(Digital) Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres

ABSTRACT

With the advent of digital media and social media platforms, the speed of innovation and technology adoption in campaigns have increased tremendously. At the same time, the campaign environment and its rules are in constant flow, as platform logics, party operations, and voter alignments both reflect and create instability in many political systems. Additionally, disinformation, foreign interference in campaigns, hyper-partisan media ecologies, and hyperactive users have all created changes in opinion climates. In light of these developments, and building on the theoretical concept of increasingly disrupted and dissonant public spheres (developed by Barbara Pfetsch and Lance Bennett), this special issue seeks to expand research on campaigning beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems, to better understand the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust, and their effects on communication processes. The special issue is organized within two conceptual approaches. The first cluster of manuscripts observes how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behaviour within the dissonant political environment. The second part examines responses, perceptions, and consequences of the disrupted environment on the public. Finally, four integrated forum essays look into how dissonant public spheres may disturb democratic processes, discuss the role of data-driven campaigning, and address how limited access to platform data affects our understanding of dissonant public spheres.

KEYWORDS:

• dissonant public spheres
• social media platforms
• disruptive communication
• democracy
• new media

Campaigns have always had a special place in the field of political communication – they are the times when public communication intensifies, when parties and candidates adopt new techniques and technologies to mobilize and persuade voters, and when citizens are most aware and alert about politics. They are often referred to as the prototype situation of political communication. Democratic elections are recurring events, allowing us to trace developments, learning processes, and technology adoption over time. The way elections are carried out varies from country to country, enabling us to analyze the impact of political, media, and cultural factors across system differences. In well-functioning democracies, elections are competitive races with open results, making them exciting, enthralling events that may hold the public’s attention for extended periods of time.

With the advent of digital media and social media platforms, the speed of innovation and technology adoption in campaigns have increased tremendously, turning each new round of election into a new box of surprises (not only) for scholars of political communication. Parties, candidates, and political movements develop new strategies of campaigning, including (but not limited to) microtargeting, embedding employees from tech companies into their campaigns, and experimenting with new platforms beyond social media (Kreiss & McGregor, 2018). At the same time, the campaign environment and its rules are in constant flow, as platform logics, party operations, and voter alignments both reflect and create instability in many political systems. New actors have joined the game of campaigning: algorithms that curate news feeds and manage content, social bots that automatically distribute messages and likes, chat bots on campaign websites, or data scientists and platform employees who join PR consultants from the traditional era of target-group-centered campaigning. Additionally, disinformation, foreign interference in campaigns, hyper-partisan media ecologies, and hyperactive users have all created changes in opinion climates. These developments raise new concerns about voter manipulation, dark participation (Quandt, 2018), and coordinated inauthentic behavior. All of this means that, as social media become engines of campaign communication, elections in many nations are increasingly burdened with problems of disinformation and voter mistrust that often benefit rightwing or illiberal parties (Zimmermann & Kohring, 2020).

In light of these developments, the field of political communication is positioned to expand its theoretical frameworks beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems to better understand the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust, and their effects on communication processes. Recent scholarship has put the spotlight on worrying phenomena such as disinformation, fragmentation, polarization, dark participation, computational propaganda, and negative-micro targeted campaigning (Freelon & Wells, 2020; Persily & Tucker, 2020). This shift in theoretical focus is particularly important in cases such as the United States and other rapidly backsliding democracies, where parties, leaders, and movements challenge the legitimacy of election results and attack the institutions guarding the election process itself.

As the political communication field begins to adjust its theoretical assumptions, scholars have recognized that widespread democratic backsliding is not simply connected to communication content or media technologies, but also rooted in structural changes, cultural transformations, and institutional erosion in many established and presumably consolidated democracies (Bennett & Livingston, 2019; Kuo & Marwick, 2021). The question before us is how to better integrate communication models with institutional and cultural processes to understand complex phenomena such as democratic backsliding. As a step in this direction, the focus of this special issue links institutions such as parties, media organizations, and electoral processes with communication technologies and campaign practices that both reflect and shape increasingly dissonant public spheres.

Dissonant Public Spheres

This special issue connects to the theoretical argument brought forward by Barbara Pfetsch and Lance Bennett (Bennett & Pfetsch, 2018; Pfetsch, 2018), who observe disruption and increasing dissonance within public spheres. In a recent update of his classic theory, Habermas notes that key conditions, such as the capacity of the press to focus social differences and summarize debates, have been disrupted by the more personalized communication offered by digital platforms and the resulting absence of institutional capacity to help citizens clarify and resolve critical public debates (Habermas, 2022). As more personalized and emotional communication dominates public life, and traditional institutional mechanisms fail to moderate and resolve public conflicts, the result is growing citizen distrust of traditional democratic regulatory mechanisms such as press, parties, and elections. The loss of trust in public institutions spills over into other areas such as science (climate change, pandemic health policies) and education (challenges to teaching about religion, diversity, and democracy). In light of these disruptions, Pfetsch (2018) calls for an end to “wishful thinking” (p. 60), and a need to change perspectives in political communication research, which remains largely “fixated on consonance” (p. 60) and on deliberation, while real-world communication seemingly cannot deliver on these normative ideals of rationality and mutual understanding.

While political communication often focuses on connections, linkages, and ties, hybrid media systems and the political actors who manipulate them often create disconnected publics and affective polarization, resulting in the “inability to communicate across differences” (Waisbord, 2016). In addition, the increasingly emotional appeals circulating through social media and adopted in consumer and political communication make the ideals of rational and fact-driven public communication increasingly distant and hard to achieve (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2019). All of this connects well with the concept of an “unedited” public sphere in which the absence of “epistemic editing” on social media platforms creates contexts for obscure information sources, deceptive communication, and manipulated social signals (Bimber & Gil de Zúñiga, 2020). As a result, public spheres in the current era are not “truth machines” (Bimber & Gil de Zúñiga, 2020, p. 708), just as platforms are not democracy machines. Through their affordances and algorithms, and the opportunities they provide to a wider range of actors to communicate at scale, platforms make it harder for publics to deliberate and separate truth from falsehood. When those publics vote for parties and leaders who seek to undermine core institutions such as the media and legal protections for opposing parties, movements, and minorities, elections operate in charged atmospheres, often with unstable results.

Ending Techno-Determinism

The perspective of dissonant public spheres has much to offer for studying campaigns. We highlight three of these useful shifts in perspective.

First, and perhaps most importantly, looking at the interface of communication and institutions helps to overcome implicit or explicit techno-determinism, the notion that the problems democracies are currently suffering and the dysfunctions of public discourse were mainly caused by new (digital) technologies (Bennett et al., 2018). Technologies are always embedded in social contexts, and their impact on society is moderated and shaped by these social contexts. Indeed, the same technologies that afford astroturfing and mobilizing illiberal political mobs are, at the same time, empowering movements striving for equality and climate justice.

Second, building upon the idea of dissonant or disrupted public spheres enables scholars to move away from studying topics descriptively and out of theoretical context. The idea here is to recognize that phenomena such as disinformation, fragmentation or affective polarization may not be directly caused by technologies and their affordances, but they take shape in the context of much-changed institutional moderators of democratic public spheres. With varying degrees of disruption in different democracies, traditional institutional intermediaries (importantly the legacy press) have lost much of their influence. New actors, influencers and gatewatchers create noise and disruption in traditional information flows. At the same time, these newly emerging actors may also forge networked connections among previously unconnected publics, as happened in the case of Donald Trump’s MAGA movement that captured the Republican Party in the U.S. (Benkler et al., 2018), or the assemblage of extremist networks that has struggled to control the Alternative für Deutschland party in Germany (Klinger et al., 2022).

Third, the concept of dissonant public spheres enables scholars to account for the dysfunctionalities and the dark side of public communication without the desperate illusion of an ideal harmonious public sphere. Technology did not break the public sphere, and technology alone cannot repair the quality of public discourse – although regulation of technologies in the public interest would help (Stockmann, 2023).

In these and other ways, developing the idea that political communication operates in increasingly dissonant public spheres provides a useful conceptual background for studying political campaigns. The theoretical concept enables scholars to interpret empirical research on campaigning by offering a contextual model without normative overload.

Political Challenges for Political Communication

Politics ultimately is about power, and campaigning is about the game of who gains or loses power. Elections and campaigns are core institutions because they civilize potentially brutal fights over power. Thus, studying campaigns and elections means studying the transition of power, of holding those in power accountable. The power of political communication research is that it monitors how these processes work, if they function properly and who pushes dysfunctional, problematic, or non-democratic dynamics. This research is not just an academic pursuit but highly relevant to society. We must know how far parties and candidates are willing to go in both institutional and communication terms to push their strategies within or beyond the legal, ethical, and culturally acceptable lines of campaigning. We also need to document how this changes campaigning over time and across nations (Blumler, 2019; Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999).

In this era of democratic backsliding, it is important that political communication scholars make observations and offer normative perspectives that address whether elections and campaigns adhere to a set of generally accepted democratic standards. Those standards, of course, should be aired and debated in the field as a scientific context for our work. In addition, we must specify how to apply and assess those standards. Of course, the corporations operating media platforms have made this a lot harder in recent years by denying scholars, and thus society, access to crucial data (see De Vreese and Tromble 2023, in this issue). European Union legislation such as the Digital Services Act contain provisions for better data access, but it remains an open question how this will be put into practice. It is time for scholars to put more focus on democracy-oriented government regulations, and share those insights with parties and interests that are willing to place democratic values above their own electoral strategies and relationships with media companies (see Stockmann, 2023).

Papers in the Special Issue/Collection

The special issue volume comprises six research papers and a thematic forum; two of these papers have previously been published and are linked to the others online.

The papers are organized within two conceptual approaches. The first observes how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behavior within the dissonant political environment. The second examines responses, perceptions, and consequences of the disrupted environment on the public.

Bossetta and Schmøkel (2023, previously published) capture how platform affordances influence candidates’ expression of emotions. They find that visuals posted by candidates during the 2020 US electoral campaign avoid negativity. In fact, ‘happiness’ was the most common expression publicized in photos. Yet its effect on public reactions is unclear and differs by platform. Displaying negative emotions (anger) in pictures is relatively rare (most eagerly employed by Bernie Sanders). Negative emotions expressed in pictures correlate negatively with interactions from users.

Analyzing not visuals but the texts in political parties’ Facebook posts during the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament elections, Klinger, Koc-Michalska, Russmann (2023) come to quite different conclusions. They find increasing levels of negative campaigning, primarily for conservative parties surpassing nationalist parties, which surprisingly remained on a similar level in 2019. The authors indicate that posts with negative emotions and dramatization receive more user engagement. These two papers urge the importance of broadening the current research by covering other platforms and examining various forms of user engagement on social media.

Those two papers are complemented by a study investigating political parties and their strategies to face incivility online. Tenove, Tworek, Lore, Buffie & Deley (2023) conduct in-depth interviews with campaign teams following the 2019 Canadian elections. Results show that political organizations assess incivility according to four criteria: intensity, frequency, source, and target. Those criteria steer the parties’ responses to incivility (e.g., content moderation). One of the parties’ declared goals of electoral communication via social media is to propose a space of ‘civil discussion’ - a result that is thought-provoking from the European perspective which witnesses an acceleration of negative and dramatized posts by political parties, as found in the Klinger et al. study (2023).

Schlögl, Bürger, Kannan, Dietrich, and Mitrović (2023) assess how political fragmentation contributes to creating a dissonant public sphere online. The paper examines comments from social media pages of political parties during the 2016 Austrian election. The authors find a predominance of political commenting on one of the parties and that fragmentation increases with the intensity of campaigning. Interestingly, offensive comments on parties’ pages (possibly without content moderation - see also the Tenove et al. study (2023)) are often posted by users commenting on multiple pages and engaging in cross-party discussions.

Finally, two articles examine the effects that communication efforts may have on citizens’ predisposition to engage with political information or stay open to persuasive messages. Vaccari, Chadwick, and Kaiser (2023, previously published) investigate how the source of political information influences peoples’ ability to distinguish false from true information, and the willingness to redistribute falsified information. The study confirms the importance of the news sources’ credibility. Citizens who receive information from professional news organizations can more easily distinguish truth from falsehoods, whereas citizens who use social media as their news source have more problems correctly identifying false information and, regrettably, share it more eagerly.

De Zúñiga, Marné & Carty (2023) look at political persuasion as a potential step to reduce the dissonance level in the dissonant public sphere, as the process of persuasion is built on the openness to views of others and willingness to change one’s political attitudes. The paper examines how affective, ideological, and societal political polarization (theoretically conceptualized) may affect the strength of such persuasion on social media. The predominant result is that firmly polarized respondents are less likely to be influenced by persuasive efforts (modeled directly and indirectly).

This special issue/collection is accompanied by four short essays looking into how dissonant public spheres may disturb democratic processes. They conceptualize how dissonant public spheres can develop into a threat to democratic processes (Pfetsch, 2023), analyze the role of data-driven campaigning in accelerating disruption within the public sphere (Gibson 2023), indicate the limitations of our knowledge about dissonant public spheres due to deficient access to social media data (de Vreese and Tromble 2023) and finish with an assessment of the challenges and solutions that research faces when studying data-restricted platforms (Rossini 2023).

The articles in this special issue cover various aspects of dissonant public spheres and their impact on democratic processes. Yet, this issue has certain limitations, as it includes only case studies from Western democracies. Also, the analyses of social media platforms in this issue are limited to those most popular and most frequently studied in Western democracies. The field still lacks studies on less popular platforms and those with more restricted access (see also Rossini, 2023). Finally, understanding dissonant public spheres requires more research from other political regimes, cultures, and geographical regions.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Karolina Koc-Michalska

Karolina Koc-Michalska, Professor at Audencia Business School and Affiliated Researcher at CEVIPOF Sciences Po Paris, France, and University of Silesia, Poland. She is part of the NEPOCS group (nepocs.eu). She studies the strategies of political actors in the online environment and citizens’ political engagement. She employs a comparative approach focusing on the United States and European countries.

Ulrike Klinger

Ulrike Klinger is Professor for Digital Democracy at the European New School of Digital Studies, European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany. Her research focuses on digital political communication, technology and democracy, and the transformation of public spheres.

Lance Bennett

Lance Bennett is Senior Research Fellow, Center for Journalism, Media & Democracy at the University of Washington, Seattle.

Andrea Römmele

Andrea Römmele is Dean of Executive Education and Professor of Communication in Politics and Civil Society at the Hertie School. Her research interests are comparative political communications, political parties and public affairs.