Date: 28 April 2025
The data nerds among you are probably already aware that the British Election Study’s Wave 29 Online Panel Data is out. Our research team took a look through the data to see what it could tell us about the prominence of relational campaigning in the latest election, and the results were stark.
The percentage of people who attempted to persuade those they knew to vote for a particular party halved between 2019 and 2024, from 8% in 2019 to 4% in the GE just gone. We can break this result down by party in order to better understand the driving forces behind this collapse:
Breaking down the data by party clearly illustrates the dynamics at play here: supporters of all of the main parties were less inclined to engage in advocacy in 2024, with the drop off in Labour supporters who attempted to persuade others falling by 66%. At the same time, those supporting the smaller, anti systemic parties were more willing to advocate on behalf of their party this time round, with the Greens nearly doubling their % of supporters attempting to persuade others from 6% to 10%. These trends are also reflected in the data when the question is reversed:
In every environment, fewer people reported experiencing those they know attempting to persuade them how to vote. What is particularly striking, however, is the collapse of such attempts in the workplace from 5% to barely above 2%. For most of us, workplaces are where we are most likely to encounter people with different politics to our own – so this data suggests that it is advocacy that crosses the divide which may be falling the most.
In a political context where our trust in traditional sources of information like MPs and the media is low, whilst at the same time voter volatility is high, political argument from those we know and trust is only going to become more effective. Given this, progressives everywhere should be seeking to reverse the decline in relational campaigning that we see in this round of BES data.
Contact: lennard@campaignlab.uk