Democratic Campaign Research Articles

A “Democrat” from the Start: Theobald Wolfe Tone, Emblematic Founder of Irish Republicanism, Anti-Monarchism, and the “Baneful Influence of England”

Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-98), an Irish radical and revolutionary remembered in collective memory as the founding father of Irish republicanism, left behind more writings than all his radical associates combined. A founder of the Society of United Irishmen in 1791, he helped drive their democratic campaign to end religious discriminations in Ireland through a total reform of electoral representation in the Irish parliament. Tone’s adolescence and national identity had been shaped during the American War of Independence, when Irish patriotic culture began to truly question the connection to Britain. When reform campaigns failed, Tone became a separatist first, and a democrat inspired by the French Revolution and Painite republicanism. He conspired with France for a military invasion of Ireland that would support a revolution and achieve independence. The Irish republic he imagined would be free from the “baneful influence of England”, as would be its national symbols which he reconfigured to subvert British dominion. Yet his political language, only recently analysed by scholars, is not driven nor dominated by anti-monarchism. This essay explores that paradox, and how Tone’s vocabulary, in his private writings included, inspired future generations, particularly during the 1916 Rising.

From newspapers to social media? Changing dynamics in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

AbstractSwitzerland is a laggard in terms of digital campaigning. Direct democratic votes, more particularly, are centered around issues and little personalized. Combined with the specificities of voters’ information behaviour in direct democratic campaigns, these features are likely to disincentivize political actors from extensively campaigning online. Instead, we expect political actors to continue relying on traditional media. These propositions are tested on a large data base of social media posts and newspaper advertisements published before direct democratic votes held in Switzerland from 1981 to 2020 and 2010 to 2020, respectively. Counterintuitively, this research note finds a strong discontinuity in campaign communication practices. Over the past decades, and between 2010 and 2020 in particular, newspaper ads have become less central to direct democratic campaign communication. At the same time, political actors are increasingly shifting their communication to the digital sphere.

Political rallies as assemblages for transportation and communication: the case of the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign

Although rallies are essential to political communication campaigns, they have been little studied. Thus, this article presents an ethnographic observation of the Democratic campaign rallies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Two research questions structure the paper: How do material things—including human bodies—and their transportation structure the production and reproduction of rallies as political communication systems? What kind of political communication assemblages constructs the materiality of rallies? The text presents three conclusions. 1) A substantial part of the materiality of these rallies was composed of human bodies and many other things that were transported to a specific space to have copresent interactions with other bodies. 2) The production of these rallies required creating an infrastructural space built upon transporting a myriad of material objects to a specific place. These objects constituted the material bases for developing these rallies as a set of political communication practices. 3) These rallies can be conceptualised as mobile and itinerant assemblages for transportation and communication. These rallies were a means of transportation that moved the candidate’s body across a vast territory and a (political) media of communication designed to transcend the time and space in which these events were produced.

Biden Hears a WHO

The World Health Organization (WHO), the body charged with implementing global pandemic response, figured heavily in the Republican and Democratic campaigns of the 2020 US presidential election. The contrast was stark: Donald Trump drew on and ramped up dissatisfaction with the United Nations system in general and the WHO in particular, culminating in his decision to pull the US out of the WHO in the middle of the pandemic, while Joe Biden rescinded the decision to leave the WHO the day after assuming the presidency. Despite this difference, neither party heeded renewed calls during COVID to put health justice and primary healthcare at the heart of global health policy. Both parties continued to prefer private philanthropic sources of funding for global vaccine initiatives, and both sought economic returns on vaccine development, potentially missing a rare opportunity to incorporate global health justice into US global health diplomacy.

Golkar party’s utilization of TikTok for the 2024 election campaign

The successful political communication between politicians and the general public demands the utilization of social media, including TikTok, which is currently being utilized by the Golkar Party in preparation for the 2024 elections. This article examines the strategies of political communication in utilizing social media as a means of a political campaign, along with the potential opportunities and challenges that arise during the campaign. This research employs a qualitative descriptive method, collecting primary data through interviews with informants from the Golkar responsible for managing their official TikTok account. The research was conducted from October 2022 to January 2023. The results show that the utilization of TikTok by the Golkar as a campaign platform is driven by several reasons, including adaptation to reach the younger generation, leveraging TikTok’s unique features and wide reach, alignment between party leadership and team enthusiasm, expanding efforts towards democratic campaigns, and being a pioneer among political parties in TikTok utilization. This process involves audience acquisition, content direction, and human resource management. Planning the target audience and message, content design, key messages, and audience interaction are crucial aspects. The experience of Golkar can serve as an example of utilizing TikTok in politics. Challenges faced include content direction, staying up-to-date, consistency, software proficiency, and consolidating the user base.

Level Playing Field or Politics as Usual? Equalization–Normalization in Direct Democratic Online Campaigns

Are digital technologies leveling the playing field or reinforcing existing power relations and structures? This question lies at the core of the equalization vs. normalization debate. The equalization thesis states that the affordances of digital technologies help less-powerful political actors to compete with their more resource-rich counterparts, thereby overcoming structural disadvantages inherent to the political landscape. The normalization thesis, in contrast, suggests that more powerful and resource-rich political actors outperform their weaker competitors in the digital sphere by establishing a more sophisticated online presence, thus reproducing existing power imbalances. An overwhelming majority of studies on the equalizing vs. normalizing effect of digital technologies focus on electoral campaigns or non-electoral periods. Direct democratic campaigns have not been adequately considered in previous studies. This study exploits the regularly held and institutionalized character of direct democratic votes in Switzerland. Specifically, it investigates political actors’ level of activity and generated engagement on Facebook and in newspapers during all direct democratic campaigns from 2010–2020. Applying the equalization vs. normalization lens to Swiss direct democratic campaigns over an 11-year timespan provides new insights into the status-quo preserving or altering effects of digital technologies. We find a tendency toward equalization in terms of Facebook activity and user engagement, and in a comparative perspective: Facebook campaigns are, on average, more balanced than newspaper advertisement campaigns, particularly since 2014.

Disruptive Communication in Political Campaigning: On the Rhetoric of Metanoic Reflexivity

ABSTRACT Communicative acts that deliberately disrupt how an audience understands them as either fiction or nonfiction are well-known phenomena. Still, the rhetoric of such disruptions has yet to be systematically investigated. This essay treats the experience of such disruptions as a distinct form of reflexivity, conceptualizing it as metanoic reflexivity. Drawing on recent work on fictionality theory and on theories of metanoia, the essay uses this concept to describe the reading effect that is produced when a rhetor uses nonconventional forms of fictionality to disrupt how an audience ascribes relevance to a communicative act. Through readings of Democratic campaign rhetoric from the US presidential election of 2020, the essay directs attention to how this reflexivity has moved from artistic practices to the communicative mainstream, investigates how it operates, and discusses its potential deliberative ramifications.

Representations of Latinos in a Democratic Party Campaign in the United States: Identity Ownership, Narratives, and Values

AbstractIn the 2016 United States presidential election, candidates Trump and Clinton embraced the demands of certain social groups and in this way, politically and symbolically, chose to “own” the social identities of these groups. Trump decided to attack the Latino community, while Clinton positioned herself as an advocate for this community. This article presents the results of a social narrative analysis of the values that Clinton and her team used to reach out to Latino communities during the 2016 election. The Spanish-language messages produced by the Democratic campaign compose the sample, which includes blog posts, Facebook posts, tweets, and television ads. Clinton’s campaign produced narratives about who the “good Latinos” are and, consequently, the “good immigrants” while at the same time promoting values such as globalism, cosmopolitanism, and multiculturalism. Paradoxically, these narratives and values failed to portray Latinos’ diversity because they left out this community’s historical, social, and cultural complexity.

Orange Is The New Blue?

The 2018 midterm elections brought many surprises when talking about election results on Congressional level. One of them was definitely Democrats picking up four seats in the Orange County, which for many years was a Republican heartland in California. What happened? Was this just a one-time thing or a sign of blue wave in Donald Trump's era? The four case-studies of Democratic political campaigns will not only try to answer these questions, but also predict how should Republicans respond taking the example of 2020 elections.

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

More Reward Than Punishment: Labor Resilience at Midcentury

Texts Classification and Sustainability: A Case of Facebook Sub Genres

Facebook is one of the latest genres of internet social networks which have attained widespread popularity, yet its defining characteristics have not been systematically described. It has been labeled by some as a genre of possibilities implying that you can come across, new, interesting, unacceptable and controversial texts on FB. Again, it has been labeled a genre of possibilities since it is dynamic, complex and it uses multiple types of sources. FB has emerged as an effective tool for communicating social ties, keeping family and friends updated on latest issues and events, creating new affiliations and as a stage for political or democratic campaigns. The paper investigated the unique elements inherent in Facebook subgenre. It is an endeavour to understand the defining characteristics of Facebook sub genres. The study identified the most useful criteria for categorizing Facebook texts and also identifying the most typical or unique features of FB genres. The researchers endeavored to answer the question what is it that essentially determines the ‘Facebookness’ of FB genres? ‘The study investigated the defining mechanism and sustainability of FB subgenres and established that the most common subgenres on FB are comments, news links, democratic campaigns, business interactions, comments, groups, religious texts and visuals images. The concept The study made reference to some genre theorists in order to facilitate understanding on the aspect of genre classification and sustainability on FB. The study will assist Facebook users to understand the Facebook genres and contribute to the existing pool of applied linguistics knowledge

Review: Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

Review: <i>Race to the Bottom: How Racial Appeals Work in American Politics</i>, by LaFleur Stephens-Dougan

To Emerge? Breadwinning, Motherhood, and Women’s Decisions to Run for Office

Women’s underrepresentation in American politics is often attributed to relatively low levels of political ambition. Yet scholarship still grapples with a major leak in the pipeline to power: that many qualified and politically ambitious women decide against candidacy. Focusing on women with political ambition, we theorize that at the final stage of candidate emergence, household income, breadwinning responsibilities, and household composition are interlocking obstacles to women’s candidacies. We examine these dynamics through a multimethod design that includes an original survey of women most likely to run for office: alumnae of the largest Democratic campaign training organization in the United States. Although we do not find income effects, we provide evidence that breadwinning—responsibility for a majority of household income—negativelyaffects women’s ambition, especially for mothers. These findings have important implications for understanding how the political economy of the household affects candidate emergence and descriptive representation in the United States.

Social Media and Elections in Southeast Asia: The Emergence of Subversive, Underground Campaigning

ABSTRACT This article examines the use of social media platforms as a prominent form of election campaigning in three countries in Southeast Asia, namely Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. Social media campaigning is now a prominent feature, not just in democratic election campaigns (Indonesia and the Philippines) but also in semi-authoritarian regimes (Malaysia). Through personal interviews with social media campaign professionals in all three countries, this research shows that social media is increasingly used to subvert mainstream media discourse and official channels of communication. This research examines the tactics of political campaigning on social media in a region with rapidly growing usage of such platforms, but where we see increasing signs of troubling election discourse online. As such, elections seemingly have two campaigns: one formal, mainstream media-driven discourse, and on social media platforms a different campaign that is subversive, underground and based around identity politics and disinformation.

Talking Policy in Congressional Campaigns: Construction of Policy Narratives in Electoral Politics

The construction of narratives to influence policy decisions has garnered increased scholarly attention over the past decade as use of the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) has expanded in the policy literature. However, we do not know whether policy narratives as defined by the NPF are present in electoral communications or whether there are significant differences in construction of such narratives. Narratives from both Republican and Democratic campaigns in 48 U.S. House campaigns are analyzed in this study, using an automated coding approach to determine whether policy narratives also exist within electoral campaigns, whether they hold similar structures, and whether there are significant differences according to candidate characteristics. We find that electoral policy narratives do hold consistent form and two significant narrative differences exist: (1) policy issues discussed vary based on candidate characteristics such as gender and political affiliation; and (2) character portrayal varies based on party affiliation and gender of the candidate.Related ArticlesCrow, Deserai A., Lydia A. Lawhon, John Berggren, Juhi Huda, Elizabeth Koebele, and Adrianne Kroepsch. 2017. “A Narrative Policy Framework Analysis of Wildfire Policy Discussions in two Colorado Communities.” Politics &amp; Policy 45 (4): 626‐656. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12207Ertas, Nevbahar. 2015. “Policy Narratives and Public Opinion Concerning Charter Schools.” Politics &amp; Policy 43 (3): 426‐451. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12120Shanahan, Elizabeth A., Mark K. McBeth, and Paul L. Hathaway. 2011. “Narrative Policy Framework: The Influence of Media Policy Narrative on Public Opinion.” Politics &amp; Policy 39 (3): 373‐400. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747-1346.2011.00295.x

Reclaiming the House of the Representatives from Republicans: Case Study of Districts TX-32 and NJ-3

2018 midterm elections in the United States allowed more ethnically and racially diverse candidates to become members of the Congress. The use of social media tools helped them to reach out to their community and get out the vote, which is especially important in Democratic campaign tactics. The article, by focusing on Colin Allred's and Andy Kim's Congressional bids, focuses on how their issue-oriented campaigns helped to mobilize the liberal voters. Furthermore, by analysing the rapidly changing demographics, it tackles the crucial question: do they mean the doom of the Republican Party?

Direct democracy and trade union action

Until recently, the political influence of trade unions primarily relied on ties to labour-friendly political parties. Since the 1990s, however, party-union relations have deteriorated, forcing unions to consider complementary political strategies. This article reviews different direct democratic instruments at local, national and EU levels. We distinguish popular consultations initiated by government from above from citizens’ initiatives initiated from below and discuss corresponding trade union experiences in Germany, Italy, Ireland, Slovenia and Switzerland. We also analyse the successful right2water European Citizens Initiative (ECI) of the European Federation of Public Service Unions and the failed fair transport ECI of the European Transport Workers’ Federation at EU level. Whereas unions have successfully used direct democratic instruments to (i) defend social achievements or (ii) as a lever to extract policy concessions, direct democracy is also challenging. Successful direct democratic campaigns require unions that are able to mobilise their own rank-and-file and to inspire larger sections of society.

Policy evaluation and democracy: Do they fit?

The papers assembled in this special issue shed light on the question of the interrelation between democracy and policy evaluation by discussing research on the use of evaluations in democratic processes. The collection makes a case for a stronger presence of evaluation in democracy beyond expert utilization. Parliamentarians prove to be more aquainted with evaluations than expected and the inclusion of evaluations in policy arguments increases the deliberative quality of democratic campaigns. In sum, evaluation and democracy turn out to be well compatible after all.

Policy evaluation and democracy: Do they fit?

The papers assembled in this special issue shed light on the question of the interrelation between democracy and policy evaluation by discussing research on the use of evaluations in democratic processes. The collection makes a case for a stronger presence of evaluation in democracy beyond expert utilization. Parliamentarians prove to be more aquainted with evaluations than expected and the inclusion of evaluations in policy arguments increases the deliberative quality of democratic campaigns. In sum, evaluation and democracy turn out to be well compatible after all.

Meme-ing Electoral Participation

In February 2016, the Washington Post characterized the presidential primaries as “the most-memed election in U.S. history.” During the election year, meme-ing related to the major candidates became hugely popular and engaged various groups of people who were not ordinarily involved in bipartisan political processes. As brief, to the point, and quickly modifiable visual-textual messages, Internet memes were a particularly apt way to illustrate the most contested hot-button issues that emerged during the 2016 presidential race. This article considers the phenomenon of meme-ing in relation to both the Republican and Democratic campaigns. In particular, it focuses on memes that called attention to the candidates’ contradictory or incongruous statements critiquing their policy positions. The article demonstrates the ways in which memes spoke to the intersection of electoral activism and cultural representations in several ways: they enabled users to rapidly take a stand on and react to developing political events in real time; they provided alternative parallel discourses to mainstream media viewpoints; and they enabled mobilizing voters outside of official political discourses. During the 2016 campaign, meme-ing served as an example of a politico-cultural discourse that exemplified the unusual election year in ways that conventional political analysis alone was not able to capture.