Abstract
Thus far, the literature on election campaigns has identified three phases of campaigning: the pre-modern, the modern, and the professionalized phase. With this paper, we suggest that election campaigning has entered a fourth phase, characterized by new applications of communication technologies, quantitative data, immediate communications, a reinvented citizen-politics relationship offering more emotional access and lower barriers for active roles for citizens in campaigns. We root the change in the citizen-media nexus, with changes in media use and production being a major driver of this development. The classification of the ‘Mediatized Campaign’ emphasizes the role of media use and the connected changes in political and social institutions. We suggest that this classification can add coherence to future research on campaigning.
Zusammenfassung
Die wissenschaftliche Literatur unterscheidet bis dato zwischen drei historischen Phasen der Wahlkampfkampagne: die vormoderne, die moderne und die professionalisierte Phase. Mit diesem Aufsatz schlagen wir eine vierte idealtypische Phase der Wahlkampfkampagne vor. Diese vierte Phase setzt sich von den vorherigen Phasen durch die intensivierte Nutzung neuer Kommunikationstechnologien, quantitative Datenanalyse und auf unmittelbarem Austausch basierende Kommunikationsparadigmen ab. Ein weiterer Fokus liegt in dieser Phase auf dem neu entstandenen Verhältnis zwischen Bürgern und Politik, in dem der Zugang zur Kampagnenführung niedrigschwelliger ist und die emotionale Bindung in den Vordergrund gerückt wird. Veränderte Nachfrage, Anwendung und Produktion von Medien stellen die zentralen Entwicklungen in dieser Phase dar. Im Spannungsfeld zwischen Bürger und Medien ordnen wir den Hauptimpuls für den Wandel ein. Die neue Phase, die wir als ‚Mediatisierte Kampagne‘ bezeichnen, hebt die Rolle der Medien hervor und macht auf die damit verbundenen Entwicklungen in politischen und gesellschaftlichen Institutionen aufmerksam. Dieser Ansatz verleiht künftiger Wahlkampfforschung eine kohärente Struktur und weist eine potenzielle Forschungsrichtung aus.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Notes
I. e. Michael Spreng, former editor-in-chief of the BILD-Zeitung, Germany’s biggest tabloid paper, was Edmund Stoiber’s chief strategist in the 2002 campaign. Alastair Campbell, formerly chief of staff at UKs Daily Mirror and Today, had a leading role in Tony Blair’s 1997 New Labour campaign and became government spokesperson after New Labour’s victory.
References
Anholt, S., and J. Hildreth. 2004. Brand America: the mother of all brands. London: Marshall Cavendish Ltd, Cyan Communications.
Baishya, A.K. 2015. NaMo: the political work of the Selfie in the 2014 Indian general elections. International Journal of Communication 9:1686–1700.
Bennett, L.W. 1998. The uncivic culture: communication identity and the rise of lifestyle politics. PS: Political Science and Politics 31(4):740–761.
van Biezen, I., P. Mair, and T. Poguntke. 2012. Going, going, . . . gone? The decline of party membership in contemporary Europe. European Journal of Political Research 51(1):24–56.
Bimber, B. 2014. Digital media in the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012: adaptation to the personalized political communication environment. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 11(2):130–150.
Blumler, J.G. 2014. Mediatization and democracy. In Mediatization of politics: understanding the transformation of western democracies, ed. F. Esser, and J. Strömbäck, 31–41. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Blumler, J.G., and E. Katz. 1974. The uses of mass communications: current perspectives on gratifications research. Beverly Hills: SAGE.
Bowler, S., and D.M. Farrell. 1992. Electoral strategies and political marketing. Houndmills, Hampshire, New York: Macmillan Press, St. Martin’s Press.
Brady, H.E., and R. Johnston. 2006. Capturing campaign effects. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Butler, P., and N. Collins. 1994. political marketing: structure and process. European Journal of Marketing 28(1):19–34.
Castells, M. 2008. The new public sphere: global civil society, communication networks, and global governance. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616(1):78–93.
Chadwick, A. 2013. The hybrid media system: politics and power. New York: Oxford University Press.
Copeland, L., and A. Römmele. 2014. Beyond the base? Political parties, citizen activists, and digital media use in the 2009 German federal election campaign. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 11(2):169–185.
Cormode, G., and B. Krishnamurthy. 2008. Key differences between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. First Monday 13(6). doi:10.5210/fm.v13i6.2125
Dahlgren, P. 2009. Media and political engagement: citizens, communication, and democracy. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dalton, R.J. 2008. Citizenship norms and the expansion of political participation. Political Studies 56(1):76–98.
Dalton, R.J. 2016. The potential of big data for the cross-national study of political behavior. International Journal of Sociology 46(1):8–20.
Denver, D., and G. Hands. 2002. “Post-Fordism” in the constituencies: the continuing development of constituency campaigning in Britain. In Do political campaigns matter?: Campaign effects in elections and referendums, ed. D.M. Farrell, and R. Schmitt-Beck, 108–126. London, New York: Routledge.
Farrell, D., and P. Webb. 2002. Political parties as campaign organizations. In Parties without partisans: political change in advanced industrial democracies, ed. R.J. Dalton, and M.P. Wattenberg, 102–128. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.
Garrett, K.R., B. Bimber, Homero Gil de Zúñiga, F. Heinderyckx, J. Kelly, and M. Smith. 2012. New ICTs and the study of political communication. International Journal of Communication 6:214–231.
Gibson, R.K. 2013. Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizen-initiated’ campaigning. Party Politics. doi:10.1177/1354068812472575.
Gibson, R.K., and I. McAllister. 2011. Do online election campaigns win votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” election. Political Communication 28(2):227–244.
Gibson, R.K., and I. McAllister. 2013. Online social ties and political engagement. Journal of Information Technology & Politics 10(1):21–34.
Gibson, R.K., and A. Römmele. 2001. Political Parties and Professionalized Campaigning. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6:31–43.
Gordon, E., J. Baldwin-Philippi, and M. Balestra. 2013. Why we engage: how theories of human behavior contribute to our understanding of civic engagement in a digital era. SSRN Electronic Journal doi:10.2139/ssrn.2343762.
Graves, L. 2016. Deciding what’s true: the rise of political fact-checking in American journalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Graves, L., and F. Cherubini. 2016. The rise of fact-checking sites in Europe, Oxford, Reuters institute for the study of journalism. http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/publication/rise-fact-checking-sites-europe#overlay-context=. Accessed 29 Nov 2016.
Gunn, S.E., and E. Skogerbo. 2013. Personalized campaigns in party-centred politics: Twitter and Facebook as arenas for political communication. Information, Communication & Society 16(5):757–774.
Hallin, D.C., and P. Mancini. 2004. Comparing media systems: three models of media and politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Harder, R.A., S. Paulussen, and P. van Aelst. 2016. Making sense of Twitter Buzz. Digital Journalism. doi:10.1080/21670811.2016.1160790
Harrop, M., and W.L. Miller. 1987. Elections and voters: a comparative introduction. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.
Harsin, J. 2015. Regimes of posttruth, postpolitics, and attention economies. Communication, Culture & Critique 8(2):327–333.
Hersh, E. 2015. Hacking the electorate: how campaigns perceive voters. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hersh, E.D., and B.F. Schaffner. 2013. Targeted campaign appeals and the value of ambiguity. The Journal of Politics 75(02):520–534.
Hjarvard, S. 2008. The mediatization of society: a theory of the media as agents of social and cultural change. Nordicom Review 29(2):105–134.
Hjarvard, S. 2013. The mediatization of society and culture. London: Routledge.
Issenberg, S. 2012. How President Obama’s campaign used big data to rally individual voters’, MIT Technology Review 2012. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508851/how-obama-wrangled-data-to-win-his-second-term/. Accessed 25 Jul 2015.
Jonhson, J., S. Lincke, R. Imhof, and C. Lim. 2014. A comparison of international information security regulations. Interdisciplinary Journal of Information, Knowledge, and Management 9:89–116.
Kreiss, D. 2012. Taking our country back: the crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press.
Krippendorff, K.H. 2013. Content analysis – 3rd edition: an introduction to its methodology. Thousand Oaks: SAGE.
Lazarsfeld, P.F., B. Berelson, and H. Gaudet. 1968. The people’s choice: how the voter makes up his mind in a presidential campaign, 3rd edn., New York: Columbia University Press.
Lee, E.-J., and S.Y. Oh. 2012. To personalize or depersonalize?: when and how politicians’ personalized tweets affect the public’s reactions. Journal of Communication 62(6):932–949.
Lee, N.-J., D.M. McLeod, and D.V. Shah. 2008. Framing policy debates: issue dualism, journalistic frames, and opinions on controversial policy issues. Communication Research 35(5):695–718.
Lilleker, D.G., J. Tenscher, and V. Štětka. 2015. Towards hypermedia campaigning? Perceptions of new media’s importance for campaigning by party strategists in comparative perspective. Information, Communication & Society 18(7):747–765.
Mair, P. 2013. Ruling the void: the hollowing of Western democracy. London: Verso.
Needham, C. 2005. Brand leaders: Clinton, Blair and the limitations of the permanent campaign. Political Studies 53(2):343–361.
Negrine, R., and S. Papathanassopoulos. 1996. The “Americanization” of political communication: a critique. The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 1(2):45–62.
Neyazi, T.A., A. Kumar, and H.A. Semetko. 2016. Campaigns, digital media, and mobilization in India. The International Journal of Press/Politics 21(3):398–416.
Nickerson, D.W., and T. Rogers. 2014. Political campaigns and Big Data. Journal of Economic Perspectives 28(2):51–74.
Nielsen, R.K. 2015. Social media and policy processes: three comparative perspectives. http://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/april-2015-conference/april-9th-expert-workshop/. Accessed 17 Apr 2015.
Norris, P. 1998. The Battle for the Campaign Agenda. In The triumph of new Labour: Britain at the polls, ed. A. King, 113–144. Chatham, New Jersey: Chatham House.
Norris, P. 2000. A virtuous circle: political communications in postindustrial societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pfetsch, B. 2014. The idea of political communication cultures and its empirical correlates. In Political communication cultures in Europe: attitudes of political actors and journalists in nine countries, ed. B. Pfetsch, 13–30. Houndmills, Baisingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Plasser, F., and G. Plasser. 2002. Global political campaigning: a worldwide analysis of campaign professionals and their practices. Westport: Praeger.
Price, L. 2015. The Modi effect: Inside Narender Modi’s campaign to transform India. London: Hodder & Stoughton.
Prior, M. 2007. Post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Römmele, A. 2005. Direkte Kommunikation zwischen Parteien und Wählern: Professionalisierte Wahlkampftechnologien in den USA und in der BRD, 2nd edn., Wiesbaden: VS.
Scammell, M. 2007. Political brands and consumer citizens: the rebranding of Tony Blair. The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 611(1):176–192.
Schmidt, J.-H. 2014. Twitter and the rise of personal publics. In Twitter and society, ed. K. Weller, et al., 3–14. New York: Peter Lang.
Schmitt-Beck, R., and B. Pfetsch. 1994. ‘Politische Akteure und die Medien der Massenkommunikation: Zur Generierung von Öffentlichkeit in Wahlkämpfen. In Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung, soziale Bewegungen, ed. F. Neidhardt, 106–138. Opladen: Westdteutscher Verlag.
Strömbäck, J., and F. Esser. 2014. Mediatization of politics: towards a theoretical framework. In Mediatization of politics: understanding the transformation of Western democracies, ed. F. Esser, and J. Strömbäck, 3–28. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Swanson, D.L., and P. Mancini. 1996. Politics, media, and modern democracy: an international study of innovations in electoral campaigning and their consequences. Westport: Praeger.
Thorson, E. 2016. Belief echoes: the persistent effects of corrected misinformation. Political Communication 33(3):460–480.
Virilio, P. 2006. Speed and politics: an essay on dromology. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).
Voltmer, K. 2012. How far can media systems travel?: applying Hallin and Mancini’s comparative framework outside the Western World. In Comparing media systems beyond the Western world, ed. D.C. Hallin, and P. Mancini, 224–245. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Weber, M. 2011. Methodology of social sciences. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
An erratum to this article is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s41358-017-0071-6.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Römmele, A., von Schneidmesser, D. Election campaigning enters a fourth phase: the mediatized campaign. Z Politikwiss 26, 425–442 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-016-0070-z
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41358-016-0070-z
Keywords
- Political Communication
- Election Campaign
- Party Identification
- Political Engagement
- Political Information