There was some talk in the comments section of the DK Elections liveblog thread about the special elections in CA-36 on the role of yard signs. There'd been many for Huey, which had made some posters nervous, which made others point out the truism that "yard signs don't vote".
In urban Holland, people don't have yards, so there's no yard signs either. Instead, you used to have window posters. You could get them at the stands which the different parties set up in shopping centers etc ahead of elections, take them home and paste them in your home window.
When I was a kid, I used to bicycle around my suburb and count posters. (Yes, yes, I know, that's when it started.) Already back then, they weren't much of an indicator of how the elections would turn out, but they were an indicator of either voter enthusiasm, or cultural differences, or both.
Many Labour voters had them up, and quite a lot of voters of the liberal VVD did too (remember that this is continental Europe, so liberal means right-wing). Christian-Democrats, however, rarely did. Voters of small left-wing parties and of the small orthodox christian parties were fairly likely to put them up too, but we didn't have many of those in our suburb.
What always made me grin was when husband and wife, or parents and teenage children, had obviously been at loggerheads and you'd see two posters, for different parties, in the windows of a house, sometimes in the same window. I remember that a high school friend of mine put up a poster for the Communists (possibly the only one in town), while her parents put one up for the Democrats (a small, moderate center-left party). In fact, I think that by the time I turned 18, I put up a Green Left poster in my window upstairs while my mother, as always, put up her Labour one downstairs. (She was a local councillor. So that wasn't very nice of me.)
Continued below the fold with lots of links to examples, for who likes that kind of thing.
Once upon a time, before the war, posters were works of art, small paintings really. But once they became mass produced items, they became a lot simpler, and when I grew up most posters were just one colour, with an abbreviation of the party name and the party's list number. Occasionally, a party would just put the face of the party's leader on the posters, though that was already somewhat frowned on. Similarly, the use of a slogan was maybe considered a little crass, but was also credited with great effect. The slogan on the Christian-Democratic posters in 1986 ("Let [Prime Minister] Lubbers Finish His Job") was considered to have played a crucial role in the party's surprise victory.
Some parties still made more of an effort to catch the eye though, and occasionally, a poster became famous - notably one by the Pacifist Socialists from 1971 which featured a nude woman in a meadow, with a cow, her arms outstretched. It was voted best election poster ever a few years ago, but at the time it was banned in many areas, and bricks were thrown in the windows of the designer. From a different angle, radical feminist group Dolle Minas also objected, and created their own alternative.
Anyway, all that's gone now. This was in the 80s. Nowadays nobody puts up posters in their windows anymore. Once in a blue moon you'll still see one - maybe in the house of one of the candidates themselves. Just another sign of how society has changed. Ties to the "political families" of old, which once upon a time used to bind whole families to their party's newspaper, broadcaster, trade union, sports club, holiday camp etc, have long weakened or dissolved altogether.
I miss those posters though - I'd still cycle around and count them if I could. Every few years, I would come across some ancient poster that had somehow, stuck on some wall and ignored by all, survived a decade or two, if in a weathered state. When I was a student, there was still a poster for the International Communist Union (IKB), a Trotskyite splinter that had ceased to exist a decade earlier, on the wall of the yeast factory down the road from my mothers'. In Amsterdam, just five years ago or so, I saw a hilarious election poster from the long-defunct Farmers' Party, which was big in the sixties and seventies. It featured the party's leader "Farmer Koekoek," looking stern yet awkard, and the slogan "For Justice, Freedom and Authority," and must have been there for an astounding thirty years, right on one of the inner city's canals.
Nowadays political parties still make election posters, but the only places you see them is on the designated posterboards that are put up around town by municipalities, which tend to be sad affairs. On the bright side, the lower quantities in which they need to be produced has tempted parties into making a bit more elaborate posters again. I don't vote for them anymore, but the Green Left ones tend to be nice.
In another sign of the times, the louder political climate nowadays, in which it's all about getting some free media coverage, also makes some smaller and protest parties go for the shock value. Thus, the 21st century equivalent of the pacifists' nude-woman-with-cow, courtesy of a local party running in municipal elections, is equally NSFW but looks distinctly more consumerist.