Regulating Online Campaign Finance: Chasing the Gost

As the number of Internet and social media users increases, political parties and candidates are spending significant amounts of money on online campaigning. It not only helps them to reach out to more voters with comparatively lower costs, but also allows them to communicate more targeted messages to voters when compared with other traditional campaign tools. Despite the growing use of online campaigns, appropriate regulation of online expenditures is almost non-existent around the world. In fact, online expenditure is one of the key weaknesses of political finance systems and regulatory frameworks. Appropriate regulation of online expenditures will not only protect the integrity of the political process, but also thwart negative effects, such as disinformation and polarization and, more generally, prevent inauthentic activities that usually characterize online campaigns. As online expenditure is a relatively new phenomenon, its regulation is not straightforward and there is no conclusive evidence on what works. This report outlines some of the challenges that policymakers, legislators and oversight agencies face when drafting and implementing laws to include online expenditure within the scope of regulated political finance. It also provides recommendations for policymakers, social media platforms, political parties, candidates and campaigners, as well as civil society actors, on the steps that they can take towards closing the regulatory gap.

Online Political Advertising and Microtargeting: The Latest Legal, Ethical, Political and Technological Evolutions

Electoral campaigns are central to influencing how people vote and can also affect people’s perception of the legitimacy of a country’s elections and democracy in general. Today, political parties and other stakeholders are increasingly use new online techniques in electoral campaigns. Many countries struggle with applying regulatory frameworks on elections to the online sphere, especially as regards online political advertising and microtargeting. This Event Report provides an overview of the issues at stake and recommendations from two roundtables on online political advertising and microtargeting that were organized by International IDEA in June 2020, in collaboration with the European Commission and the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. It covers topics such as what sets online campaigning apart from traditional campaigning, the rights and freedoms potentially affected by the use of digital microtargeting and online campaigning, gaps in current regulations, and division and coordination of oversight roles both domestically and internationally.

Picture-perfect populism: Tracing the rise of European populist parties on Facebook

This article presents a longitudinal, structural study where party and citizen activity on Facebook is studied over a 10-year period, outlining the growing importance of audio-visual content for online campaigning purposes – as well as the rise of populist parties on the same platform. The study shows that an overall increased focus on video as a means of communication emerges as especially pertinent for native Facebook functionalities. This could have repercussions for how online political communication messages are fashioned – and also for the dependencies on platforms that are supposedly strengthened as parties make choices regarding where to invest their campaign resources. In terms of citizen engagement, the results indicate the dominance of populist parties, who have strengthened their positions on the studied platform. The dominance of populist actors will likely have repercussions for the algorithmic spread of political messages – as well as for the ways in which political messages are shaped.

#Personal vs #Party: A comparative study of candidates’ new media campaigning in Japan and the United Kingdom

This paper examines how new media is affecting candidate personal vote seeking behaviour, at the constituency level by comparing data from general elections in two countries with different styles of campaigning – party-centred campaigning in the United Kingdom (2015 & 2017) and candidate-centred campaigning Japan (2014 & 2017). By utilising both content analysis of candidates’ use of new media platforms and in-person interviews with candidates, this study gives a deep description of how individual candidates are using online campaigning and to what degree they are pursuing a personal, rather than party vote. This study confirms that that Japanese candidates use new media to run more candidate centred campaigns, replicating traditional campaign styles, but also finds that other factors, namely candidates’ levels of experience and the strength of the national party, play a role in how candidates utilise new media. Now more so than ever, candidates are relying on personal image promotion as a major element of their campaigns.

Public Relations and Their Importance in the Growth of Civil Society Organizations in Macedonia

The article examines the ways in which civil society and citizens can get connected through the communication practices of CSOs. The purpose is to explore how CSOs perceive, organize and coordinate their strategic communication and PR, to identify problems they encountered and to recommend ways of improving their communication practice. The article found out that two-way communication with the public is achieved by organizing different types of events, media relations and online campaigning. Still, there is an insufficient understanding of the importance of strategic communication and ‘ad hoc’ approach is usually used. The reasons are lack of human resources and finances. The implications of these findings are discussed in detail in the article.

Network Politics and the Arab Spring

Network politics is examined in the context of the Arab Spring. Network politics refers to politics and networks. These networks include the Internet, private networks, cellular networks, telephone networks, radio networks, television networks, etc. Network politics includes the applications of networks to enable one or more individuals or organizations to engage in political communication. Furthermore, network politics includes government regulation of networks. Finally, network politics includes the accompanying issues that arise when networks are used for political communication or when there is government regulation of networks. The domain of network politics includes, but is not limited to, e-politics (social networking for driving revolutions and organizing protests, online petitions, political blogs and vlogs, whistleblower websites, online campaigning, e-participation, virtual town halls, e-voting, Internet freedom, access to information, net neutrality, etc.) and applications of other networks in politics (robocalling, text messaging, TV broadcasting, etc.). Network politics has played a crucial role in the Arab Spring.