[ecrea] PhD studentship available at Northumbria University

An International Study of the Impact of New Technologies on Political 
Communication



Fully-funded (£14k pa) PhD studentship available at Northumbria 
University (Department of Social Sciences) in Newcastle-upon-Tyne to 
start in October 2015



The Internet and other new technologies (smartphones, social media, Web 
2.0, etc.) are revolutionising political communication (e.g. during 
election campaigns). Traditionally, politicians and their political 
parties devised a set of election campaign themes and messages and 
conveyed these to the electorate, or particular sections of the 
electorate, via advertising on billboards, in newspapers, and on radio 
and TV. In addition, they enlisted an army of canvassers to go door to 
door, posted out election flyers and other campaign materials, targeted 
swing voters by telephone and concentrated their resources on key 
marginal constituencies. More sophisticated election campaigns utilized 
commercial geo-demographic systems such as Mosaic, or developed their 
own (i.e. the Conservatives’ Voter Vault and Labour’s Contact Creator), 
in an attempt to reach particular categories of voter. The essential 
point is that such election campaigns were centrally-organized and 
top-down and they attempted to connect with the electorate as a 
collection of aggregated individuals.

Contemporary politicians and political parties, by contrast, are using 
the Internet and other new technologies to deliver decentralized and 
personalized election campaigns that connect with voters as individuals. 
Having been pioneered by Barack Obama in the United States (US) 
Presidential Election in 2008, and having been finessed during the 2012 
Presidential Election, modern election campaigns are utilizing big data 
mining (i.e. algorithms) to construct detailed and sophisticated 
profiles of individual voters; huge data banks and supercomputers; 
multiple digital platforms; real-time experiment-informed programmes, to 
test the efficacy of campaign messages, in addition to the traditional 
focus groups and survey method; micro-targeting; social media, etc. 
Furthermore, using apps on smartphones, plus other technologies, 
canvassers on the streets and coordinators at campaign headquarters can 
engage in a constant and two-way process of data collection and data 
retrieval about individual voters – as the Obama team so effectively 
demonstrated in 2012. Modern election campaigns are thus more dynamic 
and responsive than traditional ones.

While the 2010 General Election was described as the first Internet 
election, Britain is arguably engaged in a process of technological 
catch-up with the US. Nevertheless, the recruitment of former members of 
the Obama campaign team by the Conservative and Labour parties for the 
2015 General Election, namely Jim Messina and David Axelrod 
respectively, suggests that British election campaigns are also in the 
process of being transformed as techniques such as big data mining, 
micro-targeting, personalized messages and real-time experimentation are 
imported and applied. This PhD project is original in four senses:

(a) It will compare recent election campaigns in the US, Britain and 
elsewhere to ascertain whether there is a general trend to emulate the 
evolving US model. Furthermore, it will explore what effect differences 
in national political, media and legal systems have had on the use of 
such techniques outside of the US.

(b) It will break new ground by going beyond the existing literature, 
which predominantly focuses upon technological capabilities, to 
investigate the impact of such techniques on citizen’s privacy, issues 
of awareness and informed consent, and digital exclusion.

(c) It will break new ground by generating, for the first time, 
empirical British data about these effects of these techniques on voter 
mobilization and voter preferences.

(d) It will investigate what the use of such techniques – involving as 
they do issues of commercial confidentiality and personal data 
protection – means for the academic study of elections and political 
communication more generally.



Mullen, A. (2013) ‘Selling Politics: The Political Economy of Political 
Advertising’ in C. Wharton (Ed.) Advertising as Culture, Bristol: Intellect

Mullen, A (forthcoming) The Battle for British Hearts and Minds on 
Europe: Anti- and Pro-European Propaganda, 1945-2015, London: Bloomsbury



For more info see



https://www.northumbria.ac.uk/research/postgraduate-research-degrees/research-degrees/



Dr Andy Mullen, Senior Lecturer in Politics

(andrew.mullen /at/ northumbria.ac.uk)



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