Data-Driven Campaigning and Political Parties

Description

What is data-driven campaigning? According to prevailing accounts, this idea describes the rise of increasingly sophisticated, highly targeted, and often invasive uses of data deployed to suppress votes, manipulate voter preferences, or boost a candidates' popularity. The power of data is seen to be transforming campaigning practice and raising democratic concerns. And yet, there is a significant problem with these ideas: we have at best a partial understanding of how data-driven campaigning is practiced, and limited clarity about its implications.

Presenting data from interviews with over 300 professional campaigners in Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK and US, we provide unique insight into the components of data-driven campaigning by political parties. This book makes three key contributions. First, distinguishing between data, analytics, technology and personnel, they give unmatched descriptive insight into these four components of data-driven campaigning, revealing significant variation in its operationalization, depending on party and country context. Second, introducing a novel multi-level theoretical framework, they isolate systemic, regulatory, and party level variables that help explain the reasons for these differences. Third, they consider the implications of their findings for debates about democracy, data and technology in the 21st century.

Cumulatively, these contributions reveal that data-driven campaigning is not inherently problematic. Giving voice to practitioner perspectives, through interviews and innovative vignettes, this book recasts the debate around data-driven campaigning, offering important lessons for scholars, campaigners, and policymakers alike.

About the authors:

Katharine Dommett is Professor of Digital Politics at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests focus on digital campaigning, political parties, data use and public perceptions. Professor Dommett has published extensively on the use of data in elections, digital campaigning, and the implications of digital technology for democratic politics. In earlier work, she focused particularly on political parties, and her book, The Reimagined Party was published in 2020. 

Glenn Kefford's research explores questions about political parties, elections, campaigning, populism and the radical right. These interests span both Australian and comparative politics. He has published widely on these topics and his work has appeared in journals such as Political Studies, Party Politics, and the British Journal of Politics and International Relations.

Dr Simon Kruschinski is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg-University of Mainz in Germany, where he received his PhD in Communication Studies in 2022. His research focuses on election campaigns and how data, analytics, and technologies are used to persuade or mobilise voters on- and offline. Depending on the object under study, he uses computational as well as traditional quantitative and qualitative methods.

Table of contents

Introduction
Chapter 2: Theoretical Framework
Chapter 3: Data
Chapter 4: Analytics
Chapter 5: Technology
Chapter 6: Personnel
Chapter 7: Explaining variation in DDC
Chapter 8: Conclusion
References