The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
This week we look, in our politics section, at conference season. Does this have an impact on voting intention, and if not what purpose does it serve. (NB: We’re aware that is our third politics-themed bulletin in as many weeks and will be going cold turkey for the rest of October!).
And of course, there’s Charlie’s Attic, where politics junkies come for their next hit. This week we hear about the 51-0 football beating dished out in Scotland recently.
Do party conferences matter?
We were interested in this article by academic Paul Whiteley earlier this month. It looks at the impact of party conference season, based on an analysis over time.
The findings might have been useful to soothe any nerves for Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, as they prepared to take the stage at their respective conferences, over the course of the past fortnight. As the chart below shows, the overall outcomes of the analysis reveal nominal differences in terms of electoral impacts before and after. Whilst there are exceptions to this – the piece cites Labour’s conferences in 1960 as a particularly bad one for the party – the main finding is that conferences have less impact on electoral fortunes than politicians both hope and fear.
Tony Blair wrote in his memoirs that: “The single hardest thing for a practising politician to understand is that most people, most of the time, don’t give politics a first thought all day long. Or if they do, it is with a sigh…before going back to worrying about the kids, the parents, the mortgage, the boss, their friends, their weight, their health, sex and rock ’n’ roll… For most normal people, politics is a distant, occasionally irritating fog.”
Many politicians will hope that conference season is the exception to this – cutting through the fog. But the findings from the article suggest that it may be close to the opposite: a time when politicos come together to perform obscure rituals; when the fog is even, perhaps, thicker.
Does this mean that conference seasons don’t matter? Those who have spent the past couple of weekends in Manchester and/ or Liverpool should not despair.
For one thing, there are moments when a conference moment can cut through. The original article in fact suggests that 2022 was one such year, with Labour capitalising on the aftermath of the Truss mini-budget. For another, the experience of ‘getting through’ a conference with unity of purpose intact is itself an achievement. It can create energy, momentum and purpose, which is then projected externally.
Conferences may be overstated as a direct channel to the electorate. But, the piece suggests, they still play a central role in our politics.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the ‘occasionally irritating fog’ at the end of our Friday bulletin:
