Spam, buses, and votes: A Bleg

I have seen a lot of talk about the “vote buses” running around, and I’ve been wondering – do they really make much difference?  Is it a prisoner’s dilemma (more a zero sum game) where parties have to spend money on the bus tour if the other party is to keep their vote the same, and if they didn’t the bus tour would be “super effective” – or are bus tours ineffective, and political parties just do this because they believe they are effective?

Then I looked in my email and noticed that the quantity of politics related spam was increasing at a seemingly exponential rate.  Exacerbated I did what anyone would do, passive-aggressively complained on social media:

Why do I keep getting emails warning me about communists and attacking the Greens – you're pushing me closer to voting @NZGreens with this.

— TVHE (@TVHE) September 18, 2014

Unsurprisingly to anyone who reads the blog, I was never going to be very responsive to the communist cat-call given I think it makes no sense.

As a result, I was just wondering if anyone has any knowledge about the effectiveness of political marketing techniques, especially during different stages of the election cycle. Marketing is a general issue that we’ve written a little about here (here, here, here – and which is related to views on addiction), so any research you guys know of would be of genuine interest.