[ecrea] Call for Papers: Digital Media, Power, and Democracy in Election Campaigns

DIGITAL MEDIA, POWER, AND DEMOCRACY IN ELECTION CAMPAIGNS: A WORKSHOP

Convenors: Andrew Chadwick and Jennifer Stromer-Galley

Over recent years, the uprisings in Eastern Europe and the Middle East 
have focused attention on the question of digital media and political 
power. This has resulted in a wave of research on the relationships 
between technological change, mobilization, and revolutionary activism 
in authoritarian and semi-democratic political contexts.

While this research has generated important insights, we suggest that it 
should now be joined by fresh analysis of the role of digital media in 
election campaigns. We call for papers that are international or 
comparative in orientation, that present new evidence, and that connect 
the study of digital media explicitly with questions concerning power 
and democracy. We invite authors to examine established democracies both 
in and beyond the United States and Europe, and in emerging and what 
comparative regime theorists have termed “difficult democracies” across 
the world.

Our aim is to bring together scholars for a two-day workshop at 
Greenberg House, Syracuse University’s base in Washington, D.C., on June 
25 and 26, 2015. Papers will be considered for peer review and potential 
inclusion in a special issue of the International Journal of 
Press/Politics (IJPP) to be published in 2016.

AIMS

Central to the political life of all types of democracies are the 
organizations, practices, and media technologies of election campaigns, 
yet we know surprisingly little about the changes that have occurred in 
this field over recent years. We invite papers that explore what we see 
as the increasingly contested issue of the balance of power between 
political elites, digital media actors, and citizens in election 
campaigning. Our aim is to orient this project around two classical and 
fruitfully contested concepts: power and democracy.

We are keen to attract papers that explore continuity and change in the 
power relations that shape campaigns. We conceive of these power 
relations in three principal ways.

First, we see a need to focus on the internal communication structures 
of party and campaign organizations. How and to what extent have digital 
media changed the organizational characteristics of parties and 
campaigns? Are internal hierarchies becoming flatter? Are newer forms of 
communicative expertise shifting the balance of power between 
candidates, elite campaign professionals, and rank and file activists? 
What roles are emerging for the growing practices of data analytics, 
dataveillance, and voter activation?

Second, scholars may focus on power relations in the communication flows 
between party and campaign organizations and the wider constellation of 
organizations and quasi-organizations within which citizen participation 
now occurs. To what extent are the boundaries between parties and 
campaigns and looser citizen activist networks and advocacy groups being 
blurred by the use of digital media? What is the role of specialist 
digital consultants? To what extent have the mid-2000s predictions about 
the loosening of communicative and organizational discipline in parties 
and campaigns proved correct? Are citizens’ and activists’ uses of 
digital media playing a role in hastening the decline or even the 
“death” of political parties, as has been widely discussed, for example, 
in the United Kingdom over recent years?

Third, papers may examine the interactions between ordinary citizens and 
party and campaign organizations. As campaigns and parties spread their 
messaging and involvement efforts to social media, the affordances of 
those media open up possibilities for increased interaction and 
communication between ordinary citizens and the official campaign 
apparatus. But the presence of affordances does not guarantee their use. 
In what ways are citizens involving themselves in the workings of 
campaigns? In what ways or to what extent are parties and campaigns 
actually opening up their organizations, messaging, and planning to 
ordinary citizens? Are such actions carefully structured by campaigns or 
are they genuinely open to the ideas and strategies of citizens?

We primarily seek papers that advance empirical knowledge. Undergirding 
our interest in these themes, however, is intense normative curiosity 
about the potential democratizing effects of digital media, not only in 
relatively “settled” liberal-democratic contexts but also in the 
globally important difficult-democratic cases that increasingly inform 
thinking about real-world democracy, such as, for example, Brazil, 
India, Russia, Mexico, Singapore, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia, the Balkan 
states, and parts of central and eastern Europe. Our concern with the 
difficult democracies emerges because it could be the case that in these 
political systems important power shifts are more likely.

We would like authors to directly address the question of whether the 
adoption of digital media is increasing citizens’ influence over the 
hierarchical organizational structures that have typically dominated 
parties and election campaigns since the rise of the mass broadcast era. 
We also want authors to think about conditionality: the balance of 
forces and causes that shape whether changes in mediated campaigning are 
democratizing or not democratizing in their effects.

We have no orthodoxy regarding data and methods. We foresee a range of 
approaches: single country and comparative studies; papers adopting 
methods of big data analysis; those adopting quantitative approaches; 
and those situated within qualitative and ethnographic traditions.

PROCEDURE AND SCHEDULE

*November 14, 2014: 500-word paper proposals due. Please email your 
proposals to (andrew.chadwick /at/ rhul.ac.uk) and (jstromer /at/ syr.edu)

*November 28, 2014: Requests for full papers to authors and invitations 
to the workshop at Greenberg House, Syracuse University’s dedicated base 
in Washington D.C., to be held June 25–26, 2015.

*June 1, 2015: Full workshop papers to Andrew and Jennifer.

*June 25–26, 2015: Workshop.

Note: The conference conveners are working to find sponsorships to help 
defray the costs of attending the workshop.

*June 30, 2015: Call for papers for the special issue of the IJPP.

*July 31, 2015: Full papers submitted to IJPP for anonymous peer review.

*Peer review process completed by January 2016.

*Publication of special issue in mid to late 2016.

ABOUT THE CONVENORS

Andrew Chadwick is Professor of Political Science in the Department of 
Politics and International Relations at Royal Holloway, University of 
London.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley is Associate Professor in the School of 
Information Studies at Syracuse University

ABOUT THE INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRESS/POLITICS

The International Journal of Press/Politics (IJPP), published quarterly, 
is an interdisciplinary journal for the analysis and discussion of the 
role of media and politics in a globalized world. The Journal publishes 
theoretical and empirical research which analyzes the linkages between 
the news media and political processes and actors.


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