attractive for political parties because they make up smaller fractions of parties’ total vote share. Workers, farmers, rural residents, and religious groups have simply shrunk in size. So even if political parties could effectively counter dealignment trends and rebuild old loyalties, this would not have the same value that it used to. For this reason, political parties are forced to broaden their appeal beyond the traditional catchment areas (Kitschelt, 1994; Mair et al., 2004; Przeworski and Sprague, 1986). If used strategically, group-based appeals should show a de-emphasis of these declining groups.

Another way of studying if targets reflect the electoral market is to move from specific groups to a general distinction between economic and non-economic groups. Voters have become gradually more preoccupied with post-materialist concerns over the past 50 years (Franklin et al., 1992). Although not new, cultural or “new politics” issues—like environmental, moral, or immigration issues—have increasingly come on the agenda, and some suggest that these represent a second dimension of Western European party competition (Kitschelt and McGann, 1997). From this, one might expect economic group categories—defined as group categories referring to an occupation (e.g. nurses), a labor market position (e.g. workers), or economic resources (e.g. poor people)—to loose emphasis in parties’ group-based appeals. On the other hand, existing work also suggests that the cultural dimension has supplemented, rather than replaced, the existing economic one (Budge et al., 2001; Kriesi et al., 2008). Furthermore, as Paul Webb (2004: 34) argues, electoral competition in Britain, the case on which I focus, has not seen the same changes as other Western European countries because its majoritarian two-and-a-half party system prevents the emergence of niche parties who are often entrepreneurs of the “new politics” agenda. Consequently, we can hardly expect any clear-cut trends here. Although parties should de-emphasize specific economic groups, such as workers, the trend for economic groups as such will likely be unclear.

Research Design and Data

To study how political parties use group-based appeals, this article uses a new data set consisting of around 10,000 group-based appeals found in British election manifestos from 1964 to 2015. Britain is typical of the changes that advanced industrial democracies have undergone since the 1960s (Denver et al., 2012). In this respect, Britain is a useful first case on which to demonstrate that party electoral strategy involves political elites emphasizing representational ties to groups. Also, we already know much about Britain in terms of party strategy and electoral change. For example, British election manifestos laid the groundwork for the most widely used source in research on party strategy: the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP; Budge et al., 2001). Findings can thus be put in context of previous work. On some features, of course, the British party system also differs from most other advanced industrial democracies, and I discuss these further in the conclusion. The data set used covers the two major British parties—the Conservative Party and the Labour Party—because they alone have competed over the entire 50-year period that this article concerns.

I focus on election manifestos as these have unparalleled time coverage. To analyze whether parties use group-based appeals in ways responsive to partisan dealignment, the rise of “new politics,” and compositional changes of electorates, we need data going back to the 1960s when these changes began. Also, election manifestos represent the party as a one coherent entity. As Cole (2005) argues, this is an obvious advantage when parties are the units of analysis (see also Helbling and Tresch, 2011: 176). Although it is sometimes claimed that manifestos have become less relevant for voters, this does not make them obsolete. For one thing, some still read them. But mainly, election manifestos are important because they function as coordinating devises informing all other aspects of parties’ election campaigns (Adams et al., 2011). That function has remained the same over the years (Budge, 2001: 51). Ideally, existing data such as the CMP (see Volkens et al., 2013) could have been used for the analysis. The CMP data set does actually contain a few categories under the heading of “groups” (categories 701, 703, 706) suggesting that Budge et al. (2001) were well aware that parties use group-based appeals. Unfortunately, these categories cover only few groups and their quality have been shown to suffer on several accounts (Mikhaylov et al., 2012).

For this reason, the 28 Conservative and Labour election manifestos from 1964 to 2015 have been content analyzed anew. Each was coded using group-based appeals as the unit of analysis. These consist of subject (i.e. some party), object (i.e. some group), and relation (i.e. associated/dissociated) and mirror existing work on policy-based appeals (Dolezal et al., 2014; Kriesi et al., 2008; for details on this method, see Kleinnijenhuis et al., 1997). Following 2 weeks of training and based on a detailed codebook, two hired coders and the author read through the election manifestos sentence by sentence to identify group-based appeals and code them according to a number of variables. Thus, the unitizing procedure was similar to that of other major projects based on human coding of political texts (Baumgartner et al., 2006; Volkens et al., 2013), and inter-coder reliability tests indicate that group-based appeals have been identified reliably (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.86; see Hayes and Krippendorff, 2007). Overall, this yields detailed data on how parties link themselves or other parties to different group categories over time. As my theoretical expectations concern the frequency, range, concentration, and targets of group-based appeals, this article uses only information on the group categories, the party making the appeal, and the election year. However, the project codebook describes the full set of variables in detail (available from the author on request).

In one important respect, the method used here differed from previous work. Unlike policy or issue categories for which exhaustive lists are typically made before coding, such a list seems futile in the case of group categories. While political parties often target relatively well-defined groups such as “poor people” or “women,” they might also target groups that do not come to mind a priori. Indeed, one goal with the content analysis was to explore empirically which group categories parties actually target. Thus, only two broad categories indicating whether the group was economic or non-economic were coded (Krippendorff’s alpha = 0.96). Otherwise, for each group-based appeal recorded, the actual word(s) denoting the group reference was stored in a text variable to enable subsequent analysis. Hence, while the first step was to identify and code appeals, an additional, second step consisted of building specific group categories inductively based on post-analysis of the open-ended text entries.

For this second step, I initially relied on automated text analysis to reduce the volume of text. Following the methods literature (Hopkins and King, 2010: 232; Grimmer and Stewart, 2013: 272), statistical software was used to partition all the open-ended information into unique, stemmed words (excluding words that appear less than five times in the entire corpus) and categorize observations according to these. This regrouped all 10,000 group-based appeals into around 550 word categories. I then sorted word categories according to frequency and went through them manually to make sure that they were mutually exclusive and to validate them. In this process, I also collapsed categories that had the same basic meaning. For example, “the handicapped” and “disabled people” were collapsed, so were “the ill” and “those in need of care.” Likewise, a few categories were subsumed under a more abstract category if the n was very small—as with “Asian people” and “colored people,” which were added to “ethnic minorities.” The result is 97 group categories grounded in what parties have actually said from 1964 to 2015. Table 1 lists the 20 most frequent categories along with descriptive statistics. A full list of group categories including descriptive statistics can be found in the supplementary information (Table A1). Overall, this content analysis generates data on the frequency as well as the percentage of group-based appeals targeting each of the group categories. The reported analyses draw on both to examine whether the structure and content of these appeals change as we should expect given the electoral market incentives.

Table 1.

Descriptive statistics for the 20 most frequently targeted group categories.

Group category	Percentage			Frequency
Group category	Mean	Max.	Min.	Mean	Max.	Min.
Women	4.1	9.2	0.5	12	40	1
Families	3.6	8.1	0	15	49	0
Businesses	3.6	7.7	0.5	14	53	1
The nation	2.9	7.7	0.6	9	23	2
Young people	2.6	5.6	0.7	11	35	1
Poor people	2.5	5.5	0.7	8	20	2
Unions	2.4	8.8	0	6	30	0
Pensioners	2.2	9.9	0	8	52	0
Tenants	2	5.6	0	6	19	0
Parents	2	5.5	0	9	38	0
Disabled people	1.9	4.4	0.3	7	21	1
Workers	1.8	6.6	0	5	18	0
Criminals	1.7	4.4	0	8	33	0
Local people	1.6	4.8	0	9	43	0
Teachers	1.6	3.6	0	6	22	0
Old people	1.6	3	0	5	19	0
British people	1.5	9.9	0	5	14	0
Patients	1.5	5.5	0	6	25	0
Welsh people	1.4	6.2	0	4	14	0
Others (residual category)	24	33	11	100	299	10

The residual category others include all identified group-based appeals not classified in one of the 96 substantive group categories. Figure A1 in the supplementary information shows the stability of this category over time.

Group-Based Appeals in Britain 1964–2015

Have the two main British parties used group-based appeals the way we should expect? The answer appears to be yes. I begin by considering the structure of group-based appeals focusing on frequency as well as the range of and concentration across different group categories. Next, I analyze the content of group-based appeals focusing on traditional class constituencies and groups that might have replaced them as targets before turning to economic groups in general.

The Structure of Group-Based Appeals: Frequency, Range, and Concentration

I expect that political parties have intensified campaigning over past decades and that they use group-based appeals more frequently. We can analyze this in two ways. In absolute terms, the number of appeals identified in each of the 28 election manifestos covered is simply counted. In relative terms, this number is adjusted for the size of election manifestos as these have tended to become longer over the years.

Figure 1 presents these two trends in parties’ group-based appeals. To assist this article’s long-term perspective and highlight time trends, all the figures presented in the analysis show fitted lines based on linear regression and smoothed trends based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions (see Fan and Gijbels, 1996). Figure 1(a) displays the absolute number of group-based appeals. It shows quite clearly that parties have appealed more and more to groups over the years. Whereas around 200 group-based appeals were identified for both political parties in 1964, this number has been many times higher in recent years. In 2010, Labour made around 900 group-based appeals in their election manifestos—as did the Conservatives in 2015. Appealing to groups of people is obviously something parties do. And, they have done so increasingly. However, while it is informative, a simple count like this is sensitive to the varying size of election manifestos. Unsurprisingly, manifesto size and the total number of group-based appeals correlate strongly (r = 0.91; see supplementary information: Table A2). Although size might sometimes reflect how parties choose to employ group-based appeals, other times size might be the product of something else.

Figure 1.

The frequency of group-based appeals by party. (a) The observed number of group-based appeals found in the Conservative and Labour election manifestos. (b) The estimated number of group-based appeals per page. Circles show the observed value for each party-year observation. Solid line shows the fitted trend based on linear regression (OLS). Dashed line shows the smoothed trend based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions.

For example, as is also picked up in data sets focused on policies and issues (e.g. the CMP; the Comparative Agendas Project), the Conservative 2005 manifesto is much shorter than any other manifesto in recent years. But it is hardly the case that the Conservative Party saw less need for group-based appeals (or policy-based appeals) in 2005 relative to the elections in 2001 or 2010. This way, varying election manifesto sizes compromise comparability of absolute numbers over time.

To take account of this, I standardize the count and present a relative measure of group-based appeals in Figure 1(b). Specifically, I divide the count of group-based appeals in a given manifesto with its word count and then multiply with 250 (a standard estimate of words on a page) to obtain an estimate of group-based appeals per page. Looking at Figure 1(b), the results suggest that group-based appeals are of increasing relevance in British electoral competition. Holding size constant, group-based appeals have become more frequent since the 1960s. We see a steady increase for Labour, while the Conservatives show more fluctuation (notably in 1966). Even so, in long-term perspective, the evidence suggests that election manifestos of both parties have become more densely packed with group-based appeals. Group-based appeals have not lost any relevance to party electoral strategy. Rather, as expected, political elites have intensified attempts to link up with social categories when campaigning for votes.

But have parties also been widening their appeals across more different target groups? And are they consistently emphasizing some groups over others? Based on electoral market incentives, they should. Figure 2 plots the range of and concentration across group categories for the two parties. Figure 2(a) shows the number of unique group categories that each party have targeted in a given year; that is, how many of the 97 categories contain at least one observation. We see that both trend lines show a general increase in the number of different group categories being targeted. This pattern is very similar across the two parties. In 1964, the Conservative Party appealed to 49 different groups, whereas 75 groups were targeted in the 2015 election. Labour appealed to 64 different groups in 2015 compared to only 47 five decades earlier. On both sides of the spectrum, parties are widening their appeals. Although I focus on trends, it should be noted that the range of groups targeted varies considerably from election to election. For example, Labour has displayed both narrower and broader ranges at elections lying between the endpoints of the period studied. This suggests that parties retain room for short-term maneuvering despite the pressure to adjust in the long run. Figure 2(b) shows the trend in concentration over time. Recall, concentration refers to how emphasis is distributed over the 97 group categories for a given party in a given year. Following recent work on political agendas (see Boydstun et al., 2014), I use the normalized version of Shannon’s H to measure the spread of emphasis across group categories. This measure is bound from 0 to 1 with higher scores indicating a more even distribution across groups. Because group categories have been built inductively and, hence, “fit” the data, absolute values will be relatively high. But as our interest lies in how values change (or not) over time, this is less of a concern here.

Figure 2.

The range and concentration of group-based appeals by party. (a) The range of group categories found in Conservative and Labour election manifestos. (b) The concentration of group-based appeals across the group categories (higher values indicate even spread). Circles show the observed value for each party-year observation. Solid line shows the fitted trend based on linear regression (OLS). Dashed line shows the smoothed trend based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions.

Figure 2 shows that the concentration is fairly stable for both parties. But trends do exert a slight drop over five decades covered. How should this be interpreted? It indicates that, over the entire period, British parties have emphasized some groups at the expense of others—perhaps increasingly so. Thus, group-based appeals show the same kind of “selective emphasis” (Budge and Farlie, 1983) that we have long known policy-based appeals to show. Results also suggest that this selective group emphasis may have become slightly more pronounced over the years.

The Content of Group-Based Appeals: Traditional Constituencies and Economic Groups

So far, analyses have concerned the structure of group-based appeals. What about the particular group categories targeted? Political parties in Britain and elsewhere have needed to renew themselves as their traditional constituencies have declined in size. At the same time, many new and unaligned groups seem up for grabs. If group-based appeals are used strategically, we should expect parties to emphasize groups other than the shrinking traditional constituencies. I analyze this by focusing first on four traditional group categories before exploring two “new” categories increasingly targeted.

Figure 3 shows the percentage of group-based appeals targeting four different categories: workers, poor people, tenants, and businesses. All four are well-described traditional constituencies in both the British and other class-based party systems (Dalton, 2014; Denver et al., 2012). Considering first worker appeals in the upper-left corner of Figure 3, results reflect early class-party alignments. In the 1960s and 1970s, Labour put notably more emphasis on workers in their election manifestos than did the Conservative Party. Most strikingly, during the crisis election of February 1974, Labour emphasized workers five times more than their Conservative counterparts. Compared to the other three group categories, this panel shows that occupational class is really where the two main parties were most distinguishable in terms of which groups were targeted. Since the 1970s, however, Labour’s worker emphasis has dropped significantly to the point where the two parties are now indistinguishable. Although never as high, we see a decrease in the Conservative Party’s worker emphasis as well.

Figure 3.

Percentage appeals targeting workers, tenants, poor people, and businesses by party. Panels show the percentage of all group-based appeals targeting four selected group categories: (a) workers, (b) poor people, (c) tenants, and (d) businesses. Circles show the observed value for each party-year observation. Solid line shows the fitted trend based on linear regression (OLS). Dashed line shows the smoothed trend based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions.

Looking at poor people in Figure 3(b), we also see a general decline. Particularly, the transition from the 1970s to the 1980s showed a marked drop. In this case, change is most evident for the Conservatives, while Labour shows more fluctuation. Comparing the trends for workers and poor people suggests an interesting dynamic. In the 1960s and 1970s, when the working class was large and class voting pronounced, whenever Labour emphasized workers in their appeals, the Conservatives emphasized the poor. This makes sense from a party strategic perspective as that puts cross-pressure on poor workers thus undermining Labour’s working-class support (Przeworski and Sprague, 1986).

Tenants, in Figure 3(c), have generally declined as targets in the long term, although emphasis did initially rise into the 1980s, as the dashed line in the figure shows. Since the 1980s, however, tenants have become a less popular target in parties’ group-based appeals. For businesses, the pattern is reverse of the previous three group categories. Figure 3(d) shows that both parties now devote 5% to 6% of all group-based appeals to businesses. As one could expect, the Conservatives have been most consistent in emphasizing ties to businesses, while Labour seems to have changed its business appeal from one election to the next. But overall, Labour has put considerable more emphasized on businesses over the years as indicated by the solid and dashed lines. This pattern squares well with the finding that Labour has been moving toward the center ground on economic issues, more generally (e.g. Evans and Tilley, 2017).

All this begs the question: What is replacing traditional, group categories as targets in parties’ appeals? Explorative analyses not shown revealed that it is not the group categories that comparative political research argues structure electoral politics outside Britain (Dalton, 2014; Franklin et al., 1992; Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). Categories referring to ethnicity, gender, or nationality, for example, do not show notable rise in emphasis (see supplementary information: Figure A1). And religious groups have never really been targeted at all. British electoral competition has not moved from one cleavage base to another. Instead, Figure 4 explores two new popular target groups: families and parents. Note how the trends in Figure 4(a) and (b) are virtually opposite of those found for workers, poor people, and tenants. British parties are increasingly targeting families and parents (see also Evans and Tilley, 2017). While these group categories lack theorizing in current research, they seem tied to the increasing salience of valence issues like welfare and education (Green, 2007). This way, the public agenda may compel prospective government parties like Labour and the Conservatives to address the concerns of parents and families more than previously. Yet, targeting such categories also fits well with the incentives to move beyond traditional constituencies while still taking advantage of the persuasiveness of group-based appeals. Recent work by Klar (2013), for example, suggests that political elites shape policy opinions to their advantage by targeting and priming parental identities. Taken together, these results show that political parties take stock of the changing electoral market by adjusting the groups which they target. As we should expect, group categories like workers, tenants, and poor people have gradually been crowded out by other groups, two of which are explored here.

Figure 4.

Percentage appeals targeting parents and families by party. Panels show the percentage of all group-based appeals targeting two group categories: (a) families and (b) parents. Circles show the observed value for each party-year observation. Solid line shows the fitted trend based on linear regression (OLS). Dashed line shows the smoothed trend based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions.

However, if we look not at specific groups like workers but at economic groups in general, the picture is one of stability rather than change. As argued, the rise of “new politics” has supplemented the economic, left–right dimension of electoral competition across the advanced industrial democracies. Yet, in Britain, left–right politics continues to dominate (Webb, 2004). It is therefore unlikely that the emphasis of economic groups has changed in any clear way. To study this, I distinguish between two broad categories: economic groups and non-economic groups. Figure 5 shows the percentage of group-based appeals targeting economic groups. Across both parties, we do not observe much of a trend. The linear fitted line for the Conservatives does incline, but this is driven entirely by the two earliest elections covered (i.e. 1964 and 1966). Since then, we see upward and downward movement for both parties but stability in the long run. Also, in regard to how much emphasis is put on economic groups, the Conservative Party (mean = 39%) and the Labour Party (mean = 38%) are very similar. Although the Conservative Party and Labour Party have adjusted which specific groups they target, at a more general level, economic groups have been and continues to be consistent targets in the group-based appeals of the two major British parties.

Figure 5.

Percentage appeals targeting economic groups by party. This figure shows the percentage of all group-based appeals that target economic groups in Conservative and Labour election manifestos. Circles show the observed value for each party-year observation. Solid line shows the fitted trend based on linear regression (OLS). Dashed line shows the smoothed trend based on kernel-weighted local polynomial regressions.

Conclusion and Discussion

At its core, politics is about groups. Most public opinion scholars and political psychologists seem to know this. Yet, scholars interested in how political parties appeal to voters have not considered how parties use group-based appeals. Perhaps, this is based on the idea that such appeals have become ineffective as electorates have changed over the years. After all, why would election-oriented parties talk about groups if voting is decreasingly group-based?

Despite some intuitive appeal, this article has shown that such a view is mistaken. That voters simplify political choices to be, among other things, matters of group representation is “an inescapable fact of life [that] will occur no matter how educated we are, how much information we have, and how much thinking we do” (Popkin, 1994: 218). Specific group categories may wax and wane in their relevance to voters, but the significance of groups as such is inherent to political thinking. In fact, from the perspective of political parties, the dealignment of electoral politics has in many ways served to strengthen the incentives that drive the use of group-based appeals.

Using new and unique data on all group-based appeals found in the election manifestos of Labour and the Conservatives from 1964 to 2015, the analysis has demonstrated that—contrary to the idea that group-based appeals may have become less relevant—Britain’s two major parties have increased their use of group-based appeals. Over the period studied, these parties have also been targeting a growing range of different group categories, as the electoral incentives encourage, and they have made steady use of selective group emphasis. Finally, the analysis has revealed how parties have also taken stock of electoral changes and adjusted which specific group categories they target. Traditional group constituencies have lost emphasis, whereas other group categories like parents or families, which seem tied the rise of valence politics, are increasingly targeted. As we should expect from the continuing predominance of the economic, left–right dimension in British politics, this shift of emphasis applies to specific constituencies (e.g. workers) but not economic groups in general. Notably, these findings pertain to both parties studied, although they represent opposite sides of the political spectrum and have different histories of group representation. At least, in Britain, group-based appeals seem fundamental to how political parties appeal to voters.

In light of the previous focus on Britain in dealignment studies, this was the natural setting for a first look at how political parties use group-based appeals. Although the empirical findings are confined to this case, my theoretical argument suggests that political parties elsewhere rely equally on group-based appeals. The electoral incentives emanating from voters’ group thinking, as well as the strengthening of these incentives due to dealignment processes, would seem applicable to advanced industrial democracies in general (e.g. Dalton, 2014). Nonetheless, Britain is also particular for its majoritarian two-and-a-half party system and its class-based cleavage history. So to probe if results generalize, further work could usefully start with countries with other electoral systems and different cleavage histories.

Beyond this, the article suggests one major avenue for further research. Scholars interested in how political parties appeal for votes usually focus on policy statements and how these are used in policy positioning or issue agenda setting (e.g. Budge and Farlie, 1983; Dolezal et al., 2014; Downs, 1957; Green-Pedersen, 2007; Kriesi et al., 2008; Pardos-Prado and Dinas, 2010). Adopting the view that group-based appeals make up a distinctive tool in party electoral strategy raises important questions about how group-based appeals relate to such policy-based appeals. For example, if we assume that parties cannot place equal weight on all aspects of party electoral strategy, a key question is whether one electoral appeal has become more important than the other. Based on electoral research showing that cleavage voting has become less, and issue voting more, pronounced (e.g. Thomassen, 2005), one view would suggest a shift away from group-based toward more policy-based appeals. Yet, once we accept that political parties can adjust the extent to which they target traditional, cleavage-based groups without abandoning their general use of group-based appeals, expectations become less clear. Indeed, if increasing use of one electoral strategy does mean decreasing use of other ones, the finding that group-based appeals have become more prominent over the years suggests that policy-based appeals could have become less important, relatively speaking. That would imply some revision of mainstream views on electoral competition, which tend to focus on electoral strategies that target the instrumental aspects of voting (see Dalton and Klingemann, 2007).

Then again, policy-based and group-based appeals are not necessarily used in competition. Often, they are used in combination. As mentioned, around two-thirds of the group-based appeals analyzed here also contained policy information. Hence, an obvious direction for further research is to explore how policy-based and group-based appeals are combined. One possibility is that political parties use them to reinforce one another in an effort to get one key message across. Doing so may help political parties to communicate their positions and issue priorities in ways effective enough to overcome the fact that people rarely notice policy shifts (Adams et al., 2011). Another possibility is that policy-based and group-based appeals let political parties target different segments of the electorate at once. This way, the most important question may not be how policy-based and group-based appeals are used, respectively, but rather which groups are implicated on which policies and how that may vary. Scholarly attention to this could, for example, shed new light on how mainstream political parties in advanced industrial democracies attempt to target the growing pool of unaligned voters without also alienating their remaining core (Karreth et al., 2012; Mair et al., 2004; Rohrschneider, 2002).

Questions like these are important to our broader understanding of electoral competition in modern democracies. This article helps raise the questions in the first place and suggests a general framework that allows scholars to start answering them. Regardless of this interplay of electoral strategies, however, this article also shows that group-based appeals are important in their own right. The widespread and strategic use demonstrated here implies that group-based appeals represent one way that political parties appeal for votes too substantial to ignore. We stand to improve our understanding of both party strategy and electoral competition if we accept that.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Anne Binderkrantz, Ruth Dassonneville, Geoff Evans, Alexander Fouirnaies, Jane Green, Christoffer Green-Pedersen, Herbert Kitschelt, Hanspeter Kriesi, Morten Pettersson, Josh Robison, Rune Stubager, and the reviewers for comments and suggestions and Richard Johnson and Mike Norton for their research assistance. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Leuven-Montréal Winter School on Elections in Leuven (2017), the EPOP Conference in Kent (2016), the MPSA Annual Conference in Chicago (2016), and in a research seminar at Aarhus University. I thank all the participants for their helpful comments. Any remaining errors are my responsibility alone.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Supplementary Information

Additional supplementary information may be found with the online version of this article:

Table A1: Descriptive statistics for the group categories by economic/non-economic classification. Percentages.

Table A2: Pairwise correlations between time, manifesto size, absolute number of appeals, relative number of appeals, range of categories, and concentration across categories.

Figure A1: Percentage appeals targeting others (residual category), women, ethnic minorities, immigrants/asylum seekers, British people, and the nation by party.

ORCID iD

Mads Thau

Author Biography

Mads Thau is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. His research focuses on party strategy, voting behavior, and electoral change. Mads has published in journals like European Union Politics and Politica.

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Supplementary Material

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How Political Parties Use Group-Based Appeals: Evidence from Britain 1964–2015

Abstract

Keywords

Party Electoral Strategy and Group-Based Appeals

Why Do Group-Based Appeals Matter?

Change and Stability in the Electoral Incentives behind Group-Based Appeals

Frequency

Range

Concentration

Targets

Research Design and Data

Group-Based Appeals in Britain 1964–2015

The Structure of Group-Based Appeals: Frequency, Range, and Concentration

The Content of Group-Based Appeals: Traditional Constituencies and Economic Groups

Conclusion and Discussion

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Funding

Supplementary Information

ORCID iD

Author Biography

References

Supplementary Material