Political communication and campaigning in India: opportunities for future research

Abstract

ABSTRACT This concluding essay begins with a discussion of how the evolution of communication technologies has shaped perceptions of professionalism in political campaigning in India and elsewhere. Highlights from the empirical case studies in this volume are discussed, setting the thematic case studies on political campaigning in the comparative cross-national context of research on political marketing within the field of political communication. Research on media agenda-setting, priming and framing processes and effects are discussed with respect to future research opportunities, as well as methods for conducting campaigning and political communication research in India. Apart from rich ethnographic studies that have been more common in India, methods to study information, campaign engagement and effects include content analysis, ‘big data’ and text analysis, survey research, panel studies and experiments. India’s political parties and candidates, publics, and diverse media provide an abundance of online data that may be best analysed using computational social science methods.