Political advertising on Facebook is the latest in a long line of developments in campaign practice, and is a tool that has been mobilised extensively in elections around the world. In this article, we explore what we know about Facebook advertising at elections and ask what existing data from the UK Electoral Commission can reveal about current usage. Highlighting the principles behind Facebook advertising, we argue that existing metrics offer little insight into current campaign trends—posing analytical, methodological and normative challenges for academics and electoral regulators alike. Moreover, we argue that these challenges strike at the heart of debates about democratic responsibility and the degree to which governments should cede responsibility to commercial actors who may have differing understandings of fundamental democratic norms.

A key question facing scholars of party politics is the journey engaged individuals take to becoming party members. We argue that the existing literature largely outlines one aspect – motivation. In this article, we present an alternative position: that a membership journey is only complete when a motivation, process and trigger are present. We outline this utilising a case study of the Green Party of England and Wales including previously confidential internal party documents, membership figures, elite interviews, focus group research and participant observation to provide a different means to understand membership fluctuations. We present these findings as an exploratory and inductive reinterpretation of existing debates. However, we also suggest that the findings are of interest not just in the case of the Green Party, nor the United Kingdom, but to all those who study party membership.

Since at least the 1980s, scholars have highlighted parties’ reliance on external actors, with Panebianco’s ‘electoral–professional’ party model spotlighting the increasing role of professionals in supporting party activities and campaigns. Over successive decades, our understanding of the role of external actors, and particularly consultants, has grown. As parties have begun to embrace digital tools and technologies, however, it has become apparent that our understanding of party organization does not reflect the array of actors who support party activities. In this article, we draw on extensive interview data from Australia and the United Kingdom to offer a new conceptual framework – that we call the ‘party-centred digital ecosystem’ – to highlight the functions that different types of external actor provide for parties. Introducing the classification of CLANS to describe these different actors, we discuss the significance of this trend, highlighting the potential for increasingly porous organizational boundaries as parties call on different types of external actor for support.

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Alongside the growth of online campaigning has been an increased anxiety around its effects on democratic institutions and processes. Many have suggested that in a (new) media environment that privileges choice, citizens will increasingly segment themselves into echo chambers, tuning out dissenting voices. But the debate on the existence of echo chambers is mixed, and the extent to which political parties campaign to easily persuadable (and pre-disposed) electorates is unclear. In this article, we present a case study of the Facebook campaign activity of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats at the U.K.’s parliamentary general election in 2019. Utilising an analysis of the Facebook Ad Archive’s Graph API, we find that political parties do not consistently campaign to their easily persuadable electorates—often chasing votes as much as they mobilise supporters. The evidence that parties campaign to specific echo chambers online is therefore, at best, mixed.