As the plugged-in presidential campaign has arguably reached maturity, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age challenges popular claims about the democratizing effect of Digital Communication Technologies (DCTs). Analyzing campaign strategies, structures, and tactics from the past six presidential election cycles, Stromer-Galley reveals how, for all their vaunted inclusivity and tantalizing promise of increased two-way communication between candidates and the individuals who support them, DCTs have done little to change the fundamental dynamics of campaigns. The expansion of new technologies has presented candidates with greater opportunities to micro-target potential voters, cheaper and easier ways to raise money, and faster and more innovative ways to respond to opponents. The need for communication control and management, however, has made campaigns slow and loathe to experiment with truly interactive internet communication technologies. Citizen involvement in the campaign historically has been and, as this book shows, continues to be a means to an end: winning the election for the candidate. For all the proliferation of apps to download, polls to click, videos to watch, and messages to forward, the decidedly undemocratic view of controlled interactivity is how most campaigns continue to operate. In the fully revised second edition, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age examines election cycles from 1996, when the World Wide Web was first used for presidential campaigning, through 2016 when campaigns had the full power of advertising on social media sites. As the book charts changes in internet communication technologies, it shows how, even as campaigns have moved from a mass mediated to a networked paradigm, the possibilities these shifts in interactivity seem to promise for citizen input and empowerment remain farther than a click away.

How American elections are increasingly vulnerable—and what must be done to protect them Until recently, most Americans could assume that elections, at all levels of government, were reasonably clean and well managed—most of the time. Yes, there were exceptions: some states and localities were notorious for occasional election-rigging, losers often complained that winners somehow had unfair advantages, and money increasingly distorted the electoral process. But even when voters did not like the results, the overall system of elections did not seem nearly as corrupt or warped as in many other countries. That positive view of American politics now seems outdated, even naïve. This new book by Elaine Kamarck and Darrell West shows how American elections have been compromised by what used to be called “dirty tricks” and how those tricks are becoming even more complex and dangerous the deeper we get into the digital age. It shows how old-fashioned vote-rigging at polling stations has been overtaken by much more sophisticated system-wide campaigns, from Russia’s massive campaign to influence the 2016 presidential election through social media to influence campaigns yet to come. Dirty Tricks in the Digital Age looks not just at the past but also toward the future, examining how American elections can be protected from abuse, both domestic and foreign. State governments have primary responsibility for elections in the United States, but the federal government also must play a major role in shaping the system for how Americans cast their votes. The book explores what political leaders are doing and must do to protect elections—and how they can overcome the current toxic political climate to do so. It outlines five concrete steps that state and federal leaders must take to secure the future of American democracy. Dirty Tricks in the Digital Age is a valuable resource for scholars, students, journalists, politicians, and voters—indeed, anyone interested in securing the most basic element of democracy.

This book investigates how institutional differences, such as the roles of political parties and the regulation of electoral systems, affect the development of Internet election campaigns in the U.S., Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. It examines whether or not the “Americanization of elections” is evident in East Asian democracies. While Japan is a parliamentary system, the U.S. and Korea are presidential systems and Taiwan is a semi-presidential system that has a president along with a parliamentary system. Furthermore, the role of the presidency in the U.S., Korea, and Taiwan is quite different. Taking these variations in political systems into consideration, the authors discuss how the electoral systems are regulated in relation to issues such as paid advertisements and campaign periods. They argue that stronger regulation of election systems and shorter election periods in Japan characterize Japanese uniqueness compared with the U.S., Korea, and Taiwan in terms of Internet election campaigns.

The 2008 presidential election provided a "perfect storm" for pollsters. A significant portion of the population had exchanged their landlines for cellphones, which made them harder to survey. Additionally, a potential Bradley effect -- in which white voters misrepresent their intentions of voting for or against a black candidate -- skewed predictions, and aggressive voter registration and mobilization campaigns by Barack Obama combined to challenge conventional understandings about how to measure and report public preferences. In the wake of these significant changes, Political Polling in the Digital Age, edited by Kirby Goidel, offers timely and insightful interpretations of the impact these trends will have on polling. In this groundbreaking collection, contributors place recent developments in public-opinion polling into a broader historical context, examine how to construct accurate meanings from public-opinion surveys, and analyze the future of public-opinion polling. Notable contributors include Mark Blumenthal, editor and publisher of Pollster.com; Anna Greenberg, a leading Democratic pollster; and Scott Keeter, director of survey research for the Pew Research Center. In an era of increasingly personalized and interactive communications, accurate political polling is more difficult and also more important. Political Polling in the Digital Age presents fresh perspectives and relevant tactics that demystify the variable world of opinion taking.

This book investigates the changing meanings of power and politics in the Internet age and questions whether the political category of the citizen still has a meaningful role to play in the highly-mediated dynamics of an increasingly networked world. To answer such questions, the book analyses and compares the impact of the Internet on the relationship between state, citizens, and politics in three countries: the USA, Italy, and China. The book’s journey starts in the mid-90s and ends in 2016. It pays particular attention to Obama 2008 and Trump 2016 presidential campaigns, the ascendance to power in Italy of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement, and to the enduring Chinese government’s struggle to control the Internet public opinion. The book challenges the traditional understanding of power through which the strong typically prevails over the weak. This leads to a clearer understanding of the wider role citizens can play (and must play) in a networked political sphere, while it also warns the reader on the many risks citizens face in a post-truth world. The book challenges the traditional understanding of power through which the strong typically prevails over the weak. This leads to a clearer understanding of the wider role citizens can play (and must play) in a networked political sphere.

Given the advanced state of digital technology and social media, one would think that the Democratic and Republican Parties would be reasonably well-matched in terms of their technology uptake and sophistication. But as past presidential campaigns have shown, this is not the case. So what explains this odd disparity? Political scientists have shown that Republicans effectively used the strategy of party building and networking to gain campaign and electoral advantage throughout the twentieth century. In Prototype Politics, Daniel Kreiss argues that contemporary campaigning has entered a new technology-intensive era that the Democratic Party has engaged to not only gain traction against the Republicans, but to shape the new electoral context and define what electoral participation means in the twenty-first century. Prototype Politics provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how campaigns are newly "technology-intensive," and why digital media, data, and analytics are at the forefront of contemporary electoral dynamics. The book discusses the importance of infrastructure, the contexts within which technological innovation happens, and how the collective making of prototypes shapes parties and their technological futures. Drawing on an analysis of the careers of 629 presidential campaign staffers from 2004-2012, as well as interviews with party elites on both sides of the aisle, Prototype Politics details how and why the Democrats invested more in technology, were able to attract staffers with specialized expertise to work in electoral politics, and founded an array of firms to diffuse technological innovations down ballot and across election cycles. Taken together, this book shows how the differences between the major party campaigns on display in 2012 were shaped by their institutional histories since 2004, as well as that of their extended network of allied organizations. In the process, this book argues that scholars need to understand how technological development around politics happens in time and how the dynamics on display during presidential cycles are the outcome of longer processes.

Provides academics, journalists, and general readers with bird's-eye view of data-driven practices and their impact in politics and media.