Spontaneous humour and Malaysia’s democratic breakthrough in 2018

The 2018 Malaysian general election was the first democratic change of government in the nation’s modern history. The victory of the Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope – PH) coalition surprised several observers within and outside the country, especially considering the intensified repression employed by the outgoing Barisan Nasional (National Front – BN) ruling coalition leading up to the polls, including media censorship, the silencing of political opponents, and the manipulation of Islamism and ethnic Malay nationalism. This article examines the role of spontaneous, conversational humour in constructing a viable political identity for the PH. It does this by considering humorous moments during press conferences and similar media events held by the PH coalition, led by its designated choice for prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad. This article aims to contribute to the scholarship on the role of humour in identity construction and political campaigning.

Populism as Communication: Political Campaigning on Facebook

We adopt the notion of populism as a communication phenomenon that includes typical elements of content and of style, moving away from actor-centered approaches towards a content-centered approach. Empirically, our study measures populism to varying degrees and forms in 3564 Facebook postings of political parties in France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the 2014 EU elections campaigns, the 2017 national parliamentary election campaigns, and a non-electoral period in 2018 in each country. The results show that populism is not a marginal phenomenon, but that it is present in about one fourth of all postings in some form; that there is variance between countries, party types, policy fields, and over time. While radical parties are very exclusionary towards out-groups on the radical right and very anti-elitist on the radical left and the radical right, this observation provides only a partial view of the multifaceted phenomenon of populism.

CREATIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS OF POLITICAL IMAGERY IN AN INSTAGRAM-BASED ELECTION CAMPAIGN: IMPLICATIONS FOR VISUAL RHETORICAL LITERACY

This article reviews literature on visual rhetoric in political campaigning and synthesizes several strands of current research devoted to the rhetorical potential of communicating with visuals in online environments. It uses rhetorical concepts of identification and manoeuvring, as well as the category of topos, to discuss the implications of an abductive analysis of a coded corpus of 1976 Instagram images posted during 2019 election to the European Parliament campaign in Poland. On this basis, the article offers recommendations related to the awareness of topoi in visual rhetoric to foster users’ creative inventory. In the context of increasingly strategically designed and creative online political communications, scholarship should offer guidance on how to parse images according to how they (mis)represent political reality to fit the purposes of elite communicators, and how to challenge them.

Could Cambridge Analytica Have Delivered Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential Victory? An Anthropologist’s Look at Big Data and Political Campaigning

I first provide some context about Cambridge Analytica’s (ca) activities, linking them to ca parent company, scl Group, which specialised in “public relations” campaigns around the world across multiple sectors (from politics to defence and development), with the explicit aim of behavioural change. I then analyse in more detail the claims made by mathematician and machine learning scholar David Sumpter, who dismisses the possibility that ca might have successfully deployed internet psychographics (e.g. online personality profiling) in the winning 2016 Trump presidential campaign in the US. I critique his arguments, pointing at the need to focus on the bigger picture and on the totality of ca methods, rather than analysing psychographics in isolation. This is followed by a section where I use ca whistleblower Christopher Wylie’s 2019 memoir to show the important role that in-depth qualitative research and methods akin ethnographic immersion might have played in building ca big data capabilities. I provide an angle on big data that sees it as complementary, rather than in opposition to, human insight that comes from qualitative immersion in the social realities targeted by ca. The concluding section discusses additional questions that should be explored to gain a deeper understanding of how big data is changing political campaigning, with an emphasis on the important contribution that anthropology can make to these crucial debates.

On some problems of legal regulation of the use of personal data during the election campaign

This article is devoted to the analysis of some problems of legal regulation of the use of personal data during election campaigning. The authors carried out a study of the risks of using personal data, including those obtained by owners and operators of social networks and communication platforms on the Internet, for the purpose of political campaigning during the election campaign. The paper develops and justifies a system of proposals to resolve these problems, including: to counteract illegal actions related to the processing, transfer or use of personal data for political agitation; to supplement the current legislation with a number of terms, for example, "targeted advertising".

Otto Eibl, Miloš Gregor et al.: Thirty Years of Political Campaigning in Central and Eastern Europe

Review of the book title: Otto Eibl, Miloš Gregor et al.: THIRTY YEARS OF POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. 426 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-27692-8.

The Digitalization of Russian Politics and Political Participation

The chapter discusses the impact of digitalization and the rise of online and social media on Russian politics and political participation. It departs from the question whether the introduction of digital technologies has resulted in the transformation of Russian politics in ways that go beyond the mere replication of political practices in digital form. Placing its analysis in the context of Open Government thinking, the chapter examines four areas: first, it discusses changes in political communication; second, it examines the impact of online communications on political campaigning; third, the chapter reflects on changes in the voting process; and, finally, it critically examines digital tools for political participation (so-called civic technologies) and civic engagement.