Abstract
Today’s election campaigns are heavily data-driven. Despite the numerous skeptical voices questioning the compatibility of specific campaigning practices with fundamental principles of liberal democracies, there has to date been little comprehensive work in this area from the perspective of normative democratic theory. Our article addresses this gap by drawing on recent research on the normative theory of political parties in the field of deliberative democratic theory. The deliberative theories of democracy proposed by Habermas and Rawls contain structural elements of a normative theory of the political party: the special status of political parties as mediators between background culture and the political forum, between the political system and the public sphere, and between the individual and the state, confers on them a central position as actors in in the public use of reason and deliberation.We argue in this article for a view of digital campaigning as a policy of democracy promotion and for the proposition that, alongside other actors, political parties have a special responsibility in this regard. We point to the implications for the evaluation and design of digital political microtargeting that arise from the application of deliberative principles to political parties and consider the need they reveal for the ongoing development of detailed, nuanced normative theories of democracy.
Highlights
We argue in this article for a view of digital campaigning as a policy of democracy promotion and for the proposition that, alongside other actors, political parties have a special responsibility in this regard
We point to the implications for the evaluation and design of digital political microtargeting that arise from the application of deliberative principles to political parties and consider the need they reveal for the ongoing development of detailed, nuanced normative theories of democracy
We will argue that the status of political parties as complex deliberative actors makes it incumbent upon them, when they engage in digital campaigning, to respect fundamental tenets of public deliberation
Summary
2.1 Habermas’s principles of discourse as a normative foundation for digital campaigning by political parties. 237); from this issues the primacy of public deliberation over collective majority decision-making. The nucleus of all deliberative theories of democracy is deliberation, consisting in the weighing of arguments in pursuit of understanding This understanding- and consensus-centered conception of democracy has received scholarly and sociopolitical attention in recent decades Jürgen Habermas’s contribution to scholarship is considered one of the most influential in the development of deliberative literature, as no other political theory has shaped the discourse as significantly (cf Greve 2009; Hudget 2007; Landwehr 2012; Schmidt 2010). As a “frequent point of reference” (Blake 1995, p. 355) in philosophical scholarship, his work will serve as a foundation for the development of an outline for an ethos of digital campaigning in this article
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