Introduction

Abstract

When the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke out in 2016, the use of personalised data in political campaigns became a national conversation. The public learned that personalised data could be used to build individualised models to optimise political campaigns to influence their vote. While Cambridge Analytica is historically interesting, their supposed impact on the 2016 election says little on data-driven, psychologically informed micro-targeting campaigns and their possible effect on deliberative democracies in principle. After all, we should never generalise from one case study, as numerous confounding variables might have influenced the impact: bad models, poor data management, poor competing candidates, and many other aspects. The Psychology of Micro-Targeted Election Campaigns presents the fundamental principles behind these campaigns and discusses their position within modern deliberative democracies.

Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.

Bertrand Russell, New Hopes for a Changing World