Social media campaigning in Europe: Mapping the terrain

The evolution of political communication as a practice has seen political actors constantly adapting to communication technologies. Scammell (1994) documents how, as a gubernatorial candidate, Theodore Roosevelt exploited the potential of embedded pictures in print news, and how UK prime minister Stanley Baldwin employed actors to help him develop the appropriate tone of voice for radio to match the news he was imparting. Later, Ronald Reagan pioneered the televisual performance, while in the UK Margaret Thatcher was redefining prime ministerial media management. While mainstream political figures innovated with traditional media the pioneers of Internet campaigning were largely outsiders—challengers to the U.S. two-party system. When former wrestler Jesse Ventura crowdsourced support for his 1998 insurgent campaign that won him the governorship of Minnesota, he demonstrated how an outsider could challenge the establishment using digital technology. The unsuccessful but groundbreaking campaign of Democrat candidate Howard Dean in 2003 demonstrated the utility of an online crowdfunding strategy. It was Dean’s innovative style that would inform the Obama campaign of 2007–8, which would harness the full potential of social media to reach out to voters, earn donations, and build a campaign infrastructure across the United States by harnessing the enthusiasm of his young support base (Lilleker & Jackson, 2011) as well as an established progressive online activist network (Karpf, 2012; Kreiss, 2012). Although the history of innovative use of technology has a U.S.-centric flavor, one should not underestimate the impact of these developments across Western democracies. Campaign strategists travel the world learning how to campaign and what innovations work, shopping around to learn the latest tactical advantages (Plasser & Plasser, 2002) and then adapting them for competitive advantage in their home nations (Lees-Marshment & Lilleker, 2012). The developments have largely seen digital technology employed to further the objectives of the campaign, not create interactive spaces where citizens and politicians canmeet or where political issues of the day are debated (Lilleker &Vedel, 2013). Hence, technology is employed to meet the requirements of a campaign with minimal adaptation to the content of political communication. The communication forms appropriate to technologies, such as Twitter and Facebook as was formerly the case with radio and television, become incorporated into the toolboxes and repertoires of political campaigners. In turn, as digital technologies increasingly become embedded in political communication, research has burgeoned with works exploring the way in which e-mail, Web sites and more recently the plethora of social media platforms are employed and impact the implementation of election campaigns. Studies have charted the increased use of Web sites, Weblog tools, e-mail, and most recently social media by political campaigns (Gibson & Ward, 2009), as well as the use of similar platforms by citizens to communicate about elections and political issues more generally (Loader, Vromen, & Xenos, 2014). As political participation develops an online dimension, so political parties, in particular during elections, seek to exploit the affordances of digital technologies to harness supporters and garner support (Tencher et al., 2016). The questions are how and with what effect? Apart from the innovations of outsider candidates such as Ventura, the early days of Internet campaigning involved the development of something akin to an online shop front. The Web site provided a means by which citizens could learn more about a candidate or party, and be persuaded that the platform they offered