Studies of digital campaigning have revealed substantial change in the nature of political campaigns. Tracing the rise of email, party websites, social media, online videos and gamification, scholars have shown how, since the 1990s, parties have become heavily dependent on digital technology (Gibson, 2015). In this chapter we focus on two elements of the 2017 digital campaign: Facebook advertising and what we term 'satellite campaigns'. Whilst resisting claims of revolution and transformational change (Kreiss, 2010, Williamson, Miller andFallon, 2010)w e nevertheless argue that these digital practices have important implications for parties' organisational structures, practices and behaviour, as well as for public expectations of campaigning. Through this analysis we contend that the 2017 general election provides further evidence that 'digital media are reconfiguring party-related engagement' (Vaccari and Valeriani, 2016, p. 295), and agree with Gibson (2015, p. 191) that by 'chaf[ing] against embedded organisational routines and norms' these developments challenge established understandings of parties' campaign strategies.In examining digital, we adopt an expansive definition of the term. Alongside an interest in social media and party websites, we also examine the organisational digital infrastructure on which parties rely. Including digital databases, canvassing systems, online phone banks, and email lists, digital infrastructure is pivotal to parties' diverse campaign activities by enabling participation through the reduction of resource costs. In the analysis that follows, we employ this expansive conception of digital to consider developments within the Labour and Conservative parties, using these examples to illustrate wider emerging trends.By April 2017, few were predicting an early general election, but in the days that elapsed between Theresa May's surprise announcement on 18 May and the vote on 8 June, parties across the spectrum exhibited formidable online and offline campaigns. In the digital realm, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and

In this paper we analyse whether relative deprivation has divergent effects on different types of social and political action. We expect that it will depress volunteering with parties as well as different types of conventional political participation more generally while stimulating volunteering with anti-cuts organisations and engagement in various kinds of protest activism. There is little research into how relative deprivation impacts on different types of social and political action from the wide range of activities available to citizens in contemporary democracies as well as into how this relationship might vary based on the wider economic context. While many studies construct scales, we examine participation in specific activities and associations, such as parties or anti-cuts organisations, voting, contacting, demonstrating and striking to show that deprivation has divergent effects that depart from what is traditionally argued. We apply random effects models with cross-level interactions utilizing an original cross-national European dataset collected in 2015 (N = 17,667) within a collaborative funded-project. We show that a negative economic context has a mobilizing effect by both increasing the stimulating effect of relative deprivation on protest activism as well as by closing or reversing the gap between resource-poor and resource-rich groups for volunteering with parties and voting.

This paper investigates policy responses to the Great Recession in Sweden, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Faced with the global financial crisis in 2007, responses in the respective countries differed considerably and followed the "old" paths of their institutional legacies. We focus on labour market and social welfare policies and demonstrate how these differing responses were shaped by path dependent ideational paradigms. Since these paradigms are first and foremost carried by policy communities, the analysis does not, in contrast to prior studies, only rely on policy documents but outlines the process as seen from the perspective of key public officials and experts in the respective fields. The paper shows how the crisis was perceived and which kinds of arguments were used for explaining the liberal (UK), conservative (Germany) and social-democratic (Sweden) responses to crisis.

Using political claims analysis on 1,000 articles from five national newspapers (Daily Mail, The Sun, The Times, The Guardian, and Daily Mirror), this article demonstrates that press coverage of the financial crisis, recession, and austerity in the United Kingdom between 2007‐14 drew heavily on a neoliberal discourse. Political, market, and civil society actors discussed the impact of hard times on people using a reductionist neoliberal narrative, framing people as “economic actors” and consistently underplaying any social or political traits. By examining communicative, rather than coordinative, discourse this research expands the focus of previous studies which have examined the embeddedness of ideology in society, and highlights potential links to studies of citizen participation and mobilization. Related Articles in this Special Issue Related Media Youtube. . “Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution ‐ Interview with Wendy Brown.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUGSjd_OoQ0 LSE British Politics and Policy Blog. . “Words Matter: Deconstructing ‘Welfare Dependency’ in the UK – Paul Michael Garrett.” http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/%EF%BB%BFwords-matter-deconstructing-welfare-dependency-in-the-uk/

Since the 1980s, Britains two largest political parties have been converging ever closer on the political spectrum, in line with a Downsian model of two party majoritarian systems. While both Labour and the Conservatives have been moving toward consensus, we investigate the extent to which the recent financial crisis, understood as a critical juncture, interrupted this movement. Using a "fuzzy set" ideal type analysis with claims-making data, we assess whether or not we can detect any signs of this consensus breaking down as a result of the crisis and the events which followed. Our results show that despite this most critical event, consensus was maintained as we found both parties adopting very similar framing and narrating strategies on the economic crisis in their public discourse. The study concludes that the shared discursive framing and narrating between both parties on the crisis demonstrates a continued Thatcherite, neoliberal consensus in British politics.