Parties’ voter targeting strategies: What can facebook ads tell us?

Stuckelberger, Simon; Koedam, Jelle

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102473

Cited by 9 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Voters recognize and dislike being targeted (Hersh & Schaffner 2013), and some parties in fact voluntarily restrict their targeting for ethical reasons (Pauly & Stotz 2019). The literature has largely focused on the targets (Lovett & Peress 2015;Stuckelberger & Koedam 2022) and contents (Benoit & Hansen 2002) of campaign ads separately despite incentives to tailor. Previous work on tailoring could not disentangle the strategic behavior of parties from biases introduced by ad delivery algorithms (Fowler et al 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…So far, few researchers have studied the tailoring of campaign ads. The literature has largely focused on the targets (Lovett & Peress 2015;Stuckelberger & Koedam 2022) and contents (Benoit & Hansen 2002) of campaign ads separately despite strong incentives to tailor. Going beyond gender, Zárate et al (2023) show that candidates benefit from appealing to Hispanic voters in Spanish.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Gendered targeting: Do parties tailor their campaign ads to women?

Erfort¹

2023

Preprint

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Are parties communicating differently to women? A growing literature documents gender differences in the political behavior of both voters and politicians, and suggests that this can help or hurt parties electorally. We still know little, however, about whether and how parties adapt their campaign strategies and differentiate their communication accordingly. I analyze how parties strategically vary their communication in ads targeting women using a new comprehensive dataset of over 60,000 Facebook and Instagram ads from 146 parties during the 2019 European Parliament election. Large-scale computational vision identifies the tailoring of ads to female audiences in parties' social media ads. The results show that parties not only strategically target women, but that they also tailor the content of ads to women. The findings are important because they uncover gendered strategies in parties’ campaign communication which have important implications for political representation and opinion formation.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Gendered targeting: Do parties tailor their campaign ads to women?

Erfort¹

2023

Preprint

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“…Campaigns now extensively rely on propensity scores to target most likely voters (Endres & Kelly, 2018;Stuckelberger & Koedam, 2022). By doing so, they activate those who we call marginal abstainers, people "on the fence" to turn out.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, we have reasons to believe that the shift to microtargeting has made voter turnout efforts more similar to our simulations. Campaigns now extensively rely on propensity scores to target most likely voters (Endres & Kelly, 2018; Stuckelberger & Koedam, 2022). By doing so, they activate those who we call marginal abstainers, people “on the fence” to turn out.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Party Realignment, Education, and the Turnout Advantage: Revisiting the Partisan Effect of Turnout

Goidel,

MQ Moreira,

Armstrong

2023

American Politics Research

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Party realignment is occurring along the lines of education in the United States. As college-educated voters increasingly align with the Democratic Party, it is necessary to revisit the partisan effect of turnout. We predict that, since 2016, the Democratic Party no longer benefits from higher turnout. Using validated voter turnout from the Cooperative Election Study (CES), we simulate election results across turnout rates for the 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 elections. Our findings show that increases in turnout greatly benefit the Democratic Party in the pre-Trump era. However, this pattern has drastically changed. In 2016, 2018, and 2020, the Democratic Party sees a much smaller gain in vote share as simulated turnout increases, but also a large vote share advantage when voter turnout is extremely low. These results indicate that continued party realignment along the lines of education could lead to a persistent reversal in the expected partisan effect of turnout—where Democrats perform better in low-turnout local or primary elections and Republicans perform better in high-turnout general elections.

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“…First, targeting citizens based on their geographic location is a straightforward way for political actors to reach citizens within their constituency but also to mobilize any regional strongholds (Stuckelberger and Koedam, 2022). Socio-demographic targeting aims at groups with shared characteristics, such as age, gender, income, or education level.…”

Section: Targeting and Exclusion Strategiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Does(n't) Target You?

Votta,

Kruschinski,

Hove

et al. 2024

JQD

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Political campaigns are increasingly investing in targeted advertising on social media platforms to reach voters. Despite critical implications for citizens and elections, little is known about the targeting strategies deployed by political parties — especially in countries beyond the global north. This paper provides a comprehensive descriptive analysis of political microtargeting practices on Facebook and Instagram across 95 countries during 113 national elections. By analyzing the Meta Ad Targeting dataset, we explore targeting strategies of 54k political advertisers who ran 2.5 million ads between August 2020 and December 2022. The findings indicate that election campaigns worldwide utilize targeted advertising. Most commonly, spending is allocated towards a single targeting criterion, however, in wealthier countries and electoral systems with proportional representation, a greater amount of money is spent on microtargeting by combining multiple criteria. Furthermore, targeting strategies vary along ideological lines of political parties who seek out voters more typically aligned with each side of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, parties use microtargeting irrespective of political ideology. Our findings offer the first comparative analysis of political microtargeting on Meta platforms for countries across all continents. Methodologically, we introduce a semi-automatic method to identify worldwide political advertisers using multiple data sources. Our study deepens the understanding of how country and party contexts explain differences in targeting strategies, highlighting the need for more research beyond the global north. Finally, our results have important implications for policy makers, and other stakeholders who seek to develop regulations to address the challenges posed by political microtargeting techniques.

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Parties’ voter targeting strategies: What can facebook ads tell us?

Cited by 9 publications

References 24 publications

Gendered targeting: Do parties tailor their campaign ads to women?

Gendered targeting: Do parties tailor their campaign ads to women?

Party Realignment, Education, and the Turnout Advantage: Revisiting the Partisan Effect of Turnout

Who Does(n't) Target You?

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