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This chapter examines the role of the Liberal Democrat Party members in influencing voting behaviour in the 1997 general elections. Debates in literature about the importance of campaigns in elections are reviewed. To evaluate the impact of Liberal Democrat campaign activity on the election, it is important to take into account the campaign activities of its main rivals, Labour and the Conservatives. This is done using data from a survey of Labour party members conducted in 1997, together with local campaign spending data for all three parties. The results suggest that local campaigning plays a very important role in influencing the Liberal Democrat vote.

For the case of elections since 1988, this chapter looks at the suggestion made by Andre Siegfried in 1907 that Canadian elections are peculiarly vulnerable to leader effects. It begins by outlining the specifically Canadian arguments for taking leadership seriously and the evidence said to back them; the arguments are found to refer mainly to ‘indirect’ effects in the sense used by King in Chapter 1 (so that leaders are treated as embodied preferences), with the actual evidence largely silent on the content – personality or otherwise – of Canadian judgments on leaders, at least in so far as those judgments are linked to the vote. Likewise, most accounts control for competing explanations weakly, if at all, and none considers personality for its net, election–day effect. Working through each argument also reveals that each is highly contingent, generally applying more to certain parties or party sizes than others, and more to periods of flux and to new parties than to stable periods and old parties. Filling the gaps requires an account of the personality factors worth taking seriously (the analysis looks at competence and character), a basic estimation strategy setting these attributes into proper context (which is given), and based on this estimation strategy, an accounting for net aggregate effects (also given). The last two sections of the chapter discuss whether perceptions of personality can be modified over the course of a campaign, and give an account of a special sort of ‘indirect’ effect: the case where perceptions of a leader’s personality can be cashed in on perceptions of a policy option (here the proposal for a commercial union between Canada and the United States in 1988).

There are good reasons to suppose that electoral politics will be more leadership driven in a democratizing or semi–democratic nation than in older democratic polities possessing entrenched party systems and coherent issue agendas. The Russian Federation’s watershed election of June–July 1996, in which its founding president, Boris Yeltsin, staged a stirring comeback to defeat the neo–Communist opposition and earn a second term in office, offers an opportunity to put this proposition to the test. The chapter demonstrates that the perceptions of the personal characteristics of the presidential candidates exerted substantial effects on the choices of the Russian electorate in 1996. Thorough examination discloses that these, and the underlying dynamic of transitional politics, were highly complex. The different sections of the chapter are: The New Russia and the 1996 Election; Sizing up the Candidates; Leadership Evaluations and the Vote – taking third variables into account, modelling the phenomenon, estimating leadership effects, differences across candidates and voters; and Conclusion.

Throughout the period between the First and Third Reform Acts, politics was ultimately about issues. However, turning these views into votes, and votes into electoral majorities was a highly complex and time-consuming business. The hard annual graft of voter registration reviewed in the last chapter was only the first step, and enormous additional effort was required to ensure that the registered electorate turned out on polling day. This chapter focuses on the processes involved and investigates three particular aspects of the campaign. The chapter begins by examining the essential elements of preparation undertaken by the parties, from finding themselves a candidate to organizing their canvass. It then examines the business of the canvass itself, and the role played by bribery and corruption in securing the support of the more unprincipled voters. After the campaign had ended, there was a long clearing-up process as bills relating to the contest were scrutinized and discharged: the final section of the chapter reviews the costs of electioneering.

Three boulders emerge as the turning points in 2008: celebrity metaphor, the Palin effect, and financial crisis. The first emerges at the end of July and showered radioactive dust over the Democratic Party's election campaign until, five weeks later, Barack Obama demonstrated his hero bonafides at his convention speech. Immediately afterward, the newly hopeful Democratic campaign was knocked off balance again by the energy burst of Sarah Palin as she exploded on the national scene. Then, even as ship Obama succeeded in righting itself—the half-life of the Palin effect was shorter than celebrity metaphor—the financial crisis loomed suddenly like a giant iceberg threatening to capsize both campaigns. The Republican craft listed dangerously, the Democrats' hardly founders. By early October, the rushing stream of the election had divided, marking the effective end of the 2008 campaign.

Initially, Eisenhower's emergence as the Republican nominee for president also helped to sustain a basic consensus behind the war, for Ike was a moderate who was prepared to defend Truman's decision to intervene in Korea. As the campaign progressed, Eisenhower's comments became more critical. But even his decisive promise to voters to “go to Korea” was ambiguous. It was intended to signal that something new had to be done to end the fighting, while leaving Ike free to decide precisely what—and, crucially, while also ensuring that he kept his distance from MacArthur and the Republican right. On becoming president, Eisenhower therefore retained a good deal of freedom. But in terms of public relations, he swiftly made many of the same mistakes that had plagued Truman's early efforts. And only Stalin's death, which in turn led to a thawing of the communist position, revived the armistice negotiations and resulted in an end to this long and costly war.

This chapter examines women's involvement during and after election campaigns. It argues that when election fever hit, it would have been very difficult for women of the political elite to remain unpoliticized. While the female canvasser of the contemporary stereotype was a pretty, young, single woman who used her beauty and charm to win votes, the reality was much more varied. Moreover, the experiences of female canvassers demonstrate that the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable electioneering behaviours had a certain amount of flexibility and might vary according to situation. By looking specifically at two outstanding female campaigners — Lady Susan Keck in the Oxfordshire election of 1754, and the duchess of Devonshire in the Westminster election of 1784 — both of whose activities attracted much press coverage, it becomes clear that sexual slander was the weapon of choice for attacking women who threatened the status quo by becoming political figures in their own rights.

At no point during the 2008 election campaign did the John McCain image generate much dramatic force. When Steven Schmidt assumed control over image making in early summer, even he could not liven up the image. Schmidt tried redressing the deficit of excitement by attacking the image on the other side. With the celebrity campaign running out of gas, Republicans needed to generate performative power from their own side. When McCain named Sarah Palin his choice for vice president, she officially assumed the junior partner position. Symbolically, however, the reverse was the case. The dimly lit McCain figure was plugged into the high-wattage image from Alaska. Palin had the dramatic power and the prospective political glory. Palin's paint job sparkled, and she was clearly built for power and speed. This new Republican model projected the right image, and she had many of the special features the public desired.

In the middle of September 1950, MacArthur's dramatic victory at Inchon transformed the Korean War. This chapter explores the problems thrown up by this victory. In the battlefield theater, the military received scant respite from correspondents, who complained that MacArthur had made it excessively difficult to cover the Inchon campaign. In Washington, the government's efforts to sustain domestic support for a prolonged mobilization campaign appeared threatened by the public's natural tendency to lapse into complacency the minute an international crisis had passed. And in the midterm election campaign, Truman and the Democrats found it surprisingly difficult to exploit the successful turn of events in Korea, not least because the administration's decision to cross the 38th parallel threatened to bring China into the war.

As election campaigns work the binaries, they try to simplify the meaning of every issue that comes up, bringing it into semiotic alignment with one side or the other of the great divide. Candidates are purified so that their characters can be folded into heroic narrative arcs of a democratic kind. Hillary Clinton came to symbolize equality and mobility, wisdom and maturity, a modern enlightened woman breaking the glass ceiling. Barack Obama became the great emancipator. John McCain was the wounded prisoner of war who breaks the bonds of enslavement and comes back as a corruption-fighting maverick. By election time, citizen voters make the crucial decision about the civil and uncivil qualities of candidates. However this voting public as such is not physically active in the democratic struggle for power. Democracy is representative not only in the exercise of power but also in the struggle for it.

This chapter explores the causes and the nature of the dramatic changes that overtook the rural Liberal party between 1884 and 1886. The first three sections, which focus on the constituencies of Holmfirth and North Essex, show that labourers in many parts of England possessed longstanding traditions of radical social protest that inspired them, once enfranchised, to demand a voice first in the choice of a Liberal Parliamentary candidate and then in the planning of the Liberal election campaign. The fourth section addresses the subject of rural divisions where the Liberals lost the election. The fifth section discusses the effect of household enfranchisement on the local Liberal moderates who had previously controlled the party in the counties, and particularly the ways in which the democratization of local party structures and the radicalization of the Liberal agenda alienated moderate support.

All complex societies have states, and they are extraordinarily important, but it is vital not to conflate states and their powers with the institutions of the civil sphere. States are organizations that exercise social control in formal and explicit, if sometimes indirect ways, by requests if possible, by commands if necessary, and by force if nothing else will do. The goals of government and its ends, are established by forces outside state organization itself. At the head of state organization sits an authority that is instituted by some nonbureaucratic power, which aims to make the bureaucracy work in its own interests and name. This chapter discusses civil power; the instrumental science of politics; constructing and destructing civil power; the right to vote and disenfranchisement; parties, partisanship, and election campaigns; and civil power in the state.

Even though the issues and contestants changed during the 1844 election campaign, most Whigs voiced continual certitude about their triumph. “Everywhere the Whigs are confident”, Gustavus Henry, a Whig presidential elector in Tennessee, cheered while stumping the state in July. Only two days before the presidential balloting a Philadelphian gushed, “The Whigs are in high spirits and fully expect to get the state of Pennsylvania, and to elect Henry Clay”. All these Whigs rejoiced that fate had now given them another opportunity to vindicate “the justness of their cause” and the charismatic leader who best personified the party's principles and the frustrating struggle to establish them. If superior men and superior policies were ever going to prevail, if right and justice were ever to triumph, the Whig party believed, 1844 had to be the year. Defeat was, quite literally, unthinkable.

The Palin effect deflated before the financial crisis, and her polluted representation had already brought down John McCain. From that point on, the civil power of the Republican Party's election campaign was in decline. The outcome of the democratic struggle for power is neither inevitable nor determined. Despite their recent misfortunes, the Republicans still had a chance. The looming economic boulder presented grave new dangers, but it also offered opportunity. Financial crisis was a cause, but it didn't trigger an inevitable effect. What it created was a new stage for the unfolding of political drama, for those struggling for power to perform, and for citizen audiences to decide. The economic boulder broke the surface of the rushing river for objective reasons, driven by events and institutional logics that stood outside the cultural structures and meaning struggles of the political campaign.