Political Campaigning, Elections and the Internet

Darren Lilleker, Nigel Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136815294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Internet first played a minor role in the 1992 U.S. Presidential election, and has gradually increased in importance so that it is central to election campaign strategy. However, election campaigners have, until very recently, focused on Web 1.0: websites and email.

Political Campaigning, Elections and the Internet contextualises the US Presidential campaign of 2008 within three other contests: France 2007; Germany 2009; and the UK 2010. In offering a comparative history of the use of the Internet as an election tool, the authors are able to test the optimistic view that the Internet is transforming elections while also mapping the role the Internet plays and performs for parties and candidates. Lilleker and Jackson offer in-depth analysis demonstrating how interactive Web 2.0 online tools, including weblogs, social networking sites and file-sharing sites, are utilised and evaluate the role of these tools in the marketing and branding of parties and candidates.

Examining the interactivity between candidate, party, and voter, this important book will be of strong interest to students and scholars of political science, elections, international relations and political communication. It will be of value to those within public relations, marketing and related communication and media programmes.

1 Introduction

On Thursday 6 November 2008, Brian Eno, the musician and music producer, stated on the BBC’s flagship current affairs discussion programme Question Time, that the 2008 US Presidential Election was the first to be won on the Internet. The relevance of Eno’s observation is not that it demonstrates a unique insight he alone has, rather that an interested ‘amateur’ has come to this conclusion. This suggests that this impression of the impact of the Internet in 2008 is widespread. However, we do not need to take the view of just individuals such as Eno, as professionals also take a similar view. For example, Wired magazine (Stirland 2008) noted that Obama’s victory was ‘propelled by the Internet’, suggesting that without Web technologies as a fundraising and organising tool he would not have won. Similarly, Greengard (2009) agrees that the Internet was central to Obama’s electoral success, and moreover he concludes that how politicians and the public interact will never be the same again. That the Internet ‘won’ the election for Obama, and as a consequence other elections will never be the same again, is fast becoming a popular axiom. The purpose of this book is to contextualise the US Presidential Campaign of 2008 within three other contests: France 2007; Germany 2009; and the UK 2010. In offering a comparative history of the use of the Internet as an election tool, we are able to test the optimistic view that the Internet is transforming elections while also mapping the role the Internet plays and performs for parties and candidates.

The optimistic view of the Internet as a revolutionary tool is not one limited to either the US or Obama. It is argued that in 2005 the Internet, and so its use as a communication tool within society, for corporate communication and in our context of the election campaign, changed forever. It did so not because of a technological ‘big bang’, but because of a conceptual idea: Web 2.0. Up to this time, the Internet had gradually increased in use, importance and possibly impact during Western election campaigns. The Internet first played a role (albeit very minor) in an election in 1992, and this has increased at each subsequent series of elections. However, few commentators stuck their neck out and stated that this technology would transform election campaigning. Many commentators had suggested that the Internet might transform democracy, but far less credence was given to its importance on the process of how citizens decided to choose their representatives. The focus was on the impact of the Internet on governmental decision making, not how the Internet shaped individual voters’ decision making. However, the first few years of the twenty-first century saw a ‘cranking up’ in the use of the Internet within the body politic. In particular, as a number of new communication channels became socially popular, such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, created in 2004, 2005 and 2006 respectively, pioneering political actors began to adopt these new technological developments. Taken alone, as technological improvements, these developments would have had a marginal impact on elections. However, if Web 2.0 cumulatively heralds a revolution in online communication, this may be driving changes in how organisations communicate in general, and so collectively transform the societal impact these technologies may have.

In 2005 O’Reilly published an article where he suggested that the nature and use of the Internet was radically changing. The era of Web 1.0, that of static content-driven websites was, he believed, being enhanced by a radically different phase in the Internet’s short history. He suggested that Web 2.0 represented a fundamental change in how the Internet would be used. O’Reilly identified seven key themes, ¹ the sum of which suggested that not only did new Web technologies offer increasingly interactive possibilities, but perhaps more importantly, the attitude of users towards the Internet was changing. This bottom-up approach that O’Reilly highlighted implied significant change for political actors in ‘peacetime’ between elections, but also the ‘wartime’ of election campaigns.

In the era of Web 1.0, the Internet played a secondary campaigning role in the four countries we will study. Probably the most advanced was in America, and certainly the experience of Howard Dean in the primaries did increase interest in the Internet (Chadwick 2006). Although the leading candidates did mobilise support and raise funds online (Cornfield 2004; Kim and Margolis 2005; Vaccari 2008), the Internet was still a second-order campaigning channel in the 2004 US Presidential Elections, lagging way behind the advertising and public relations use of mass communication channels. Probably next in importance was the UK, where during the 2005 General Election, the Internet became a mainstream campaigning channel for the first time, but its real impact was limited to the use of email lists to mobilise support offline (Coleman and Ward 2005; Jackson 2006a). At the German 2005 National Elections, use of the Internet was evolving but it was also a secondary communication tool (Albrecht 2007; Schweitzer 2008a, 2008b). Some way behind the other three countries was the experience of the 2002 French Presidential Election, where the Internet was a novelty. The inherent logic of O’Reilly’s thesis is that the electoral world has changed forever, and that with the force for change from below, political actors cannot ignore the Internet; rather, they should embrace it in their election campaigns. If O’Reilly’s analysis is correct, at the next tranche of elections the Internet would become a primary campaigning channel. We will explore the meaning of Web 2.0, and what impact this concept has had on elections. In short, we shall consider whether we have now entered the era of Elections 2.0. This book seeks to identify whether academics and practitioners can identify common lessons to be learnt from the four elections we will study. Therefore, the rest of this chapter will help set up the key debates that this book will explore. First, we will explore the evolution and professionalisation of election campaigning in general, as this underpins our approach to understanding and assessing online election campaigns. This will lead on to a contextualisation of Web 2.0, its social implications and the potential impact that new technologies may have on the conduct of election campaigns.

Modern election campaigns

Textbooks on elections typically focus on their evolution, purpose, the electoral system applied and the type of government they result in (Katz 1997; Farrell 1997; Powell 2000). Whilst these factors are part of the contextual background of the four elections we study, and we will return to them in Chapter 2, our focus here is narrower. We are interested in how parties and candidates campaign during an election period. The Colombia School (Lazarsfeld et al. 1944) focused on the importance of communication and campaigning. This was, however, soon replaced by the Michigan School in America (Campbell et al. 1960), and the Nuffield studies in the UK (Butler and Rose 1960; Butler and Stokes 1971). The received wisdom at this historical juncture was that the campaign itself had little effect, but that the principal actors undertook campaigning techniques such as giving speeches, holding meetings and talking to the media because it was expected of them and it might have some minor impact. This view was the dominant academic view until the 1980s. However, this approach is now challenged, and increasingly, the view that election campaigns matter has support (Holbrook 1996; Farrell and Schmitt-Beck 2002).

The growing importance of election campaigns is not something that has happened by accident; a range of social and political factors have led to increased numbers of voters that need convincing of who to support at the ballot box. The received wisdom is thus to target these median voters, terms such as ‘Average Joe’, Middle England or in Germany the ungebunden, literally translated as the unattached (Zelle 1995; Lilleker 2003). The perceived importance of the floating or swing voter (Wechselwähler), who has little loyalty to any party and so may vote differently between elections, has increased since the late 1970s/early 1980s, which means that political actors now put greater emphasis on campaigning. We shall discuss three interrelated concepts which we believe are shaping the nature of election campaigns, and hence why, how and with what effect the Internet in general, and Web 2.0 applications in particular, may have: postmodern campaigning; the permanent campaign; and professional campaigning.

A number of commentators have suggested that the evolution of communication technologies has had an effect on political campaigning (Wring 1996; Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). We feel that this approach is best presented by Norris (2000), who suggests that campaigning in the past 100 years or so can be divided into three different ages dependent upon the communication channels and techniques used. In pre-modern campaigning, from the nineteenth century through to the Second World War, the dominant political communication technique was direct communication, such as face-to-face meetings and public events (Maarek 1995; Norris 2000). Election campaigning was characterised by three features: a partisan press; reliance on local volunteers; and a short national campaign (Norris et al. 1999). The second, or modern era has been dominated by television (Harrop 1986; Kavanagh 1995; Denver and Hands 1998). Although mass communication had existed for some years with a national print media and radio, it was television which gradually became the mass communication tool of choice for politicians. From the late 1950s/early 1960s, political communication was essentially mediated (Swanson and Mancini 1996).

If the modern era of political campaigning has been dominant since the 1950s, a number of commentators (Wring 1996; Norris 2000) have suggested that from the early 1990s it has been challenged by a third era, the postmodern. Whilst not yet dominant, postmodern political campaigning has encouraged greater use of unmediated communication between citizen and politician. The postmodern era has been driven by three factors. First, television has become more fragmented, with significant increases in the number of terrestrial and satellite television stations (Norris et al. 1999). Second, to maintain market share the national press has had to become less partisan in nature (Norris et al. 1999), so political parties can no longer rely on communicating their messages through a few national newspapers. The third factor, the introduction of ICTs such as the fax, the Internet and text messaging, enables politicians to directly communicate with targeted groups of voters. The postmodern campaign uses a much wider range of techniques and tools. Norris’s approach suggests that campaigning was originally based on direct communication between politicians and electors. This, then, was largely replaced by indirect communication via the mass media, and now direct communication is possible again. In postmodern campaigning, political actors will use both direct and indirect communication channels, building what Howard (2006) describes as a hypermedia campaign.

The second concept that we will consider is the ‘permanent campaign’, a phrase coined in 1980 by Blumenthal. There is significant support for the view that a permanent campaign is now a fact of American political life (Nimmo 1999; Ornstein and Mann 2000; Thurber 2002). Bill Clinton is credited with being the first permanently campaigning president (Jones 2000), and George W. Bush continued this process (Thurber 2002). The essence of permanent campaigning is that the clear separation between campaigning and governing is blurred, so that political actors seek to campaign every day and dominate the political agenda, not just during a formal election campaign (Orstein and Mann 2000; Heclo 2000).

Although Nimmo (1999) believes that permanent campaigning has taken several centuries to develop, most commentators see its history as much more recent and fuelled by particular political factors. Blumenthal (1980) believed that the existence of a professional political consultant class was vital in altering the nature of election campaigning. Steger (1999) adds a more simplistic motive, namely that candidates turned to the permanent campaign as a means of ensuring incumbency. But it could be argued that politicians have always sought re-election; what, therefore, is so different about the past thirty years? Peters (2002) provides an answer by identifying four changes to American politics: realignment of the political parties; changes to the electorate; new communications technology; and the ever-growing demand for funding. Two further trends help link the Internet with the permanent campaign. First, in recent years the influence of marketers within the political consultant class has grown. Second, Thurber (2002) adds that the tragedy of 9/11 highlighted the importance of coordinated communication within a 24/7 news cycle. Therefore, the nature of the permanent campaign will be influenced by developments in the Internet, such as Web 2.0 applications. Permanent campaigning is, according to Ornstein and Mann (2000), a zero sum game with one winner. Therefore, the techniques used are constantly evolving as the competitors seek an advantage. Because the permanent campaign has no end, participants are always striving for new means of dominating the political agenda. As a result, Web 2.0 applications have attracted great interest from those looking for an edge.

The third concept is the increasing professionalisation of political campaigning. In the era post the 1992 and 1996 campaigns of Bill Clinton in the USA and of Blair in the UK in 1997, phrases such as ‘campaign professionalisation’ (Gibson and Rommele 2001: 40) and descriptions epitomised by ‘the smoothness, slickness and all-too-evident professionalism of recent campaigning’ (Watts 1997: 142) have become common in academic parlance. For some this is related to the increased employment of professional strategists and consultants who have, in the words of Wring (1997), colonised political campaign headquarters (see also Farrell et al. 2001; Scammell 1995). Equally, such developments have given rise to discussion of the marketisation of politics, both in terms of its reliance on marketing communications and public relations (Jamieson 1996; Kavanagh 1995; Maarek 1997; Newman 1999) as well as debates surrounding the introduction of a marketing philosophy into politics more generally (Newman 1994; Lees-Marshment 2001, 2008). What is common to most works on campaigning is the sense that political campaigning is in a constant state of flux, adapting a variety of strategic and tactical tools in order to gain electoral advantage.

Professionalisation has been criticised as a blanket term which obscures many of the specifics of the evolution of political campaigning. Indeed, a call has been made to use instead phrases such as specialisation of tasks, the increased use of experts and the management or centralisation of the campaign (Lilleker and Negrine 2002). However, there is one aspect of this professionalisation that is important for this study. That is the notion of campaigning evolving: ‘The introduction of national newspapers, of radio and later of television as forms of mass communication altered the ways politicians sought to communicate with the public, in the same way that the Internet will alter practices in the future’ (Lilleker and Negrine 2002: 101) This implicitly argues that rather than categorising change within eras (Norris 2000) or stages (Blumler and Kavanagh, 1999), we should focus on the way in which campaigns adapt, and adapt to, new techniques of communication.

The design of the style and content of messages is equally consistent with the marketisation of political campaigning. Though some argue that political marketing as a study should centre on the prescription of the market-oriented party – one that designs its policies as well as communication as a result of market research among voters (Lees-Marshment 2001; 2008) – there is little evidence of the existence of such a party (Lilleker and Negrine 2006). At best, the evidence to suggest parties or candidates have any adherence to a market orientation is patchy across various aspects of the design of the brand and its messages (Lilleker and Lees-Marshment 2005), and the one study that discussed all aspects of a campaign, albeit in a single nation, found marketing was a tool mainly used in the context of the design of communication (Lilleker et al. 2006). Thus, we would expect that professionalisation and marketisation would drive parties to use the most up-to-date communication devices available via the Internet. One study of UK elections described political strategists as being akin to magpies (Lilleker et al. 2006), borrowing tools and ideas from marketing, social communication and any other realm in order to improve the sophistication of their campaign. We build on this to suggest that this process of lesson learning is not just related to the use of tools, but also techniques of usage; and lessons will not simply be learned within a domestic context, but from other campaigns around the world. In particular, the lessons of recent online elections may encourage the targeting of voters in a way that will draw them to the campaign.

Comparing online election campaigns

The use of the Internet in America has probably generated more research than any other single country. This may, in part, be explained by the Americanisation hypothesis, which suggests that as the dominant world economy, American political actors are also the first to develop and master new technologies and techniques. As a consequence, this hypothesis suggests that all other countries learn their lessons from American practice. If this is the case, this book would simply identify the use of Web 2.0 applications in the 2008 US Presidential election, and see where and how they have been used or adapted by our other elections. We suggest that the Internet in general, and Web 2.0 specifically, does not recognise national boundaries. Developments in one country are as likely as another to influence the use of Web 2.0 as are those in the US. This book will seek to identify what lessons different campaigns learn from one another. Rather than suggesting an inherent Americanisation, we suspect that there are other structural factors which shape how and why political actors use Web 2.0.

Existing comparative studies of the Internet have primarily taken two different forms. First, a number of individual articles have compared the use of the Internet in two or more countries (Gibson et al. 2003a; Gibson and McAllister 2003). Second, a number of books have introduced an overall framework with a range of individual case study chapters written by different authors. Gibson et al. (2003a) focused on three factors: campaigning and style of politics; electoral outcomes and the balance of power between parties; and internal organisation and democracy. Kluver et al. (2007) applied the concept of the Web sphere (Foot and Schneider 2002) to understand the impact of technological, cultural and political factors on Internet use by a range of political actors (not just parties and candidates). Ward et al. (2008) applied to twelve national case studies an assessment of whether four factors influenced Internet use in elections: nature of the party system; election process rules; the role of conventional media; and access to the Internet. Learning lessons from these studies, our approach will consider the following factors as possibly shaping the use of the Internet in election campaigns:

1. Political system. In presidential systems the focus is on the individual who holds Executive power. In parliamentary systems the focus is more complex. Yes, it may well be on the person who as party leader may lead the government, but it can also focus on the desired party. Equally, as electors are choosing, technically if not in practice, their locally elected representative, there may be a multi-layered approach to campaigning.
2. Electoral system. Each of our four countries uses a slightly different electoral system. The two presidential systems have some form of selection to whittle the process down to two main candidates. In the US there is an internal party process of primaries, which selects one candidate to represent either the Democrat or Republican Party. Whilst third-party candidates may enter the actual presidential election, they are usually largely ignored. In France, the parties select their candidate and then voters have two rounds of votes. The first round is based on the whole slate of candidates. The second round two weeks later is of the top two candidates. In the UK, a first-past-the-post system for single member constituencies operates, where the candidate who generates the most votes in a constituency is elected (they don’t need to secure more than 50 per cent). The Prime Minister is the leader of the party with the most seats. This system nearly always delivers one party or another with a majority of seats, and so is able to form a single party government. In contrast, Germany uses a mixed member proportional representation system. Half of the seats in parliament (Bundestag) are elected as in the UK in single member constituencies, the other half based on party lists. Voters have two votes, one for the constituency and one for the party. Whilst there are two main political parties, there are a number of minor parties, and hence coalitions are a common outcome of elections.
3. Party or candidate. In strong party systems, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 E-campaigning and e-elections
• 3 Web 2.0
• 4 Measuring for a new style of campaigning
• 5 France 2007: Tentative interactivity
• 6 The US 2008; A giant step for interactivity
• 7 Controlled interactivity: Parties’ online campaigns in the 2009 German National Elections
• 8 The UK 2010; Interacting within echo chambers
• 9 Elections 2.0: Interactivity, the Internet and political campaigning 2007–10
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index