The old in the new: Voter surveillance in political clientelism and datafied campaigning

Abstract

This article compares political clientelism and datafied campaigning as two modes of relating politicians/parties and voters that are centred around voter surveillance. It contributes to the discussion on consequences of Big Data by showing similarities of datafied campaigns with a type of electoral politics that pre-dates the advent of mass media and is usually regarded as deficient. It thus departs from the predominant perspective on datafication and surveillance, which draws on Foucault, in order to identify the particular challenges that datafication poses in the realm of democratic electoral politics. They are related to four major aspects in which datafied campaigning resembles political clientelism, as opposed to the combination of ideology, issue-based campaigning and media appeal that characterized Western European party politics in the second half of the 20th century. It personalizes the relationship between politicians and voters with the help of intermediaries; it is based on an asymmetric and iterative monitoring of voters; it implies a strong particularism and an affinity with populist appeals; and it is ambivalent with regard to the volition of voters. The identification of these similarities renders general concerns about the consequences of datafied campaigning for democracy more concrete. It offers a mirror in which seemingly novel practices are revealed to have implications that are well known to be problematic for the quality of democracy.

Data-driven campaigning and democratic disruption: Evidence from six advanced democracies

“…Similar approaches can be observed in the personas identified by campaigns as groups of target voters, with a search in the Australian Liberal Party for ‘tradies’ and similar techniques also used by the German Christian Democrats to identify groups of like-minded voters. These techniques are not, however, particularly new, as polling and focus groups have been used for decades to identify target audiences and this has also been a common approach used by data brokers and commercial marketing operations for decades (Kusche, 2020).…”

“…Such narratives suggest DDC has democratic implications for individuals (Zuiderveen Borgesius et al, 2018), raising questions about voters’ privacy and capacity to freely exercise choice free from manipulation (Burkell and Regan, 2019). At a societal level, scholars have also spotlighted the negative democratic implications of DDC, arguing that it encourages campaigns to focus on individual interests rather than interest aggregation (Kusche, 2020), contributes to a fragmentation of political discourse (Pons, 2016; Harker, 2020), and undermines prevailing systems of electoral accountability (Jamieson, 2013; in 't Veld, 2017). DDC is therefore currently seen to threaten established democratic principles about individual and societal practices, trends that are seen likely to only intensify as campaigns gain access to ever more personalised data and technology adapts to enable more individual level targeting.…”

Understanding the Modern Election Campaign: Analysing Campaign Eras through Financial Transparency Disclosures at the 2019 UK General Election

“…Often absent from such discussionperhaps in the rush to diagnose novel ideal typesis, however, reflection on how these new features are used alongside previous practices. Whilst some have acknowledged the evolution of many of these techniques (Kusche 2020), it is somewhat rare for scholars to reflect on how, and to what extent, new and old techniques are being entwined within modern campaign assemblages (Nielsen 2012). We argue this tendency is detrimental to our understanding of modern campaign practice and, considering what it obscures, advocate for a more holistic approach to the study of campaigns.…”

¿Ciudadanía vigilada o monitorización ciudadana? Dos aproximaciones opuestas a la relación entre tecnología y democracia

“…De la mano de estos avances, han surgido diversas corrientes que hacen interpretaciones diferentes sobre los objetivos que debe perseguir el uso de nuevas tecnologías en relación con el ejerci-cio del poder político en los sistemas democráticos. En consecuencia, también ha aumentado el interés académico por estudiar los posibles efectos de las distintas aproximaciones sobre la naturaleza y los fundamentos de la democracia y los procesos de toma de decisiones políticas (Aguirre Sala, 2019;Bernholz et al, 2021;Kusche, 2020;Martí, 2020;Monteagudo, 2021;Saura Agel, 2020).…”