Data-Driven Campaigning and Political Parties: Five Advanced Democracies Compared

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.

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. Professor Dommett was awarded the 2020 Richard Rose Prize by the Political Studies Association for an early-career scholar who has made a distinctive contribution to British politics. This award recognized her work as Special Advisor to the House of Lords Committee on Democracy and Digital Technology and her extensive engagement in public policy debates.

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. He is a former Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award Fellow (2019-2021) for his project on political campaigning in advanced democracies. Emerging from this fellowship was his previous monograph on data-driven campaigning, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia: Data, Digital and Field, published by Palgrave. In the last five years, he has provided expert commentary in over 400 media stories about electoral politics in Australia and internationally. This includes writing for The Washington Post, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, the Guardian and the ABC.

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. Dr Kruschinski has published extensively on topics at the intersection of political communication, digital marketing, political behaviour, and political media coverage. His publications appear in international peer-reviewed journals such as Political Communication, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, International Journal of Press/Politics, Party Politics, and European Union Politics. His work was funded by German funding bodies and has received national awards. He is involved in multinational research projects, such as CamforS (Campaigning for Strasbourg), or DigiWorld (Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide). Based on his expertise, Dr Kruschinski advises parties, institutions, or foundations and is regularly featured in German media. More details and updates about his research work can be found on his website, and on Twitter @meinungfuehrer.