Crowdsourcing Campaigns: A New Dataset for Studying British Parties’ Electoral Communications

Abstract

Parties’ electoral communications play a central role in British campaigns. Yet, we know little about the nature of the material contained in these communications and how parties’ campaign messages differ across constituencies or elections. In this article, we present a new dataset of 8600 election leaflets from four recent general elections that relies on crowdsourced information. We illustrate the utility of the OpenElections dataset by comparing the use of negative campaign messaging across parties and over time.