Campaigning Wiki

5 min read

Summary

The set of methods a campaign uses before launch — and during — to ground its analysis in evidence: desk research, stakeholder interviews, polling, secondary data, opposition research, and the synthesis of all of the above into the campaign plan.

Body

Research is the campaign’s evidence base. Without it, power-mapping, stakeholder-analysis and audience-segmentation all become speculation. The Community Tool Box places “assessing community needs and resources” as the first phase of its public-action model, before engaging stakeholders or planning action — research is what feeds every later step [source: community-tool-box].

The Commons Library’s organising modules run the same logic: a campaign plan that cannot cite the research on which it rests is a plan that will be re-litigated every time the strategy is challenged [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual’s Campaign Strategy Guide opens with situational analysis — forcefield analysis, the problem tree, the political-context scan — as the explicit research layer before any tactic is chosen [source: people-power-manual].

The most useful research methods recur across the planning literature:

  • Desk research — review of existing datasets, reports, prior campaign post-mortems and the strategic framework of allied organisations. The Commons Library runs desk research as the first 30–60 minutes of any campaign planning process and treats its absence as the most common reason for re-inventing the wheel [source: commons-library].
  • Stakeholder interviews — short, structured conversations with named actors (decision-makers, allies, opponents, affected communities) to test assumptions and surface information not in print. The People Power Manual pairs the “Listening to the people” process guide with the stakeholder-analysis chapter: the interviews are the data that fills the stakeholder map [source: people-power-manual].
  • Polling and survey research — public-opinion data to size the persuadable, test messages, and track attitude shifts. Discuss Data — the open research-data platform hosted at the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen — publishes public-opinion survey data from across Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, including the KIIS omnibus survey, the Caucasus Barometer and the PROPA panel study on Russian public opinion during the war [source: discuss-data-civil-resistance]. Discuss Data also documents the methodological challenges of doing survey research during war: a 2025 article in Post-Soviet Affairs by Aaron Erlich (McGill) concludes that wartime attitudes in Ukraine can be reliably measured with modern survey techniques, but there is a trade-off between coverage bias and social-desirability bias across modes [source: discuss-data-civil-resistance].
  • Secondary qualitative data analysis (SQDA) — re-use of existing interview and focus-group material. Discuss Data publishes the 800-interview / 1,500-hour Maidan corpus from the University of Bremen’s “Comparing protest actions” project, opened for reuse via a VolkswagenStiftung DataReuse grant [source: discuss-data-civil-resistance]. A 2023 Comparative Political Studies article by Kern and Mustasilta shows that SQDA in political science “largely depends on how primary researchers share their ‘raw’ qualitative data, that is, interview and focus group transcripts in our example study, as well as the additional documentation to understand primary context” [source: discuss-data-civil-resistance].
  • Opposition research — public-record research into the position, funding, allies and vulnerabilities of opposing actors. The Commons Library treats this as standard ethics-bounded work: only public material, with sources documented [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual pairs opposition research with the pillars-of-support analysis: the same evidence base maps both [source: people-power-manual].
  • Media and discourse scans — systematic review of press coverage and social-media conversation to track the message environment. The Commons Library uses this both as input to framing-and-narrative and as a baseline against which evaluation later measures the campaign’s impact on the conversation [source: commons-library].

A useful research plan also states who does the work and on what cadence. The Community Tool Box treats research as an ongoing discipline, not a one-shot: a campaign whose research stops at kick-off is a campaign that will be surprised by mid-cycle developments [source: community-tool-box]. The Discuss Data 2024 BASEES panel — “Research Data Quality in Times of War” — is a working example of how a research community treats data-collection method as a continuing methodological conversation rather than a settled procedure [source: discuss-data-civil-resistance].

A common failure mode is to confuse research with advocacy. The Commons Library warns that a campaign team that researches only material that confirms its existing strategy is doing confirmation, not research, and will be blindsided by facts the team never looked for [source: commons-library]. The People Power Manual adds a second failure mode: research that is never synthesised. Each method produces a different artefact, and the campaign plan needs an explicit synthesis step that turns the desk research, interviews, polling and scans into one evidence base the team can act on [source: people-power-manual].

Use it for

Kick-off research for a new campaign; building the evidence base for a theory-of-change; sizing a target audience before segmentation; opposition research before a spectrum-of-allies revision; mid-campaign reality check.

Open Questions

  • 2026-06-23 — Most campaign-research methods described above are anchored on the Discuss Data corpus for the polling/SQDA half and on the Commons Library / People Power Manual / Community Tool Box for the qualitative half. No corpus source explicitly covers “opposition research ethics” as a topic. Seeds for Change’s consensus and ethics modules are the most likely home — listed as a sourcing target.

Sources & verification

  • sources/discuss-data-civil-resistance — grounding: secondary — RAW (10564 chars)
  • sources/community-tool-box — grounding: secondary — RAW (833 chars)
  • sources/commons-library — grounding: secondary — RAW (5257 chars)
  • sources/people-power-manual — grounding: secondary — RAW (7977 chars)

Verified 2026-06-23 by llm-qc.

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