Crowds as Content: Party Campaign Strategy in the Digital Age

• In Event: Party Organization, Campaigns, and Mobilization in India

Abstract

What explains the puzzling persistence of in-person mass campaign rallies, even as lower cost online alternatives for party-voter communication are readily available? Drawing on intensive qualitative fieldwork in India, I develop a theory that emphasizes content-complementarity, or the mutually reinforcing relationship between physical and digital forms of campaigning. I propose that the imperative of the crowd-metric, which parties use to assess rally success, is heightened today as parties strategically utilize rally crowds as online content. I test my theory in the context of the 2022 state election in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, using observational data from party social media accounts and original survey experiments conducted with approximately 4,000 voters. My findings suggest that visuals which reveal the size and composition of rally crowds and narratives about such crowds influence voter evaluations of the rally-organizing party and voter inclination to participate in that party's campaign. I corroborate these findings with data from a novel survey with around 400 party functionaries on their perceived effects of such rally content. I discuss the implications of my findings in the context of online misinformation, multi-party democracy, and gaps in political participation as well as in access to digital technologies.

Author

• Shahana Sheikh, University of Pennsylvania