Determinants of personalised campaigning: a comprarative analysis

This chapter provides an analysis of how much personalisation is going on, where, and why. Three elements of personal vote seeking strategies are evaluated: campaign focus, campaign means and local constituency activities. We find that the level of institutional incentives for a personal vote is an important predictor of personalised campaigning, but also candidate-related features are important. Apart from the visibility of the candidate, the perception of electoral success and campaign intensity are strongly related to all three types of personalised campaigning. We conclude that while electoral system features play a key role, candidate-related factors such as candidate visibility and motivation also make a major contribution to an explanation of the personalised campaigning phenomenon.