Here we go again. After a mere eight months since we last went to the polls, politicians and voters are getting set for fresh Assembly elections.

Outgoing First Minister and DUP leader Arlene Foster has warned of a “brutal” campaign to come, yet in the midst of widespread electoral weariness the upcoming vote also presents at least one constructive (and rare) opportunity.

Among the plethora of peculiarities of Northern Ireland politics, one thing that strikes an outsider more than anything else at election time is the fixation with posters. They end up everywhere. Everywhere.

If you miss a candidate’s face on one lamppost, you can be sure to spot him or her on the next one, or the next one after that, or the next one after that (for good measure), and so they go on.

This time round, in one constituency, Lagan Valley, things look set to be different. Four of the parties have come to a mutual agreement: “No posters will be placed on main/arterial roads unless directly outside a polling station. If this agreement is broken by one party it is no longer valid.”

The DUP, UUP, SDLP and Alliance Party say they “recognise the desire from the public to minimise disruption during this election campaign.”

This is a fascinating development; in ‘normal’ circumstances no party has any real incentive to unilaterally abstain from putting up posters. No party wants to blink first and risk losing influence.

Studies in France and Belgium have found that larger parties use election posters in order to project their strength, while smaller parties use them to try informing the public.

In other words, for parties of all sizes, there is a perceived “importance of being present.” They calculate that even if voters don’t pay too much attention to their posters, there is too much of a risk that they do pay attention if they aren’t up.

This is in spite of little evidence that election posters actually have any meaningful effect on voters. Ask yourself: has a poster on a lamppost ever decisively affected your vote? Or, to put it another way, is there anything that you can learn from a poster that you can’t learn from one of the several dozen leaflets that arrive through your mailbox before election day?

What’s different about this election is that it is unexpected and it occurs so soon after the previous Assembly contest. From the perspective of candidates and political parties, presumably stretched for cash, they have been presented with a rare incentive to change how we go about political campaigning.

In Lagan Valley, the parties have calculated that as long as all sides stick to the deal, all will be better off without having to spend too much cash or too much time up ladders.

Will it make a difference? Will voters notice? One thing is for sure: if it holds, this experiment will be closely monitored by each of the parties across the other 17 constituencies. If it doesn’t end their attachment to posters, perhaps it will at least begin to ease their addiction.