When does an election campaign end? This question is the focus of a monograph-length project that I am currently working on.
Clear temporal demarcations are vital to institutionalising politics, but around the world, a growing recourse to populist politics, which is rhetorically constructed around distinctions between friends and enemies and frequently elevates a single leader to a position of infallibility, jeopardises these institutionally defined endings harder. This is a problem because perhaps the most basic test for a society being an effective democracy is the smooth transition of power between an incumbent electoral loser and an opposition election winner. Most famously, this process was spectacularly derailed by Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 US Presidential elections, culminating in the Capitol Riots.
In seeking to study the post-election campaign, I am interested in political communication and mobilisation which takes places after the ballots have been counted, either with the aim of framing the election result or extending the electoral contest. While the January 6th riot is an extreme example, this sort of post-election politics can also play out in situations where the result is broadly accepted, as the winners seek to rhetorically claim a mandate for their platform (even though empirical evidence suggests that winning voting coalitions can be very diverse). Indecisive election results, such as hung parliaments, are also rhetorically framed in the days after the election as competing politicians seek to bestow a particularly meaning on complex results in order to justify their preferred governing arrangement.
In writing about the post-election campaign, I am seeking to rethink the temporality of political communication, and challenge the traditional boundaries we impose on institutional time.
Earlier relevant work
- Anstead, N. 2011. Asserting Legitimacy. Coverage of the Coalition Negotiations After the 2010 UK General Election. Paper presented to the annual general meeting of the Political Studies Association, London. Access here.
Project outputs
- Anstead, N. 2024. A New Temporal Dimension in Political Communication? A Proposed Typology for Exploring the Post-Election Campaign. Paper presented to the IJPP annual conference, Edinburgh. Access here.