Virtual Volunteers to Unicorn Factories: Participatory Campaigning over 25 Years

• In Event: Analyzing Political Campaign Strategies across Platforms

Abstract

The most common narrative of participatory digital campaigning is that, despite early internet use offering citizens opportunities to truly influence politics and speak openly, campaigning tactics solidified around a more constrained set of political actions (Gibson, 2020; Kreiss 2012; Stromer Galley, 2014). While that broad trend is a defining feature of what Ben Epstein calls the information era of political communication (2018), it has centered attention on practices that mobilize citizens’ to take instrumental action (eg. party managed online activist hubs that out outsource key campaign tasks such as donation, phone banking, canvassing, and organizing campaign events to supporters). Beyond instrumental action, however, we argue there is another dimension of participatory campaigning that relates to citizen-voice and the extent to which parties allow individuals to speak and express their views on more substantive questions relating to the policy agenda or candidate choice. Here, work is more limited with some recent work examining campaigns control over comments sections (Baldwin-Philippi, 2015). We argue that both dimensions—voice and instrumental action—need to be considered when evaluating how far internet technologies have promoted more interactive and participatory campaigns over time, and particularly the claim that campaigns have moved ever closer toward managed interactivity. To show the value of simultaneously investigating voice and instrumental action, we will assess campaign tactics on these dimensions across two national contexts (US and UK).

We take this approach because while channels for supporter action and voice may be co-related and follow a similar pathway toward increasing control, they may also be orthogonal to one another, with higher voice not matched by more channels for supporter-initiated activism, or vice versa. This may also vary by country and party. For example, in the US, actions that exemplify controlled interactivity are central to campaigns, but there are outliers. Notably, the 2016 and 2020 Trump campaign highlighted the voices of everyday citizens in Twitter and the 2020 primary campaign for Pete Buttigieg gave nuanced directions to help citizens to create their own campaign content across social platforms. In the UK, early efforts to provide official platforms for expression of grassroots opinions by the main parties appear to have been displaced by investment in new virtual supporter hubs designed to empower local activists to promote their local candidates and the wider party message. However, all have faced and to varying degrees embraced growth in a set of ‘quasi-official’ vibrant supporter-led online forums designed to promote the voices of ordinary members and loyal partisans. These initial observations make a case for more rigorous assessment across time, national contexts, and numerous campaigns/parties.

By viewing digitally enabled supporter engagement in this dual manner–i.e. how far campaigns encourage citizens to speak (and how freely), as well as how much they encourage people to take action (and how freely)–we expand the rubric under which trends toward controlled interactivity are judged. While this may lead to conventional academic theories of a move toward increased control over time being challenged, it may also lead to their being reinforced.

In the full paper we will examine these twin tracks of voice and instrumentalism/action within US and UK parties from the late 1990s through to present day with a view to re-interpreting the narrative of increased top-down control. In doing so we link our analysis to more recent work that associates disruptive organizational uses of new ICTs with newer parties, and incremental and sustaining innovations to established players (Raniolo, 2020). Essentially, we argue that by widening the lens to encompass the notion of voice, we may build a rather different and more radical picture over time of the extent to which digital innovation has disrupted the internal operations of mainstream or ‘legacy’ parties.

Baldwin-Philippi, J. (2015). Using Technology, Building Democracy: Digital campaigning and the construction of citizenship. Oxford UP.
Epstein, B. (2018). The Only Constant is Change: Technology, political communication, and innovation over time. Oxford UP.
Gibson, R. (2020). When the Nerds Go Marching In: How digital technology moved from the margins to the mainstream. Oxford UP.
Kreiss, D. (2012). Taking our country back: The crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. Oxford UP.
Raniolo, F., Tarditi, V., & Vittori, D. (2021). Political Parties and New ICTs: Between Tradition and Innovation. In Digital Parties (Springer, pp. 181–204).
Stromer-Galley, J. (2014). Presidential campaigning in the internet age. Oxford UP.

Authors

• Jessica Baldwin-Philippi, Fordham University

• Rachel K. Gibson, University of Manchester