Dr Martin Moore
Senior Lecturer in Political Communication Education in the Department of Political Economy, King’s College London.
Email: martin.moore@kcl.ac.uk
Dr Gordon Neil Ramsay
Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Akureyri. He is co-author of Seeing Red: Russian Propaganda and American News (Oxford: OUP, 2024)
UK Election 2024
Section 6: The digital campaign
62. Local news and information on candidates was insufficient (Dr Martin Moore, Dr Gordon Neil Ramsay)
63. The Al election that wasn’t – yet (Prof Helen Margetts)
64. Al-generated images: how citizens depicted politicians and society (Niamh Cashell)
65. The threat to democracy that wasn’t? Four types of Al-generated synthetic media in the General Election (Dr Liam McLoughlin)
66. Shitposting meets Generative Artificial Intelligence and ‘deep fakes’ at the 2024 General Election (Dr Rosalynd Southern)
67. Shitposting the General Election: why this campaign felt like one long meme (SE Harman, Dr Matthew Wall)
68. Winning voters’ hearts and minds… through reels and memes?! How #GE24 unfolded on TikTok (Dr Aljosha Karim Schapals)
69. Debating the election in “Non-political” Third Spaces: the case of Gransnet (Prof Scott Wright et al)
70. Which social networks did political parties use most in 2024? (Dr Richard Fletcher)
71. Facebook’s role in the General Election: still relevant in a more fragmented information environment (Prof Andrea Carson, Dr Felix M. Simon)
72. Farage on TikTok: the perfect populist platform (Prof Karin Wahl-Jorgensen)
Could voters find out enough about their constituency candidates during the 2024 UK Election campaign to make an informed decision on polling day? This question is particularly salient given the election was called unexpectedly, meaning that candidates were not selected until just weeks before the vote itself. Based on our research during the campaign, which builds on a similar study we did for the 2019 election, we find that the information available to voters about candidates was limited, haphazard and dependent on external factors. This has democratic implications and raises practical questions about how voters can find information about candidates in future elections.
Our 2019 study of election coverage published by over 95% of local news outlets across the UK online in the days leading up to the vote, found that less than 7% of articles contained information about the election, and only six in ten of these were about the local contest. The five years following the 2019 Election were very difficult for local journalism, as ongoing financial pressures were amplified by the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. The 579 online local news outlets that we identified in 2019 had dropped, by the 2024 Election, to 460 – a decline of around one-fifth. This was driven partly by closures, but also by further consolidation. National World, for example, collapsed stand-alone news sites into regional hubs much like Reach Plc did a decade before.
During the 2024 campaign we monitored the articles published by local news outlets in four constituencies in the fortnight before the vote: Glasgow South, Blackpool North & Fleetwood, Banbury, and Poole. These were selected from the four areas that would, according to the Financial Times, ‘decide the election’. In three of the four constituencies, two local news outlets published articles about the candidates. In Poole, there was only one outlet covering the contest, the Bournemouth Echo. In Banbury the news articles were supplemented by candidate interviews on independent local radio station Banbury FM.
Over the two weeks before polling day, the seven news outlets published 37 articles that referenced one or more of the candidates. Across the four constituencies this averaged out at less than one article in each outlet per day. There was, however, a significant range between outlets and candidates. Certain candidates, like Labour’s Sean Woodcock in Banbury, were referenced in many articles (9). Others, like Danny Raja of Reform UK in Glasgow, were mentioned in none. The coverage was also highly contingent on external factors. In Banbury, it was boosted by visits from both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak. In Blackpool, most of the coverage was about a single hustings event, and written by Local Democracy Reporters. In Poole, there was minimal coverage of the contest (seven articles in this period), and all but one article was written by a single reporter (who was also covering other constituencies). Given that Poole was eventually won by only 18 votes, it would be reasonable to conclude that more coverage may have influenced the outcome.
Of course, in a digital age, there are other sources of candidate information available beyond that published by local news outlets. We identified three further categories of information online that were potentially available to voters: information published by the candidate/party themselves (on their own websites or social media); information gathered and published automatically – either for public interest or commercial reasons (e.g. WhoCanYouVoteFor, or Google’s information boxes); and information published by other members of the public and/or civil society (chiefly on social media).
However, again, based on our research on these four constituencies, we found this information to be sporadic, subjective, and highly conditional on the candidate themselves. Some candidates provided regular and substantive information via official and personal profiles. Stewart McDonald (SNP), for example, had an SNP page, a public Facebook page, and a Twitter/X profile (on which he posted frequently). Others, such as Banbury’s Social Democrat candidate Declan Soper, published no information online at all. For candidates like these, though there are websites which automatically collate material from the web (such as voteclimate.uk), if there is no information available, then there is nothing to collate. Twitter/X was the most popular self-publishing platform for these candidates, though some had a much greater audience on the service than others. Victoria Prentis (Conservative, Banbury), for example, had almost 17,000 followers and her posts sometimes received over 30,000 views. Neil Duncan-Jordan (Labour, Poole), by contrast, had only 210 followers and would rarely receive more than a thousand views.
This early analysis is based on only four constituencies, though it is consistent with our findings from 2019. During each election campaign, there was limited information about candidates available to voters, and information availability varied considerably according to constituency and candidate. External factors, such as visits by party leaders, or the presence of a Local Democracy Reporter, could have a pronounced effect on coverage. This raises normative democratic questions and suggests the declining provision of local news is unlikely to be offset by political information published elsewhere.
