Political marketing and Greek MPs: results of a survey

Ioannis Andreadis and Theodore Chadjipadelis Department of Political Sciences Aristotle University Thessaloniki

Introduction
Research on political marketing has been conducted with increasing rates within the last decade. Along with the blossom of political marketing, new terms have been implemented in political science literature. Voters are considered as customers and political parties are expected to act as business organisations that should try to understand and satisfy their customers' needs. In the same framework, Lees-Marshment (2001a; 2001b p. 43) classifies political parties to product-oriented, sales-oriented and market oriented. Wring (1996) describes three key stages in the development of electioneering: propaganda, media and marketing. In terms of political communication Farrell and Webb (2000 p.104) argue about the existence of three stages in the development of campaigning according to the professionalization degree of the electoral campaign. Norris (2002 p.135) refers to the typology of the evolution of political communication using the terms premodern, modern and postmodern. All these classifications share some common characteristics and it could be argued that there is some form of correspondence between them, i.e. modern or media campaigns are carried on by sales-oriented parties; on the other hand, market-oriented parties tend to wage campaigns which could be classified as postmodern. Classifying the Greek political parties according to their orientation and stage of development of election campaigning is difficult because political marketing is still challenged in Greece. As Papathanassopoulos (2000) has reported most of the communication experts who have been invited in Greece since 1990s have come

incognito because Greek political parties tend to be sensitive about their relations with marketing professionals. Yannas (2005) has presented the implementation of political marketing in Greek political parties and the debates about it. Based on Yannas' report and recent experience from the Parliamentary elections held in September 2007, Greek major political parties could be classified somewhere between the second and the third stage of political communication. In this paper we try to examine how political marketing and the aforementioned modernisation of Greek major political parties' campaign have affected local campaigns of their candidates who have run for a constituency seat at the most recent Greek Parliamentary election. This is an important question because, as Whiteley and Seyd (2003) have demonstrated, local campaigns play a significant role in influencing the vote. We study local campaigns through a number of different dimensions: i) the orientation of the campaign, i.e. if candidates are raising issues that are not occupied by their party and whether attention of the campaign is given to their constituency problems or to party issues, ii) the intensity of the campaign, which can be measured by the candidates time investment on their campaign and the quality of used campaign means, iii) the use of information technology and new media and iv) the organisation of the campaign (resources, party support, budget).

Parliamentary Elections in Greece

Greek Parliament consists of 300 members who are elected for a period of four consecutive years through direct, universal and secret ballot by the citizens. Twelve MPs are elected from nationwide party lists in proportion to the total electoral strength of each

party throughout the country. The rest 288 seats are allocated to 8 single-seat and 48 multi-seat constituencies. In each constituency each party has its own ballot which includes a list with the party's candidates in this constituency. Citizens can vote for individual candidates with a cross symbol next to their name on the party ballot. Constituency seats are distributed to parties according to their strength in each constituency. Once a constituency seat is distributed to a party the seat is won by the party's candidate who has collected the greater number of crosses. With this system personal campaign is more than necessary to every candidate who wants to win a seat in the Greek Parliament despite of running in a multi-seat or single seat constituency. Even in the single-seat constituencies the major parties often use the maximum allowed number of candidates, i.e. three candidates for one seat. These personal campaigns sometimes take the form of war between candidates of the same party. In the last 33 years there are two major political parties in Greece, the right wing New Democracy (ND) and the socialist Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK), which compete for election win and government power. The rest of this paper deals with personal campaigns of these two parties' candidates.

Methodology
The results presented in this paper have been collected with the use of an international questionnaire for candidate surveys in the framework of the Comparative Candidate Survey (CCS) project. National study directors of CCS project have developed a common

core questionnaire which is used in the aftermath of the national elections. The core questionnaire specifically focuses at the issue of individualization of electoral campaigns. The survey in Greece is conducted by the Laboratory of Applied Political Research, School of Political Sciences, Aristotle University Thessaloniki. The first wave of data, which is presented in this paper, has been collected online. At this time we are on the verge of completing a second wave of data collection that will use offline methods. For online data collection we have used our own web server, properly modified open source web-survey software and a list of names and email addresses of about 700 candidates, which was provided by the two major political parties in Greece. About one out of ten of these email addresses was associated with some form of error and corresponding candidates have not been reached. The rest of the candidates were invited to participate to the survey with an email sent by us. We have also sent them seven reminders (one reminder every about 2 weeks). This effort resulted in 163 responses. Crawford et al (2001) have pointed out that nonresponse in Web surveys is associated with two different factors. The first is the usual nonresponse, the rejection to the invitation that also occurs with printed questionnaires. The second factor is associated with break-offs. The result of a break-off is a semi-completed questionnaire with some unanswered questions. Web surveys are impersonal because respondents do not come face-to-face with another person. This makes it easier for them to abandon a survey they have started. There are some techniques that can help in reducing this behaviour, (i.e. interactive survey process, time indicator) but even after using these techniques, the result is far from total elimination of this problem. (Evans and Mathur 2005; Zhang 2000). CCS questionnaire covers a lot of issues and its printed form consists of 12 pages. With such a

long questionnaire we could not escape from the occurrence of some break offs. As a result in the following tables the number of respondents is different from 163 which is the sample size.

Campaign theme and characteristics

According to Farrell and Webb, the development from the second to the third stage of election campaigning is associated with stronger professionalization of campaign staff and significant growth of leader's office magnitude and power. The attitudes of Greek candidates towards these developments are presented in Table 1. The majority of candidates (64.5%) believe that professionals have too much influence over their party's decision making. As a result, most of them (71%) support that decisions are taken at top level of their party without paying attention to the grassroots. Table 1 Attitudes towards decision-making processes
agree - strongly agree Count 76 % 71,0% neither agree nor disagree Count 13 % 12,1% disagree strongly disagree Count % 18 16,8%

Decision-making in my party is too topdown; the grassroots cannot make its voice heard Pollsters and political strategists have too much influence over my party's decision making

69

64,5%

23

21,5%

15

14,0%

The power of party's leadership is also attested by the way candidates were nominated. As Table 2 indicates the decision about nomination of candidates for the Greek Parliament is mostly done by party leadership. Table 2 Nomination decision
voters at large voters of my party members of my party a party delegate conference party leadership Total Frequency 5 3 7 2 124 141 Percent 3,5% 2,1% 5,0% 1,4% 87,9% 100

On the other hand, aspirations for market segmentation lead to decentralization of campaign operations and rejuvenation of local campaigns. This development provides some freedom to candidates to incorporate constituency services in their campaigns. Constituency service and personal vote have occupied political analysts in recent research projects (Jackson 2003; Morgenstern and Swindle 2005; Pattie, Johnston, and Fieldhouse 1995). In CCS questionnaire a list of activities regarding their constituency was presented to the candidates and they were asked to report the strength of emphasis they have given to each of them in their campaign. These activities are: a) Promoting local customs and traditions, b) Providing services and offering help to people with practical problems in the constituency, c) Taking care of the economic well-being of the constituency, d) Advocating the policy demands of the voters in the constituency and e) Openness to the voters in the constituency and communicating with them extensively.

Openness to the voters in the constituency and communicating with them extensively

Advocating the policy demands of the voters in the constituency

Taking care of the economic well-being of the constituency

Providing services and help to people with practical problems in the constituency

Promoting local customs and traditions

20% Not at all Not much

0%

20% Much

40% Very much

60%

80%

100%

Somewhat

Diagram 1 Emphasis on constituency issues

As Diagram 1 indicates about 3 out of four candidates have given much or very much emphasis on extensive communication with voters and advocacy of their demands. About 2 out of 3 candidates have paid much or very much attention to the economic well being of their constituency and 1 out of 2 candidates have tried hard or very hard to solve practical problems in the constituency. On the other hand, the promotion of local customs and traditions was strongly or very strongly supported by about 1 out of 4 candidates. Candidates were also asked to assess their campaigns on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 means the primary aim of my campaign was to attract as much attention as possible for me as a candidate and 10 means the primary aim of my campaign was to attract as much as possible attention for my party. About half of them (52.2%) reported that their campaign was more focused on their party than on the candidate. On the other hand only a small percentage of candidates (20.6%) have given an answer in [0, 4] range, i.e. more focus on candidate. They were also asked if they have raised any issues during their campaign that were specific to their constituency and that were not raised by their party. Most of the candidates (63.2%) have reported that they have raised constituency issues which were not included in the agenda of their parties. Table 3 How should MPs vote?
According to party According to voters Total Frequency 51 57 108 Percent 47,2 52,8 100,0

At this point, an interesting question occurs: What candidates would do as elected MPs if voters in their constituency had different opinion from their party about an issue? How should they vote for this issue in Greek Parliament? Table 3 shows that candidates are

divided into two almost equal groups according to their position on this subject. Almost half of them advocate party discipline, but the rest adopt the promotion of the demands of their constituency voters. Another significant characteristic of a campaign is the time in which it extends. Longterm or "permanent" campaign (Jackson 2003) does not seem to be an issue for Greek candidates. About 4 out of 5 candidates have started dealing with the preparation of their campaign within the last three months before the Election Day. This is mostly due to the time of the nomination of the candidates by their party. Almost nine out of ten candidates have been nominated by their party within the last three months before the Election Day. A small percentage (16,8%) of the candidates in the sample has taken the risk to begin organising their campaign before their nomination. Hayes and McAllister (1996) argue that conversions from short term campaigns are cancelled out by defections. Our results are in agreement with their argument. On the other hand long-term campaigning can greatly improve the probability of a successful electoral outcome. As Table 4 indicates 42.9% of the candidates, who have been waging a long campaign, have managed to get elected. The corresponding percentage for shortterm (within 3 months before the Election Day) campaigners is equal to 15.3%. Table 4 Election outcome and long term campaigning
Election outcome No Yes Count % Count % 83 84,7% 15 15,3% 12 57,1% 9 42,9% 95 79,8% 24 20,2%

Long-term campaigning Total

No Yes

Campaign activities
Participating in party activities could be considered as an informal type of campaigning. Thus, it is interesting to see how much time candidates usually spend on party activities.

Nine out of ten candidates have devoted some time to their political party prior to the election campaign. As Table 5 indicates the largest subgroup consists of 62 candidates (40.8%) who have spent 1-10 hours per month on party activities. Table 5 Time devoted to party activities
No time Occasionally (1-10 hours per month) Part-time (11-80 hours per month) Full-time (81+ hours per month) Total Frequency 14 62 52 24 152 Percent 9,2% 40,8% 34,2% 15,8% 100,0%

Table 6 Time spent on campaign activities

calling up voters on the phone visiting national events in business, sports and culture meeting local party members door-knocking, canvassing organising and joining large rallies in the constituency local and regional newspaper interviews local and regional radio and TV interviews meeting national party officials appointments with associations and clubs in constituency visiting local events in business, sports and culture debating with competing candidates in public providing information and communicating via the internet direct mailing national radio and TV interviews national newspaper interviews appointments with companies in constituency No time 9 10 13 18 27 8 10 50 32 38 53 48 75 56 70 80 1-5 62 55 55 60 57 88 82 50 77 72 56 62 40 64 52 45 5 10 30 35 40 30 33 25 33 22 20 17 17 16 9 10 9 6 10 - 20 16 24 16 15 11 10 6 7 3 6 6 8 10 4 3 2 >20 22 14 14 16 9 6 6 8 5 4 6 4 5 3 3 4 Mean 7,8 7,6 7,0 6,7 5,4 5,0 4,9 4,1 3,6 3,5 3,5 3,5 3,0 2,6 2,2 2,0

Candidates were asked to note down how many hours per week they have personally spent on each of sixteen campaign activities during the final month of their campaign. Table 6 indicates that candidates have spent more than 6 hours per week on three interpersonal communication activities, (i.e. calling up voters on the phone, meeting local party members and canvassing) and only one-way activity (i.e. visiting national events in business, sports and culture). This inclination to interpersonal communication activities is

fully justified in local races (Friedenberg 2007) as it is the case of constituency seats for the Greek Parliament. It seems that Greek candidates acknowledge the effectiveness of canvassing and interpersonal communication that has been demonstrated in previous research experiments (Gerber and Green 2000; 2001; 2005; Green and Gerber 2005).

We have used categorical principal components analysis on the campaign activities to reveal major dimensions of variation. Results from this analysis are presented in Table 7. On the first dimension, all campaign activities have positive component loadings. This is an expected result because campaign activities are correlated positively with each other. The second and third dimensions separate the variables. The variables direct mailing, debating with competing candidates in public, national newspaper interviews, local and regional radio and TV interviews, national radio and TV interviews form a bundle of activities which have significant positive loadings in the second dimension. These campaign activities are mostly used by candidates who are inclined to using traditional media for one-way political communication. Messages have only one source and one target, i.e. from candidate to voters.

On the other hand, the variables: meeting national party officials, visiting national events in business, sports and culture, visiting local events in business, sports and culture, appointments with companies in constituency, appointments with associations and clubs in constituency, organising and joining large rallies in the constituency have negative loadings in the second dimension. In this bundle we observe campaign activities that require the physical presence of the candidate in the same scene with voters. In addition, some of these activities involve interpersonal communication and interactivity with

voters. This means that candidates with a large positive score in dimension 2 are those who spent a lot of time on campaign activities facilitated by traditional media and less time on activities that involve their physical presence.

The third dimension is associated with two variables: calling up voters on the phone and door-knocking, canvassing. Both of these variables present a significant positive loading in this dimension. This means that candidates with large positive score in dimension 3 are those candidates who consider interpersonal political communication as a very significant part of their campaign. Table 7 Component Loadings of campaign activities
door-knocking, canvassing calling up voters on the phone direct mailing debating with competing candidates in public providing information and communicating via the internet meeting local party members meeting national party officials visiting national events in business, sports and culture visiting local events in business, sports and culture appointments with companies in constituency appointments with associations and clubs in constituency organising and joining large rallies in the constituency local and regional newspaper interviews national newspaper interviews local and regional radio and TV interviews national radio and TV interviews 1 0,51 0,33 0,60 0,68 0,75 0,67 0,71 0,64 0,88 0,78 0,86 0,78 0,89 0,79 0,83 0,72 Dimension 2 -0,13 0,23 0,49 0,52 0,08 -0,12 -0,45 -0,45 -0,21 -0,23 -0,38 -0,34 0,04 0,44 0,35 0,35 3 0,48 0,75 -0,13 0,09 -0,23 0,39 -0,23 0,19 -0,24 -0,10 -0,15 0,20 -0,06 -0,16 0,01 -0,13

Campaign means
In the next block of the questionnaire a list of campaign means was presented to candidates asking them if they have used any of the following means in their personal campaign: campaign posters, spots in radio, TV, personal website, ads in the local press,

personal flyers, office hours and social gatherings. In case of positive answer they were also asked to indicate the importance these means had in their campaign. In Diagram 2 these campaign means are presented in descending order according to the percentage of candidates who consider these means as fairly or very important. A large percent of all candidates (84.7%) consider social gathering as fairly or very important and only a small percent (3.7%) have not used this type of campaigning. Office hours are also considered as a fairly or very important campaign mean by the majority (57.7%) of candidates. On the other hand, campaign posters and spots in radio, TV and movie houses are presented at the bottom of this list with only a few of candidates considering these means as fairly or very important. The corresponding percentages are 13.9% and 15.3% respectively.

social gatherings office hours personal flyers ads in the local press personal w ebsite spots in radio, TV campaign posters 80% not used 60% 40% 20% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

not at all important

not very important

fairly important

very important

Diagram 2 Use and importance of campaign means

Campaigns and New Media

Information technology offers new tools that can be used in political campaigns. Kaid (2003) has found Internet advertising as more effective than TV advertising. Internet can

be used for broadcasting or as an interactive medium (Jackson and Lilleker 2004). Greek candidates have started implementing some of these new tools in their campaigns, but most of them only for broadcasting purposes. Most of the candidates (63.2%) run their own webpage. In addition, 54.4% of all candidates have advertised their webpage and/or email address on their campaign literature and 38.2% of them have used email lists to distribute information and organise activities. A newer broadcasting opportunity has risen in the current decade with internet broadcasting services which enable everyone to broadcast their own videos. Only one out of ten candidates has used a personal campaign spot on the web. This low ratio could probably be explained by the possible technical difficulties that candidates could deal with the production and submission of a web campaign spot. On the other hand, chatting or blogging are as easy as surfing and they cannot be considered as technically challenging activities, but only 14% of Greek candidates have conducted online chats with voters and 12.5% of them have used a blog during their campaign. The low ratio of chatting or blogging by Greek candidates does not mean that they avoid voters' feedback. As we have seen above interpersonal political communication is considered significant for Greek candidates, but it seems that they prefer physical instead of electronic contact for these activities.

Campaign resources
We have asked candidates to write down the number of people who made-up their own personal campaign team. As Table 8 indicates most candidates (45.7%) have enjoyed the services of a small team consisting from one to ten people. A small percentage of candidates (8.5%) have run their campaign without help.

Table 8 Campaign team

No personal campaign team 1-10 people 11-20 people 21+ people Total Frequency 11 59 32 27 129 Percent 8,5% 45,7% 24,8% 20,9% 100

Most of the candidates (87.6%) have not employed a professional consultant in their personal campaign. Almost all of those who have used services from professional consultants when asked what was the primary reason for consulting a professional, they have answered that they had mostly sought for advice on communication issues.
68

140000

120000

Campaign budget

100000

96 160 80000 80

60000

40000

20000

0 No Yes

Elected

Diagram 3 Budget for elected and non-elected candidates

Campaign budget is a significant factor for the election of the candidate. The median value of the budget of elected candidates is 24,000 Euro. Within the group of those who were not elected the median value drops to 17,500 Euro. This does not mean that spending more money would guarantee a seat in Greek Parliament. As Diagram 3 shows there are candidates who have not been elected, although they have spent larger amounts of money for their campaigns than other candidates who have been elected. In addition statistical analysis has not shown a significant difference between the two groups at significance level a=0.05 (MannWhitney U=545.5, p=0.051). Campaign budget can have three sources: party, donations, and own private funds. As Table 9 indicates own private funds are the primary source for campaign budget with mean percentage equal to 85.8%. Donations correspond to 14.12% of the campaign budget for the average candidate. Finally, financial support from the party is very limited and it has not covered more than 10% of the campaign budget for any of the candidates in the sample. Table 9 Percentage of budget sources: party, donations, and own private funds
Party Donations Own private funds N 118 118 118 Min 0% 0% 10% Max 10% 90% 100% Mean 0,08% 14,12% 85,80% S.D. 0,921 23,355 23,321

Table 10 Central party leadership visits

No Yes, once Yes, more than once Total Frequency 26 61 42 129 Percent 20,2% 47,3% 32,6% 100

Political parties in Greece prefer to express their support to constituency candidates with other ways. One of them is by sending members of central party leadership to visit

constituencies during the campaign. Table 10 indicates that only two out of ten candidates report that there were no visits from members of central party leadership to their constituency.

Discussion
CCS project results presented in this paper indicate that Greek candidates have been influenced on several aspects by the implementation of political marketing in their parties' organization. Firstly, decentralization of party campaigns has allowed space for the individualization of candidate campaigns. As a result candidate campaigns obtained constituency orientation, i.e. most candidates promote issues of their constituency instead of party's issues. Individual election campaigning has been modernized but only up to a certain degree and by a small fraction of candidates. For instance, long-term campaigning and services from professional experts are used by a limited number of candidates. Categorical principal component analysis has revealed that campaign activities are associated with three dimensions. On the first dimension, all campaign activities have positive component loadings. The third dimension is associated with canvassing (door knocking or telephone). But, the most interesting dimension is the second one, which separates activities related to market segmentation, (i.e. appointments with associations, clubs and companies in constituency) from catch-all activities, (i.e. national newspaper, radio and TV interviews and debating with competing candidates in public). This means that the second dimension can be used to separate candidates according to their campaign targeting. The results presented in this paper are the output of those candidates who have participated in a web survey after responding to email invitations. This is a limitation of

this paper because the rest of the candidates, who have not responded to the email invitations, could be different from those in our sample. This limitation will be surmounted with the second phase of data collection that will use offline methods.

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