Data

About the Data

Our archive includes over 10,000 leaflets from the 2010, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2024 General Elections. We have leaflets from across Britain – from St Ives to Moray and from Great Yarmouth to Ynys Mon. The dataset includes a leaflet from almost every constituency in Britain, making it the largest collection of content-coded leaflets from recent general election leaflets that is freely available for you to browse and analyse. The archive will continue to grow as new leaflets are added from previous and future general elections.

The leaflets in the dataset are coded on a number of dimensions to make them easy to analyse. They can be filtered by election year, party, constituency, and country. In addition, leaflets are evaluated on whether they include references to policies related to the economy, immigration, health, social welfare, education, environment, Europe, or matters related to governance. We identify whether leaflets discuss or feature an image of the candidate and/or party leader; whether they talk about the tactical situation in the constituency; and whether they criticise an opposing party or candidate. We have made the data easily available as a CSV file, and you can find more information about the dataset in the accompanying codebook.

The leaflets in our database come from you. They have been either uploaded to the crowdsourced record-keeping website ElectionLeaflets.org, part of Democracy Club, or directly to OpenElections. We screen the submitted leaflets to ensure that duplicates are removed, the images are clean, etc. but, ultimately, this project is powered by citizen science.