Preliminary Reflections

Abstract

More than a generation has elapsed since scholars and journalists first began to study democratic elections seriously. But, rather surprisingly, little attempt has yet been made to investigate in detail the motives and conduct of politicians as they set about trying to influence voters. The problem of electoral strategy has been neglected. No scholarly literature on the subject exists, and books like Theodore H. White’s The Making of the President 1960 discuss the problem only briefly and in passing.¹ The reason for this neglect is not immediately obvious. Students may have been deterred by the impossibility of gauging accurately the impact of politicians’ actions; they may also have despaired of finding out enough about the inner workings of campaign decision-making. Both of these problems are real ones, and the present authors are acutely conscious of them. Nevertheless, we have tried in this section of the book to provide some account of how electoral strategy was made in the months leading up to the 1964 campaign. This chapter deals briefly with a number of neglected aspects of electioneering; the next three deal in turn with each of the national parties. Our conclusions are necessarily tentative; often we found that the participants themselves were none too sure what had happened.²