Abstract
The revitalisation of canvassing in recent elections is strongly related to campaigns´ growing possibilities for analysing voter data to gain knowledge about their constituents, identifying their most likely voters and serving up personalised messages through individual conversations. The research literature about political micro-targeting hardly ever focusses on campaigns in parliamentary democracies with strict data protection laws. Based on in-depth expert interviews we introduce a framework of constraints in strategic political communication and reveal several restrictions on the macro, meso and micro levels which hinder the implementation of sophisticated data strategies in Germany. We argue that political micro-targeting highly depends on system-level contextual factors, budgetary and legal restraints, party structures and even individual decisions and knowledge on behalf of the campaign leadership.
Highlights
Despite the manifold opportunities presented by online campaign tools and multimedia channels nowadays, political parties in the US and Europe seem to have built a resurgent interest in an originally 'premodern' campaign tool to mobilise voters and generate votes: door-to-door canvassing.This revitalisation heavily relates to campaignsgrowing possibilities for analysing voter data to gain knowledge about their constituents, identifying their most likely voters and serving up personalised messages through face-to-face conversations
The variation in the institutional frameworks, social and legislative conditions is almost limited to the one-country case and reveals the existence of a research gap regarding data-driven canvassing in parliamentary democracies with strict data protection laws
We introduce a framework of constraints in strategic political communication and address our research questions with findings from an analysis of in-depth expert interviews with nine campaign coordinators of parties running in the state parliament of Rhineland-Palatinate in 2016 (Christian Democrats [commuters (SPD) or religious habits (CDU)], Social Democrats [SPD], the Green Party [The Greens], the Left, the Liberals [FDP] and the populist right-wing party Alternative for Germany [AfD])
Summary
Despite the manifold opportunities presented by online campaign tools and multimedia channels nowadays, political parties in the US and Europe seem to have built a resurgent interest in an originally 'premodern' campaign tool to mobilise voters and generate votes: door-to-door canvassing. The variation in the institutional frameworks, social and legislative conditions is almost limited to the one-country case and reveals the existence of a research gap regarding data-driven canvassing in parliamentary democracies with strict data protection laws. This said, the Obama, Clinton and Trump campaigns made data-driven campaigning and micro-targeting known to a broader public. We reveal several restrictions on the macro, meso and micro levels that hinder the implementation of sophisticated data-driven micro-targeting strategies in contemporary German campaigns We argue that these strategies depend on system-level contextual factors, budgetary and legal restraints, specific campaign contexts, organisational party structures and even individual decisions and knowledge on behalf of a campaign’s leadership. Our concluding remarks contain main arguments of criticism of data-driven canvassing to point at further normative research
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