The Early Bloomer

2020 ◽  
pp. 107-133
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Early Start ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Activist Group ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Digital Campaigning

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in Australia from 1994 to 2013. It does so by reviewing the findings from the secondary literature, and conducting original analysis of web content and national survey data. These data sources build a picture of key changes in the supply and demand for digital campaigning in Australia and particularly whether they fit the four-phase model of development. The results show that digital campaigning has broadly followed the anticipated cycle with parties making a strong early start. However, efforts slowed considerably following a highly publicized failure by prominent right-wing state politician and web campaigner Jeff Kennett. Much of the subsequent innovation appears to have been driven by the mainstream left and also the non-party online activist group GetUp!

The Trendsetter

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-209
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
The United States ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Left Wing ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Digital Campaigning

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in the United States during the period 1994–2012. It does so by reviewing the findings from the secondary literature, and conducting original analysis of web content and national survey data. These data sources build a picture of key changes in the supply and demand for digital campaigning in the United States and particularly whether they fit the four-phase model of development. The results show that the model fits, and that US parties and voters were considerably faster in engaging with web campaigning than was the case elsewhere. This enthusiasm appeared to be driven, to an extent, by the more conducive regulatory environment and also innovation among left-wing organizations and particularly the Democrats from the middle of the first decade of the 2000s. Their ability to sustain activist involvement in their online cause beyond 2008, however, is challenged by the author’s findings.

The Late Bloomer

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-167
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
National Survey ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
The Other ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
Digital Infrastructure ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Digital Campaigning

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in France during the period 1994–2012. It does so by reviewing the findings from the secondary literature, and conducting original analysis of web content and national survey data. These data sources build a picture of key changes in the supply and demand for digital campaigning in France, and particularly whether they fit the four-phase model of development. The results show that French parties and voters were slower than their UK and Australian counterparts in engaging with web campaigning. The inertia was due in part to the presence of the rival digital infrastructure Minitel and extensive regulations governing campaign communication in France. The direct importation of US expertise from the Obama 2008 campaign saw a rapid acceleration of party usage, with the Socialists proving the most enthusiastic adopters. The response of voters, however, still proved less enthusiastic than for the other cases studied.

The Slow Burner

2020 ◽  
pp. 72-106
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Phase Iii ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Secondary Literature ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Original Analysis ◽  
Digital Campaigning

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in the United Kingdom from 1994 to 2015. It does so by reviewing the findings from the secondary literature, and conducting original analysis of web content and national survey data. These data sources build a picture of key changes in the supply and demand for digital campaigning in the United Kingdom, and particularly whether they fit the four-phase model of development. The results show that UK digital campaigning has followed the anticipated cycle in a largely steady and incremental manner. An early phase of experimentation and standardization yielded to more strategic attempts at community building by 2010, and the 2015 election saw signs of entry into phase IV. At the party level, the Conservatives emerge as most aggressive in pushing the new forms of individual online targeting, while Labour and the smaller parties concentrate more on organic phase III–style indirect mobilization.

Taking Aim at Attack Advertising

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Fridkin ◽  
Patrick Kenney
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Focus Groups ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Empirical Validation ◽  
Negative Campaigning ◽  
Senate Elections ◽  
Campaign Messages ◽  
Negative Messages ◽  
The Impact

This book develops and tests the “tolerance and tactics theory of negativity.” The theory argues that citizens differ in their tolerance of negative campaigning. Also, candidates vary in the tactics used to attack their opponents, with negative messages varying in their relevance to voters and in the civility of their tone. The interplay between citizens’ tolerance of negativity and candidates’ negative messages helps clarify when negative campaigning will influence citizens’ evaluations of candidates and their likelihood of voting. A diverse set of data sources was collected from U.S. Senate elections (e.g., survey data, experiments, content analysis, focus groups) across several years to test the theory. The tolerance and tactics theory of negativity receives strong empirical validation. First, people differ systematically in their tolerance for negativity, and their tolerance changes over the course of the campaign. Second, people’s levels of tolerance consistently and powerfully influence how they assess negative messages. Third, the relevance and civility of negative messages consistently influence citizens’ assessments of candidates competing for office. That is, negative messages focusing on relevant topics and utilizing an uncivil tone produce significant changes in people’s impressions of the candidates. Furthermore, people’s tolerance of negativity influences their susceptibility to negative campaigning. Specifically, relevant and uncivil messages are most influential for people who are least tolerant of negative campaigning. The relevance and civility of campaign messages also alter people’s likelihood of voting, and the impact of negative messages on turnout is more consequential for people with less tolerance of negativity.

scholarly journals Professional activists? Party activism among political staffers in parliamentary democracies

2021 ◽  
pp. 135406882110273
Author(s):  
Pieter Moens
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Model ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
High Intensity ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Parliamentary Democracies ◽  
Coalition Governments ◽  
Depth Analysis ◽  
Strong Commitment ◽  
Staff Recruitment

Although the position of the party on the ground has been weakened by cartelization, grassroots activists remain an important recruitment pool for political professionals. Based on unique survey data collected among the staff of 14 Belgian and Dutch parties (N = 1009), this article offers an in-depth analysis of party activism among this under-researched population. Introducing a new supply and demand framework, I argue that staff recruitment is shaped by candidate preferences (supply) and party preferences (demand). The findings demonstrate that most political staffers are high-intensity activists with a strong commitment to their party. Moreover, the theoretical model accurately predicts that non-activists are more common among policy and communication experts, ministerial staff, and those working for ideologically moderate parties. These findings show that paid staffers do not necessarily widen the gap between parties and activists. They also raise normative questions about internal congruence within parties in coalition governments.

scholarly journals Global Agricultural Concept Space: lightweight semantics for pragmatic interoperability.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Baker ◽  
Brandon Whitehead ◽  
Ruthie Musker ◽  
Johannes Keizer
Keyword(s):  
Data Sources ◽  
Bibliographic Databases ◽  
Food Technology ◽  
Web Content ◽  
Controlled Vocabularies ◽  
Research And Innovation ◽  
Concept Space ◽  
Image Metadata ◽  
Diverse Data

Abstract Progress on research and innovation in food technology depends increasingly on the use of structured vocabularies - concept schemes, thesauri, and ontologies - for discovering and re-using a diversity of data sources. Here we report on GACS Core, a concept scheme in the larger Global Agricultural Concept Space (GACS), which was formed by mapping between the most frequently used concepts of AGROVOC, CAB Thesaurus, and NAL Thesaurus and serves as a target for mapping near-equivalent concepts from other vocabularies. It provides globally unique identifiers which can be used as keywords in bibliographic databases, tags for web content, for building lightweight facet schemes, and for annotating spreadsheets, databases, and image metadata using synonyms and variant labels in 25 languages. The minimal semantics of GACS allows terms defined with more precision in ontologies, or less precision in controlled vocabularies, to be linked together making it easier to discover and integrate semantically diverse data sources.

scholarly journals Harnessing Administrative Records for Official Statistics on People and Households

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Misty L Heggeness
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Census Bureau ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Official Statistics ◽  
Administrative Records ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Federal Statistical ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Working Age ◽  
The Impact

The availability and excessiveness of alternative (non-survey) data sources, collected on a daily, hourly, and sometimes second-by-second basis, has challenged the federal statistical system to update existing protocol for developing official statistics. Federal statistical agencies collect data primarily through survey methodologies built on frames constructed from administrative records. They compute survey weights to adjust for non-response and unequal sampling probabilities, impute answers for nonresponse, and report official statistics via tabulations from these survey. The U.S. federal government has rigorously developed these methodologies since the advent of surveys -- an innovation produced by the urgent desire of Congress and the President to estimate annual unemployment rates of working age men during the Great Depression. In the 1930s, Twitter did not exist; high-scale computing facilities were not abundant let alone cheap, and the ease of the ether was just a storyline from the imagination of fiction writers. Today we do have the technology, and an abundance of data, record markers, and alternative sources, which, if curated and examined properly, can help enhance official statistics. Researchers at the Census Bureau have been experimenting with administrative records in an effort to understand how these alternative data sources can improve our understanding of official statistics. Innovative projects like these have advanced our knowledge of the limitations of survey data in estimating official statistics. This paper will discuss advances made in linking administrative records to survey data to-date and will summarize the research on the impact of administrative records on official statistics.

scholarly journals Comparing Discourse and Policy Network Approaches: Evidence from Water Policy on Micropollutants

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Schaub ◽  
Florence Metz
Keyword(s):  
Survey Data ◽  
Water Policy ◽  
Policy Networks ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Policy Preferences ◽  
Policy Network ◽  
Network Approach ◽  
Coalition Structures ◽  
Network Approaches ◽  
Policy Proposals

To understand how actors make collective policy decisions, scholars use policy and discourse network approaches to analyze interdependencies among actors. While policy networks often build on survey data, discourse networks typically use media data to capture the beliefs or policy preferences shared by actors. One of the reasons for the variety of data sources is that discourse data can be more accessible to researchers than survey data (or vice versa). In order to make an informed decision on valid data sources, researchers need to understand how differences in data sources may affect results. As this remains largely unexplored, we analyze the differences and similarities between policy and discourse networks. We systematically compare policy networks with discourse networks in respect of the types of actors participating in them, the policy proposals actors advocate and their coalition structures. For the policy field of micropollutants in surface waters in Germany, we observe only small differences between the results obtained using the policy and discourse network approaches. We find that the discourse network approach particularly emphasizes certain actor types, i.e., expanders who seek to change the policy status quo. The policy network approach particularly reflects electoral interests, since preferences for policies targeting voters are less visible. Finally, different observation periods reveal some smaller differences in the coalition structures within the discourse network. Beyond these small differences, both approaches come to largely congruent results with regards to actor types, policy preferences and coalition structures. In our case, the use of discourse and policy network approaches lead to similar conclusions regarding the study of policy processes.

Digital Campaigning across Space

2020 ◽  
pp. 44-71
Author(s):  
Rachel K. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Multilevel Modeling ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Electoral Systems ◽  
The United States ◽  
Voter Mobilization ◽  
Internet Penetration ◽  
Digital Campaigning ◽  
The Comparative Study

This chapter examines developments in digital campaigning in comparative perspective. It does so using survey data from Wave 4 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) to measure the extent of digital voter contact occurring in eighteen countries (2011–2015). Based on the understanding that extensive voter mobilization is a key feature of a country’s entry into phase IV digital campaigning, the authors infer which nations have progressed more rapidly through the four phases, and are thus most advanced in their use of digital campaign tools. Using this measure, they find that the United States is the most advanced nation and Thailand the least. They investigate the rankings more systematically using multilevel modeling techniques, and find that presidential elections and higher internet penetration rates are most predictive of higher rates of digital campaign contact. The results are helpful in building expectations about the digital campaign performance of the four national case studies.

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