Replication Data for: The face of the party? Leader personalisation in British campaigns

The personal characteristics of political elites play an important role in British elections. While the personalisation of the media’s election coverage has been the subject of much debate, we know less about the conditions under which voters receive personalised messages directly from elites during the campaign. In this paper, we use a new dataset that includes more than 3,300 local communications from the 2015 general election to explore variation in the personalisation of campaign messaging. We find that there is systemic variation in terms of where photographs of party leaders are included in election communications, which provides further evidence that campaign messages are deployed strategically to portray the candidate – and their party – in the best possible light.

政治精英的个人特质在英国选举进程中发挥着重要作用。尽管媒体对选举报道的个人化倾向已然成为学界热议的议题，但针对竞选期间选民直接接收精英所发送的个性化竞选信息的具体情境，目前我们的认知仍较为有限。本研究依托一项全新数据集展开分析，该数据集涵盖2015年英国大选期间的3300余份地方竞选宣传材料，旨在探究竞选宣传信息个性化程度的差异情况。研究发现，政党领袖照片在选举宣传材料中的嵌入位置存在系统性差异，这一发现进一步佐证：竞选团队会通过策略性部署宣传信息，以尽可能最优的方式塑造候选人及其所属政党的形象。