Digital campaigning: Empirical research and normative implications.

Abstract

Election campaigns present many normatively charged situations to politicians. In particular, some of their decisions can potentially have negative effects on democratic norms and/or political trust. Today’s digitally enhanced and increasingly strategic campaign practices have arguably increased these ethical challenges. Online political advertising in particular offers parties a powerful way to connect with and potentially persuade voters, and has thus raised various ethical issues. This panel will ascertain whether these concerns are justified, by tackling a variety of open empirical and normative questions. An analysis of five years of political online advertising on Facebook (in the UK) will bring clarity about the most common kinds of political advertising and whether negative advertising is as prevalent as its place in current research suggests. Because political ads are often assumed to exacerbate political polarisation, we also inquire into the relationship between affective polarisation and democratic trust (with a multi-wave panel study from the Netherlands). The normative implications of (micro-)targeted political advertising for both citizens and politicians are analysed theoretically, and also empirically with representative mass surveys from Germany, Italy, the UK and the US. Overall, this panel sheds both empirical and normative light on some of the most prominent and momentous features of today’s digitally driven election campaigns.

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Digital campaigning: Empirical research and normative implications	View Paper Details
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