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The debate: Is it time to ban election posters?

With the election campaign in full swing, Ireland’s lamp-posts are once again festooned with posters. But are they a vital tool for democracy, or an invitation to focus on the wrong things?

General Election: A poster for Taoiseach Simon Harris TD in his home town of Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
General Election: A poster for Taoiseach Simon Harris TD in his home town of Greystones, Co Wicklow. Photograph: Nick Bradshaw
Alan Kinsella
Clare Moriarty
Tue Nov 19 2024 - 06:00

Clare Moriarty: Yes. Hair colour, eyebrow symmetry and quality of dental work don’t say much about a candidate’s leadership abilities

Few scenarios in the political landscape are met with more urgency than the dispatch of cable-tie-wielding volunteers to clothe the country’s lamp-posts and telegraph poles with general election posters. Amid late autumn winds, these brave soldiers of democracy take lives (and ladders) in hands to – as the rationale goes – “inform the electorate”.

But what do we learn from election posters? The only mandatory information is the name and address of the printer, which, though interesting, is hardly information without which we’ll be rendered helpless. This leaves the stuff customarily found on posters – candidates’ names, party affiliations, slogans, and the performance of candidates’ faces under lighting of varying quality. Beyond those details, some say the very appearance of posters is valuable insofar as it alerts the electorate that something is afoot, electorally speaking.

But we no longer live in a world where it’s easy to miss an election on the horizon. The era of reliance on teletext and benevolent facsimile outreach is behind us. Even for those lucky ducks who have missed the months of radio and social media speculation, the polling cards, evening door-knocks, and letterbox pamphlets should serve as clues enough.

As to the details, it’s hard to argue that posters provide information that is particularly helpful to the perplexed voter. Surely, what we want to know is a candidate’s track record and the policies they will support if elected. Hair colour, eyebrow symmetry and quality of dental work are very nice, but of little salience to one’s capacity for leadership. Similarly, the shoulder-to-shoulder appearance of candidates alongside party leaders on posters just “hits different” in the high-tech world of Photoshop.

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Decades of research suggests that voters are biased towards attractive candidates, so emphasising candidates’ appearance is an invitation to vote on an unhelpful basis.

We deserve better than having yet another part of public space given over to advertising

Relatedly, it’s easy to believe good people are kept out of politics by the fairly low level of shame that would prevent one from plastering one’s face all over the locality. I’m not saying all who do lack shame, but you wouldn’t have to be completely neurotic to consider it an insuperable barrier to entry. Posters also benefit richer, establishment candidates who can buy better-looking posters and more of them.

The case against posters is so obvious as to barely require articulation. We deserve better than having yet another part of public space given over to advertising. Anything looks nicer than repetitious human faces in garish colours, sometimes slightly obstructing views of traffic, sometimes hanging off poles when the wind has made its feelings known.

Posters go up for five weeks (four before polling, one more permitted for removal). That’s over a month of having the place look terrible for no democratically supportable reason. These days, it’s often longer. The “public meeting loophole” means candidates can take normal election posters, add a patch over them advertising an “urgent public meeting”, and give themselves another month to glare down at us.

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If we must have them, there are better models. The Japanese system, designating equal space to all registered candidates in large, specially erected election boards, is fairer and easier to regulate.

Finally, sometimes the slim political messaging there is feels intrusive. Shuffling from the staff-haemorrhaging creche to slot myself, Tetris-piece-like, on to a (person- and contagion-) rammed Luas, the repetitive overhead plea to “abolish inheritance tax!” grates on the spirit. I can only imagine how the posters referring to the Great Replacement impact the start of one’s day. There should be some escape from the political arena, and it seems obvious it should be our outdoor spaces.

Dr Clare Moriarty is an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College Dublin

Alan Kinsella: No. A poster ban would favour incumbents who are usually better known

Go outside and it’s more than likely you will be greeted at some stage by a face on a lamp-post asking you for your number one vote. At every election there is the usual debate about posters. Some like them, some don’t. I happen to like them. If they didn’t work, they wouldn’t be used.

The most obvious fact that posters signify is that there is an election campaign on. Not everyone is tuned into politics or news, so it’s important to have that visual indication. Through that, people may start to think about what way they will vote, have conversations about the election, and so on.

Posters help first-time candidates with name and facial recognition. They are a simple and effective way of getting the candidate’s face known in a constituency: the face on the poster is the face on the ballot paper

The posters will tell you who is running and, by that, what constituency you are in. In this election, where there have been some radical boundary changes, and a lot of voters aren’t au fait yet as to what their constituency is. The posters are there to tell them.

Since the introduction of candidate photos on to ballot papers in the early 2000s, the photo on the poster is invariably the photo on the ballot paper. So there is a direct link from the face on the pole to the face on the ballot in the polling station. Posters are relatively egalitarian in that every candidate can have them. While a lot of posters are generic, one with a good slogan or excellent visuals can be really effective.

A poster ban would favour wealthier candidates/parties and allow them to mount extensive media campaigns beyond the means of less affluent candidates. Advertising hoardings, bus shelters and so on would become the preserve of those with the biggest wallets. Newspaper advertisements promoting candidates online or on social media are not cheap either. Allied to that, Government parties would have the advantage of knowing an election date in advance, so would be in pole position to reserve physical and digital spaces for a campaign.

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Posters help first-time candidates with name and facial recognition. They are a simple and effective way of getting the candidate’s face known in a constituency: the face on the poster is the face on the ballot paper. A poster ban would favour incumbents who often tend to be far better known, because they have been around longer and have a bigger public profile. In a short campaign like the current one, it is impossible for a candidate (especially one without a big team) to canvass every household.

A candidate who called to my house recently mentioned the figure of 60,000 households in the constituency. Any candidate will tell you the difficulty in canvassing the ever growing number of apartments. Very often it’s impossible. Add to that, that the party machines are not what they were. Posters form part of that campaign, along with leaflets and media appearances. There have been a number of studies that have shown a link between posters and turnout – notably that turnout was higher in areas where there were no poster bans.

My own hobby is collecting political ephemera, which includes posters. A selection of posters from a campaign creates a unique visual memory of that campaign. You can tell so much from a poster – the party logo is sometimes smaller when a party is not doing well in the polls. Is the party leader a part of the poster campaign? Some posters will turn out to have a historical value, but even the ones that won’t are very much part of our political past.

Alan Kinsella runs irishelectionliterature.com and has been collecting political material since the February 1982 General Election.