From newspapers to social media? Changing dynamics in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

Abstract

Switzerland is a laggard in terms of digital campaigning. Direct democratic votes, more particularly, are centered around issues and little personalized. Combined with the specificities of voters’ information behaviour in direct democratic campaigns, these features are likely to disincentivize political actors from extensively campaigning online. Instead, we expect political actors to continue relying on traditional media. These propositions are tested on a large data base of social media posts and newspaper advertisements published before direct democratic votes held in Switzerland from 1981 to 2020 and 2010 to 2020, respectively. Counterintuitively, this research note finds a strong discontinuity in campaign communication practices. Over the past decades, and between 2010 and 2020 in particular, newspaper ads have become less central to direct democratic campaign communication. At the same time, political actors are increasingly shifting their communication to the digital sphere.