Social movement–voter interaction: a case study of electoral communication by The People’s Assembly Against Austerity in the UK

This article uses qualitative content analysis to investigate the role of the communicative tactics used by the UK campaign group, The People’s Assembly Against Austerity, to reach voters in the 2015 and the 2017 general elections. It focuses on the heuristic of trust and analyses the language of the tactics used by the group as they campaigned against the policies of the governments at the time. Analysis reveals that in both elections The People’s Assembly employed existing electoral campaigning strategies, such as negative campaigning and political advertising, alongside novel tactics such as a protest song, that were all aimed at the voter and sought to shine a light on the pro-austerity policies of the incumbent Conservative government. This pattern shows that a group within the broader UK anti-austerity social movement was actively engaging in the parliamentary political process in an attempt to communicate with voters. What this insight does is emphasise the role of social movement communication in electoral campaigning and posits the dimension of ‘social movement–voter interaction’, which largely remains absent in both the fields of social movement research and political communication.