Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics

by David Taras, Richard Davis

Overview

Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. 

This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780472902699
Publisher:	University of Michigan Press
Publication date:	03/22/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	330
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

David Taras is Ralph Klein Chair in Media Studies at Mount Royal University.

Richard Davis is Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University.

Table of Contents

Introduction - David Taras 

Chapter 1: Owning Identity: Struggles to Align Voters during the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election

Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina; Shannon McGregor, University of Utah; and Regina Lawrence, University of Oregon 

Chapter 2: Trending Politics: How the Internet has Changed Political News Coverage

Kevin Wagner, Florida Atlantic University, and Jason Gainous, University of Louisville

Chapter 3: Feminism, Social Media and Political Campaigns: Justin Trudeau and Sadiq Khan

Kaitlyn Mendes, University of Leicester and Diretman Dikwal-Bot, De Montfort University

Chapter 4: A Women’s Place is in the (U.S. ) House: An analysis of issues women candidates discussed on Twitter in 2016 and 2018 Congressional elections

Heather K. Evans, University of Virginia’s College at Wise

Chapter 5: Two Different Worlds; The gap between the interests of voters and the media in Canada in the 2019 Federal Election

Chris Waddell, Carleton University

Chapter 6: The Agenda building power of Facebook and Twitter: The Case of the 2018 Italian General Election

Sara Bentivegna, University of Rome, Rita Marchetti and Anna Stanziano, University of Perugia

Chapter 7: “Many thanks for your support”: Email Populism and the People’s Party of Canada

Brian Budd and Tamara Small, University of Guelph

Chapter 8: Benjamin Netanyahu and online campaigning in Israel’s 2019 and 2020 elections

Michael Keren, University of Calgary

Chapter 9: Stabbed democracy: How social media and home views made a populist president in Brazil  

Francisco Brandao, University of Brasilia  

Chapter 10: Memes; a New emerging logic: Evidence from the 2019 British General Election

Rosalynd Southern, The University of Liverpool

Chapter 11: Populists and social media campaigning in Ukraine: The Election of Volodymyr Zelensky

Larisa Doroshenko, Northeastern University

Chapter 12: The changing face of political campaigning in Kenya

Martin Ndlela, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences

Chapter 13: Social media as strategic campaign tool: Austrian political parties use of social media over time

Uta Russman, FH Wien University of Applied Sciences

Chapter 14: “Many thanks for your support”: Email Populism and the People’s Party of Canada

Chris Wells, Blake Wertz, Li Zhang, and Rebecca Auger, Boston University

Conclusion - Richard Davis

Editorial Reviews

“This critically important volume addresses the fundamental questions of how and to what extent digital media impact electoral campaigns. Taras and Davis have assembled distinguished scholars from around the globe whose compelling research demonstrates that the answers differ substantially based on the electoral context. Each study takes a unique approach to exploring significant aspects of digital media campaigning, which provides a rich basis for comparative study. This collection fills a gap in studies of elections in the digital age by bringing theoretical and empirical rigor to investigations of campaigning.”

—Diana Owen, Georgetown University

— Diana Owen

“In our era of elections punctuated by digitally enabled voter manipulation techniques and extremist right-wing attacks on the core institutions of liberal democracy, it has never been more important to understand what parties, movements, and ordinary citizens do with media during campaigns. Deftly avoiding simplistic explanations and crude binary distinctions between traditional and social media, the contributors to this timely volume carefully reveal the paradoxes and complexities of how digital communication is reshaping elections across the globe.”

—Andrew Chadwick, author of The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power.

— Andrew Chadwick

“This edited collection is a ‘must read’ for scholars of digital campaigning. As well as providing fresh comparative insights into the role of new media in elections, collectively the contributions show the core question for scholars in the field is no longer whether, but how, the new technology has changed political campaigns.”

—Rachel Gibson, University of Manchester

— Rachel Gibson

“This critically important volume addresses the fundamental questions of how and to what extent digital media impact electoral campaigns. Taras and Davis have assembled distinguished scholars from around the globe whose compelling research demonstrates that the answers differ substantially based on the electoral context. Each study takes a unique approach to exploring significant aspects of digital media campaigning, which provides a rich basis for comparative study. This collection fills a gap in studies of elections in the digital age by bringing theoretical and empirical rigor to investigations of campaigning.”

—Diana Owen, Georgetown University

— Diana Owen

“In our era of elections punctuated by digitally enabled voter manipulation techniques and extremist right-wing attacks on the core institutions of liberal democracy, it has never been more important to understand what parties, movements, and ordinary citizens do with media during campaigns. Deftly avoiding simplistic explanations and crude binary distinctions between traditional and social media, the contributors to this timely volume carefully reveal the paradoxes and complexities of how digital communication is reshaping elections across the globe.”

—Andrew Chadwick, author of The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power.

— Andrew Chadwick

“This edited collection is a ‘must read’ for scholars of digital campaigning. As well as providing fresh comparative insights into the role of new media in elections, collectively the contributions show the core question for scholars in the field is no longer whether, but how, the new technology has changed political campaigns.”

—Rachel Gibson, University of Manchester

— Rachel Gibson

From the Publisher