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The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. This article makes a contribution by articulating, for the first time, how hope and fear appeals were constructed as a rhetorical media device in a political advertising campaign context, specifically the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. Based on a qualitative content analysis of both sides’ campaigning materials, an understanding of the fluid, responsive and symbiotic nature of these emotional appeals and how they are utilized against the other is outlined. The research reveals core dimensions for constructing persuasive media appeals. While, fear appeals should strive to create a threat perceived to be relevant, and significant, the deployed hope appeals should focus on generating alternative positive visions and be goal congruent. By understanding contested (political) campaigns, new types of hybrid hope and fears appeal emerge (i.e. hope and fear reduction appeals). Taking these findings together, allows the authors to provide prescriptions on how certain message appeal types might be used to induce particular emotional effects in the audience.

June 2018 marks two years since the Leave campaign won the referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union, bringing David Cameron's tenure as Prime Minister to a sudden, catastrophic end.

Against prior expectations the 2017 General Election proved to be a particularly dramatic campaign, repeatedly stunning commentators from its surprise calling right through to its frenetic conclusion. In seven weeks a hitherto dominant Prime Minister saw her once seemingly unassailable lead in the polls eroded as support for her previously beleaguered rival surged. The subsequent restoration of two-party dominance contributed to the return of a hung parliament with profound consequences for both Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn. Political Communication in Britain, the tenth volume in a series that began nearly four decades ago, revisits a momentous election by providing unique insights from the vantage point of those who fought, reported and researched a campaign that is likely to live long in the public imagination.

The question of whether or not Labour benefitted significantly from a “youthquake” in 2017 is perhaps the most controversial that has arisen in interpreting the outcome. This chapter explains the evidence on which such judgments are made, exploring its strengths and weaknesses: polls and surveys are always subject to a degree of uncertainty and possible error. In this case, some sources suggest there was a significant increase in the turnout of young people in 2017, others that there was not. Roger Mortimore documents each one, and concludes that the case is not proven either way; but he also argues that researchers could sometimes do more to ensure clarity when they publish, so as to help the lay observer trying to weigh up competing claims.

The public investigation of problems can take a number of forms: Royal Commissions, Tribunals, ad hoc departmental Committees and special parliamentary conferences or committees. This chapter does not deal with purely parliamentary bodies such as the Speaker’s Conferences

Poor Prisoners’ Defence Act 1903. This was the first Act which made provision for legal aid, which was limited to trials on indictment.

The Treasury and, from 1964–69, the Department of Economic Affairs have provided governments with their main official guidance.

Economic activity by the state—other than the core activity undertaken by the Civil Service—takes a range of forms which defy easy categorisation. Whereas a public corporation (or a limited company in which the state is a majority shareholder) can clearly be classified as being within the public sector, there have often been grey areas resulting from minority government shareholdings, ‘golden shares,’ and changing accounting rules over the raising of private capital.

The distinction between ‘think-tanks,’ research organisations and pressure groups or interest groups is often a tenuous one; what all the organisations listed in this section have in common is that they attempt, or attempted, to have some influence on policy decisions.

Unlike many other countries internationally, the United Kingdom does not have a ‘written constitution.’

Using national survey data on voters’ perceptions of party leaders during the 2010 British general election campaign, we use logistic regression analysis to explore the association between specific image attributes and overall satisfaction for each leader. We find attribute-satisfaction relationships differ in some respects between the three main party leaders, demonstrating that leader image effects are not symmetrical across leaders. We find evidence that negative perceptions have more powerful effects on satisfaction than positive ones, implying that parties should seek to determine a leader's image attribute perceptions measured against the public's expectations of them on the same dimensions. The positions that campaigners ought then to choose are those that will have the most beneficial effect in encouraging voting behaviour for each particular leader or discouraging voting behaviour for an opponent.

In the autumn of 2011, there was significant discussion in the British press about the level of support among women for the Conservatives and for Prime Minister David Cameron, arguing that he had a ‘problem with women’ and suggesting that this had arisen since the general election the previous year. We examine the opinion polls over the period, and find that they mostly point towards an opposite conclusion. Further, there seems little to suggest that attitudes to David Cameron personally were damaging Conservative standing among women, as much of the coverage implied. We consider how the reporting came to give a misleading impression, and why it matters.

The 2010 British election particularly focused on the party leaders’ images – a departure in fifty years of British elections. The principal contribution of the article is to illustrate how a combined approach to assessing leadership positioning using both the traditional survey and semiotic analysis can provide insights into what image attribute dimensions end up in the minds of members of the public (actual positioning) and on what image attribute dimensions party marketers are trying to position themselves (intended positioning). Using data from the 2010 British general elections, our findings indicate that the combined methodological approach would be particularly useful for brands that need repositioning, those whose image attribute positions change dramatically over time, and those who wish to target previously unresponsive target audience segments.

Roger Mortimore and Anthony Wells explore the nature of modern opinion polling in the UK, which has changed dramatically in the few years since the last substantial studies were published: this provides necessary background to understand the performance of the polls at the 2015 election. Their chapter examines the changes which have taken place in British polling in recent years, covering the way in which polls are conducted, the number of polls published and the nature of the companies conducting them, the relationships between the polling companies and their media sponsors, and the way in which poll results are published and disseminated. The chapter also outlines the polling industry’s arrangements for self-regulation, by the British Polling Council and the Market Research Society.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to comment on the differences in perceptions that exist between academic and professional marketing researchers, as creators of new marketing knowledge, and explore how academics and practitioners can work together better on areas of mutual interest or separately on areas where their interests do not coincide.Design/methodology/approachThe approach is via two focus groups, one with researchers in marketing from universities and one with commercial market researchers, and via online surveys of the same target groups, with 638 respondents in all.FindingsThe study indicates that the two sample groups have relatively congruent views about the advantages and disadvantages of each other's approach to research but both groups believe they could do more to make their research more comprehensible and accessible to each other.Research limitations/implicationsThe empirical study was conducted in the UK only, and the response rate from the university marketing research community was disappointingly low. These represent limitations on the generalisability of the findings.Practical implicationsIt is argued that marketing research can be undertaken separately by academics and practitioner researchers but that joint working between academic and commercial marketing researchers represents another dimension to marketing research which could be facilitated by the creation of joint initiatives, including industry‐inspired academic‐practitioner research projects and the development of government‐funded academic‐practitioner research projects, building on both groups' unique sets of skills.Originality/valueThe paper reports on the outcome of an empirical study that has implications for the conduct of marketing research in universities and market research agencies.

This chapter assesses public opinion, as measured through opinion polls since the inter-war period, and makes a distinction between monarchy as institution, and royal family—permitting insights into individual performances of the latter. As the chapter demonstrates, both the nature and volume of polling has changed radically from rare polls focusing mostly on peripheral matters to the modern reality of frequent and wide-ranging (although not necessarily systematic) polling. At one level, the early polls provide little insight but the shift informs of why there has been a change in focus and intensity of polls. Given that published British opinion polls are commissioned by the news media, the content evoked by polling is revealing of changing editorial agendas in relation to the institution, but also to individuals in terms of their performance ratings in relation to expectations of the institution and how royal individuals relate to these. Public support for the continuation of the monarchy has apparently remained rock-solid but not attitudes towards individual members of the royal family, something which this chapter reveals has implications for the survival of the institution.

Political parties have long since targeted the marginal constituency and floating voters using demographic segmentation approaches and the use of market segmentation techniques in general election campaigns is now well-documented (see Johnson 1971; Ahmed and Jackson 1979; Yorke and Meehan 1986; Baines et al. 2003). The actual practice of segmentation as undertaken by political parties and its relation to theory is less well-considered. This paper represents a serious attempt to outline how political parties targeted a priori segments of the electorate including gender, age and lifecycle in the 2005 British General Election when they should have been adopting a product attributed-based approach. Selected MORI surveys from April 2005 were analysed, using logistic regression to indicate the most important factors in determining how Britons vote. Principal components analysis provides an indication of how the three main British political parties are perceived. The paper discusses, using resource-advantage the...

This paper outlines a model of voter decision-making developed in the UK, “the political triangle” (issues, party image and leader image), and shows how it has been used as the basis of a polling programme. The emphasis is on the details of the polling questions used and on how the data is analysed, showing in particular how each technique lends itself to summary of the findings in an easily comprehensible visual form. It also discusses how the different aims of media polling and private polling lead to slight differences in the way surveys are carried out, even when the subject under investigation is the same.

This paper reports and discusses the results of a survey of English and Welsh schoolchildren aged 11–18, conducted in March–May 2003, covering their attitudes to and knowledge of politics, politicians and political issues. It concentrates in particular on the way these attitudes develop as pupils get older, and also discusses the sources of information on which young people depend, and which may be the key to developing this neglected political ‘market’. It finds that pupils are unenthused by politics, but not ‘apathetic’. Both knowledge and interest increase as pupils grow older; however, negative or cynical attitudes to politicians and to political parties seem to grow at the same time. Yet young people also hold positive attitudes to the electoral process in general, though many do not accept that they will have a ‘duty to vote’ when old enough. The media, though distrusted, is the principal source of information, though it is clear that the family is highly influential; schools seem less influential. Copyright © 2004 Henry Stewart Publications

The perceived importance of five technical service qualities (Gronroos 1984) or features (i.e. national and local policies, leaders, values and candidates), and voters’ ratings of the Labour and Conservative Parties’ competence on each of these parameters, were investigated during the 2001 British General Election using an a priori segmentation method and the classification tree statistical technique for data analysis. Voter ratings of the technical service features were found to be indicators of intention to vote. A product differentiation approach is most likely to influence voting intention, because the technical service features are more readily manipulated through marketing programmes than demographic and customer characteristics (Bucklin and Gupta 1992). Ratings of technical service features are stronger indicators of voting intention than voter demographics and characteristics. A product differentiation approach, based around technical service features, would be the most effective focus for strateg...

Political marketing campaigns frequently use negative campaigning approaches, in which a candidate’s advertising criticizes an opponent, but the practice is controversial. Negative advertising in the 2012 US Presidential election was widely chastised in the media (Gabbatt 2012; Gye 2012), for being even more negative than its predecessor (Cordes 2012; Slack 2012). Despite considerable investigation by academics, there is little consensus on the effectiveness of negative campaigning (Merritt 1984; Lau et al. 1999; Lau et al. 2007; Chou and Lien 2010). Fewer scholars have discussed whether it may be more effective for some candidates than for others, but their suggestions include its: being more effective on issues where the campaigner is strongest (Damore 2002); being most effective for challengers against incumbents (Lau and Pomper 2002); having more usage appeal for trailing candidates than leaders (Skaperdas and Grofman 1995); and being most used by candidates who are perceived as weak on personal attributes (Harrington and Hess 1996). None of these papers explores how the tactical circumstances might dictate prescriptively which issues a political marketer ought to choose to suit a positive focus for a given candidate nor which issue focii might repay a negative approach.

This work examines political communications in British general elections. Like its predecessors it has a dual purpose: first, to make available the reflections of those who participated in it; and, second, to provide analysis of the media, the parties and public opinion polls in the campaign

This chapter explores the election campaign from the point of view of the voters in some of the key Labour-Conservative battleground constituencies, where the eventual outcome of the election was likely to be decided and where we might expect the election to have been hardest fought. We consider the potential importance of the campaign here (as measured by the size of the floating vote), how many people the campaign reached and what those on the receiving end thought of it. We also look at how far the voters here were aware that they were in strategically important constituencies, how many claimed to be voting tactically, and how far these decisions seem to have been well informed and well judged. Finally we consider the impact of the leaders’ debates — here, as elsewhere, an influential factor, despite Nick Clegg’s performance being arguably an irrelevance in these constituencies that his party had no chance of winning.