Emotion and Persuasive Website Messaging in the UK 2024 Election

During elections political parties seek to persuade by mobilising supporters and to influence the behaviour of undecided voters. This chapter looks at how UK political parties used the home page of their election websites during the 2024 UK General Election campaign as a persuasive tool. Aristotle’s three components of persuasion: ethos; logos; and pathos, provided a conceptual and practical framework for assessing how political parties seek to mobilise and influence voters. A coding sheet was used for quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the landing page of 34 parties who overtly focused on the election campaign. While on Election Day only two of the websites were updated to provide Get Out the Vote messages, during the rest of the campaign there was frequent practical persuasive use of the websites. The websites studied tended to “pick and mix” what persuasive strategies, tools and messages they used in their website design and content. As a result, they were not applying the full range of persuasive techniques open to them. The practical recommendations include viewing their website as a persuasive tool, seeking to create emotional connections, making enhanced use of images and videos and stressing more personal testimony and stories from real-life voters.

Key Words
UK General Election 2024, political persuasion, persuasion, online political marketing, political marketing, UK political parties, web campaigning, content analysis, political rhetoric, Aristotle.