Political parties in B.C. are agonizing over how to raise the money they spend on increasingly expensive election campaigns. But what if all those millions had no effect in changing voters’ minds?
A new study from the U.S. suggests that voters make their decisions long before they cast their ballots, and barring a major gaffe on on the campaign trail, all those pricey ads make almost no difference on voting day.
Joshua L. Kalla, a graduate student in the department of political science at University of California-Berkeley, and David E. Broockman, an assistant professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, crunched the numbers from 40 studies of American elections. Those studies looked at the effect of “campaign advertising and outreach through the mail, phone calls, canvassing, TV, online ads, or literature drops on voters’ candidate choices.”
“Our best guess is that it persuades about one in 800 voters, substantively zero,” Kalla and Broockman wrote.
That news is enough to make advertising executives and campaign managers choke on their morning coffee. But the report, if it reflects reality, could tell us something about what makes a difference to voters.
Last month, Premier John Horgan kept a promise to ban union and corporate donations to political parties and limit individual donations to $1,200 per year, but he raised cries of “hypocrisy” by instead promising a per-vote subsidy. Why not just rely on donations from ordinary voters, instead of milking unwilling taxpayers?
The answer is that parties believe they need big war chests to fight elections, with advertising, leaders’ tours and social-media campaigns. The major parties have become used to the millions of dollars that have flowed from the deep pockets of their funders.
Horgan’s new subsidy would begin in 2018 at $2.50 per vote received in the last election. Based on that, the Liberals and NDP would each receive about $2 million while the Green Party would get $830,000. The allowance drops by 25 cents a year to $1.75 per vote by 2021 and would cost about $16.4 million over four years.
Unless a special legislative committee decides it should continue, the allowance would end in 2022. Parties and candidates would also get 50 per cent of their election expenses reimbursed every four years, which the government says would cost taxpayers about $11 million per election.
But what if the parties don’t really need those millions for glossy television ads?
“To be clear, our argument is not that campaigns, broadly speaking, do not matter,” the researchers wrote. “For example, candidates can determine the content of voters’ choices by changing their positions, strategically revealing certain information, and affecting media narratives. Campaigns can also effectively stimulate voter turnout.”
In other words, campaigns don’t change minds, except in cases such as former NDP leader Adrian Dix’s sudden announcement opposing the Kinder Morgan pipeline expansion during the 2013 election. However, campaigns do encourage people who have made up their minds to turn their beliefs into action by voting.
While traditional political loyalties, religion and other factors play important roles in determining preferences, dare we hope that voters make up their minds not during campaigns but between them? What if the parties make a difference by what they do and say every day?
That seems a bit fantastical, but the American study suggests our parties might not need the millions they crave to change our minds. Instead, they could spend less on flash and more on getting out the vote.
