GE2024: What we're covering, and how can you help
It looks like we are either 6 or 7 weeks out from the General Election. I am in full planning mode, and would love your input, advice, tips. As always, you can reply to this email to hit my inbox. I’ll be in a position to do about 2 newsletters a week, looking at the digital campaign.
I plan to do one per week on narratives, and one on money.
Two overriding questions for the next 6-7 weeks
I want to go a bit deeper than the high level ads monitoring work we did for the Locals and Europeans. And the two big questions in my head as we dive into the campaign are:
- What are parties/ candidates saying?
- What are they spending?
What are they saying?
Political ads let us see the narratives that parties / candidates want to put out. They are products of deliberate decisions to put cold hard cash behind words, images and videos. We can interpret them as a kind of wish fulfilment for how people and parties want to be seen.
There are lots of things we can look for in ads narrative analysis - how are the parties of Government/ Opposition trying to differentiate themselves from each other? What themes dominate? What are the regional differences?
I will be looking at these issues as we go along, but there are two more specific narrative questions that I want to focus on. These as areas where the election discourse could have long lasting public opinion and policy impacts:
- Climate action: are parties / candidates finding this to be a vote getter? Where are they positioning themselves? What is happening with content reaching or targeting rural communities? What other debates is it being entangled with?
- Migration: where does the “overton window” end up in terms of our national policy conversation on migration? Do any parties shift to compete with, counter or mimic those who have weaponised the issue? Where and how is this happening?
What are they spending?
From its opaque beginnings, online advertising expenditure is now, ironically, one of the more transparent aspects of political party and candidate expenditure. Most platforms have real-time data on how much is being spent, where, and on what. This is the only real-time campaign finance data that exists in this country.
It is not a perfect metric for political finance; we do not know, for example, if high expenditure means an overall high spend campaign, or if digital strategy is a high percentage of spend overall. But it is the best data we have.
Follow the money: joining the dots
The bigger picture value of online spending data will emerge when we can combine it with other data sources to build a bigger picture.
There are two pieces to this.
The first is monitoring for and logging other signs of parties and candidates making big purchases - newspaper ads, billboards, bus shelter or indeed bus ads…
I would love to build a database of these types of expenses during the campaign. I would need help - reply to this email if this is the kind of thing you think is interesting!
And - where is that money coming from?
The second data to combine expenditure data with is official campaign finance records.
These are candidate and political party declarations to SIPO (we are STILL waiting on the European filings to be made public - if you know anyone in SIPO please pester them), and party accounts.
These, in theory, should let us know both where money is coming from, and, if we do the maths, if any expenditure, and therefore money, is being hidden.
The perennial problem is that Irish political finance records are hand written, scanned, poorly organised piles of chaos, that come at a long delay.
I am planning to do something about that, though it obviously won’t be in the next 7 weeks. IF the Euro declarations come out, they will give us some good insights, so I might be able to do something cursory.
But here is my callout on Irish political finance: if anyone is doing (or knows of) work to digitise the records, please let me know by hitting reply.
What do you think? Can you help?
This is the part where I would like your help - does this sound like the right approach?
Are there bigger questions or issues I should be looking at here?
Can you help?
As always, just hit reply here to hit my inbox!
