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We’re delighted to relaunch ElectionLeaflets.org, our database of printed election literature. Thanks to a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, we’ve added more ways to explore the database and have prepared the site for future elections.
You can now filter by region and year of upload, browse almost 200 political parties, as well as search by candidate name.
The importance of election leaflets
Election leaflets are big business. A third of all election spending by political parties and campaigners since 2001 has been on ‘unsolicited material to electors’. This has remained consistent despite the rise of digital campaigning; 36% of all spending in the 2019 general election went on leaflets. The domination of paper is even more pronounced during smaller elections: 52% of spending during the 2021 Scottish Parliamentary election went on leaflets and 59% in that year’s Senedd election (the exception is Northern Ireland, where only 13% of spending went on leaflets during the 2022 Assembly election – it’s not immediately obvious why this is).
| General election | Total spend | Spend on leaflets | Leaflet spend as % of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | £34,463,890.38 | £12,467,440.55 | 36.18% |
| 2015 | £39,340,998.15 | £15,182,584.62 | 38.59% |
| 2017 | £41,700,681.16 | £13,402,325.05 | 32.14% |
| 2019 | £56,230,436.40 | £20,529,917.19 | 36.51% |
Full spending data for the 2024 general election has not yet been published.
Unfortunately we don’t know how many individual leaflets these numbers translate into, but Royal Mail figures and Electoral Commission post-election polling give us some indication for the 2024 general election. According to Royal Mail, 184 million items were sent by candidates under the free ‘election address’ postage in 2024. The true number of leaflets printed will likely be many times this figure. According to the Electoral Commission, 78% of candidates reported using leaflets, newsletters or flyers, with 75% taking advantage of the free Royal Mail postage for their election address.
On the other end of the letterbox, 63% of general election voters reported getting information about candidates from leaflets or flyers during the 2024 general election, compared with 48% from TV news and 39% from social media. Leaflets hold an even greater importance in local elections. For the 2023 English local elections, the number of voters who saw information about candidates on leaflets was 63%, while only 17% saw information on social media.
Despite their ubiquitousness, tracking and reporting on election leaflets is difficult, with journalists reliant on the public supplying material to them – consequently, ‘the news’ mainly focuses on the digital campaign. Occasional stories about misleading leaflets demonstrate the importance of scrutiny, but these only feature individual leaflets and anecdotal evidence. Leaflets themselves are ephemeral by design, and rarely kept by those who receive them. This is where ElectionLeaflets.org comes in.
Our website
ElectionLeaflets.org is a crowdsourced database of election literature. Anyone can photograph the material they receive and upload it to the site, where they can log when and where it was received, and who sent it. The site’s goal is to contextualise these individual examples by providing a more comprehensive national picture. It’s important to stress that we’re not doing this to simply highlight bad or misleading examples. We want to build an archive of printed UK electoral culture in all its variegated forms, good and bad.
Launched as ‘The Straight Choice’ in 2009, the site was adopted by Democracy Club in 2014. Since then it’s had a bit of a bumpy time, breaking or going offline at various points, and experiencing more than one abortive relaunch attempt. As is so often the case, the core issue was a lack of funding, meaning that we couldn’t justify the time needed to bring it up to scratch.
However, this all changed last year, when the wonderful people at the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust (JRRT) agreed to pay for a revamp of the site in time for the 2024 general election, due to take place in, er, November. We understandably missed that deadline, but JRRT reaffirmed its wonderfulness by letting us keep the money, with a new goal of relaunching the site in time for the 2025 local elections. Which we have now done. Hurrah!
Our database
At time of writing the database contains 20,000 leaflets from almost 200 different political parties. This is not a dataset built by a few eager people in select constituencies. In 2018, an academic analysis found a statistically significant correlation between the number of leaflets voters reported receiving, and the number of leaflets ElectionLeaflets.org had collected; in other words, this is already a reliable and fairly representative sample of the material created by candidates.
ElectionLeaflets.org runs off our crowdsourced database of election candidates. This means that users are able to tag leaflets with candidates from all UK elections, including by-elections, except for town, parish and community councils (although the latter can still be uploaded and tagged with a party). Each candidate and political party has its own page on the site (although bear in mind that not all leaflets have been tagged).
So, what delights does the archive contain? Well, we’ve Conservative newsletters entirely devoted to pubs; Labour steam railway-themed postcards; big grins from the Liberal Democrats; and disinfectant from the SNP. The number of votes electors will have is communicated using UKIP lambs and a somewhat more alarming baby-themed offering from the Greens. And, of course, bar charts, bar charts, bar charts!
We’ve got a surprising amount of material from the 2011 Alternative Vote referendum, including a wide range of leaflets from the Yes campaign and booklets from the anti-AV Conservative and Labour campaigns.
Some entries raise interesting questions. Did Lambeth Green Party produce real scratchcards for the 2018 council elections? Was Ed Davey’s 2009 Sudoku puzzle (which, unfortunately, we do not have a copy of) as good as that produced by Edinburgh South Conservatives? Did anyone actually watch Labour’s 2015 Ross Kemp DVD?
As we’re reliant on volunteers to upload leaflets, our coverage of individuals is patchy. For example, we’ve got leaflets for Keir Starmer from 2015 and 2017 only, and only a single leaflet for Kemi Badeoch …although that is still one more than we have for Nigel Farage. We’ve got pretty much full sets of 2024 leaflets for Adrian Ramsay and Carla Denyer, but nothing for either from former years. Perhaps you can help?
You can help fill these gaps!
Got some old leaflets lying about? You can scan (preferred) or photograph them from any time or election and add them to the archive – someone has recently added a couple from 1964. Try it now!
You don’t have to bin them afterwards
Once you’ve uploaded your leaflets to the site, consider sending them to a physical archive. Some of the more prominent political archives are listed below; your local archive or record office may also take material.
University of Bristol
National Library of Wales
London School of Economics
University of Strathclyde
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