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ABSTRACT
This concluding essay begins with a discussion of how the evolution of communication technologies has shaped perceptions of professionalism in political campaigning in India and elsewhere. Highlights from the empirical case studies in this volume are discussed, setting the thematic case studies on political campaigning in the comparative cross-national context of research on political marketing within the field of political communication. Research on media agenda-setting, priming and framing processes and effects are discussed with respect to future research opportunities, as well as methods for conducting campaigning and political communication research in India. Apart from rich ethnographic studies that have been more common in India, methods to study information, campaign engagement and effects include content analysis, ‘big data’ and text analysis, survey research, panel studies and experiments. India’s political parties and candidates, publics, and diverse media provide an abundance of online data that may be best analysed using computational social science methods.
Disclosure statement
The author would like to thank Emory University Research Committee for providing support to conduct research on political campaigning in the 2019 national election.
Notes
1. Farrell, Kolody and Medvic, “Parties and Campaign Professionals”; Gibson and Römmele, “A Party Centered Theory of Professionalized Campaigning”; Johnson, No Place for Amateurs: How Political Consultants Are Reshaping American Democracy; Lees-Marshment and Lilleker, “Knowledge Sharing and Lesson Learning”; and Gibson and Römmele, “Measuring the Professionalization of Political Campaigning.”
2. Bhatnagar, The Lotus Years.
3. Margolis, Resnick, and Tu, “Campaigning on the Internet”; and Margolis, Resnick, and Wolfe, “Party Competition on the Internet.”
4. Gibson and Römmele, “A Party-centered Theory of Professionalized Campaigning.”
5. Only a few are cited here. Lilleker and Lees-Marshment, “Political Marketing: A Comparative Perspective”; Gibson, Lusoli and Ward, “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local?”; and Koc-Michalska, Gibson and Vedel, “Online Campaigning in France, 2007–2012.”
6. Lilleker and Jackson, Political campaigning, elections and the Internet; Koc-Michalska, Gibson, and Vedel, “Online Campaigning in France, 2007–2012”; Gibson, Römmele and Williamson, “Chasing the Digital Wave”; and Lilleker et al., “Social Media Campaigning in Europe.”
7. Neyazi, Kumar and Semetko, “Campaigns, Digital Media, and Mobilization in India.”
8. Chadwick, The Hybrid Media System.
9. Thussu, News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment.
10. In addition to the special issues of Economic and Political Weekly dedicated to national elections, a handful of other interesting publications include: Tillin, “Indian elections 2014”; Tillin, “Regional Resilience and National Party System Change”; Manor, “An Odisha Landslide Buries Both National Parties”; Saikia, “General Elections 2014”; Heath, “The BJP”s Return to Power”; Heath, “Communal Realignment and Support for the BJP, 2009–2019.” There is also the book by P. Roy and D.R. Sopariwala, The Verdict: Decoding India”s Elections.
11. Dutta, “Smartphone Sales and Literacy Rate Go Hand-In-Hand in India.”
12. Nath, People-Party-Policy Interplay in India. See also Rawat, “Explained: How West Bengal has been fertile land for violence during elections.”
13. See https://www.indianpac.com/.
14. Sudhir, “YS Jagan Mohan Reddy Outdoes Dad as He Ends Record Padayatra”; Janyala, “Jagan Completes 3,648 km Padayatra in 341 Days, Meets Over 2 Crore People.”
15. Times of India, Campaign Tracker.
16. Avaaz, “Far Right Networks of Deception”; Scott, “Europe’s Failure on “Fake News.”“
17. Kalra and Sayeed, “Facebook Deletes Accounts Linked to India”s Congress Party, Pakistan Military”; Gleicher, “Removing Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior and Spam from India and Pakistan”; Campbell-Smith and Bradshaw, “Global Cyber Troops Country Profile: India”; and Niranjankumar, “No Rahul Gandhi is not posing with the Pulwama attack suicide Bomber.”
18. Some comparative media and politics studies involving India are mentioned here: Jeffrey and Sen, Media at Work in China and India; Kluver et al., The Internet and National Elections: A Comparative Study of Web Campaigning. Also see Eldersveld, “Party Identification in India in Comparative Perspective,” who draws on the work of Rajni Kothari and colleagues at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. See Kothari, R. 1970. Politics in India.
19. McCombs and Donald Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.”
20. Only a handful are mentioned here. Iyengar and Kinder, News that Matters; McCombs, Lopez-Escobar and Llamas, “Setting the Agenda of Attributes in the 1996 Spanish General Election”; Willnat and Zhu, “Newspaper Coverage and Public Opinion in Hong Kong: A Time-Series Analysis of Media Priming”; Weaver, “What Voters Learn from Media”; Walgrave and Van Aelst, “The Contingency of the Mass Media’s Political Agenda Setting Power”; Baumann, Zheng, and McCombs, “First and Second-Level Agenda-Setting in the 2014 Indian General Election”; and Soroka, Agenda-Setting Dynamics in Canada.
21. Semetko et al., The Formation of Campaign Agendas: A Comparative Analysis.
22. Iyengar and Kinder, News that Matters.
23. Holbrook and Hill, “Agenda-Setting and Priming in Prime-Time Television”; Gidengil et al., “Priming and Campaign Context: Evidence from Recent Canadian Elections.”
24. A multi-wave U.S. panel, where the same respondents were interviewed at different time points, was used in Weaver et al., Media Agenda-Setting in a Presidential Election: Issues, Images, and Interest. Findings from lab experiments on television news are reported in Iyengar and Kinder, News that Matters. Contingencies of media’s political agenda-setting power are discussed in Walgrave and Van Aelst, “The Contingency of the Mass Media’s Political Agenda Setting Power.”
25. Participants came into the lab in Iyengar, Peters and Kinder, “Experimental Demonstrations of the ““Not-So-Minimal” Consequences of Television News Programs.”
26. A natural field experiment is reported by Krosnick and Kinder, “Altering the Foundations of Support for the President Through Priming.” Insights on designing field experiments are provided by Green, Calfano and Aronow, “Field Experimental Designs for the Study of Media Effects.” In one study in rural India, vignette experiments were used to study voter indifference to candidate attributes: Banerjee et al., “Are Poor Voters Indifferent to Whether Elected Leaders Are Criminal or Corrupt?”
27. Schuck, Vliegenthart, and De Vreese, “Matching Theory and Data: Why Combining Media Content with Survey Data Matters.”
28. Focus groups are used to identify frames in the news in Neuman, Just and Crigler, Common Knowledge. Comparative studies of media frames include, for example: Hanson, “Framing the World News: The Times of India in Changing Times”; de Vreese, Peter and Semetko, “Framing Politics at the Launch of the Euro”; Nicholls and Culpepper, “Computational Identification of Media Frames.” On measuring framing effects, examples include: de Vreese, Boomgaarden and Semetko, “(In)direct Framing Effects”; and Lecheler and de Vreese, “What a Difference a Day Makes?”
29. Ansolabehere et al., “Does Attack Advertising Demobilize the Electorate?”; Finkel and Geer, “A Spot Check: Casting Doubt on the Demobilizing Effect of Attack Advertising”; and Kahn and Kenney, “Do Negative Campaigns Mobilize or Suppress Turnout?” are just three of many U.S. studies considering the impact of negative or conflict-based political advertising. Measuring frames in European news researchers found the conflict and responsibility frames most prominent in Semetko and Valkenburg, “Framing European Politics.” The mobilizing effects of conflict framing on turnout in the context of European elections are discussed in Schuck, Vliegenthart, and De Vreese, “Who”s afraid of conflict?”; Sevenans and Vliegenthart, “Political Agenda-Setting in Belgium and the Netherlands”; and Dowling and Krupinkoc, “The Effects of Negative Advertising.”
30. Schuck, Vliegenthart, and De Vreese, “Who’s afraid of conflict?”, 177.
31. Gibson, Lusoli and Ward, “Nationalizing and Normalizing the Local?”; Gibson, Römmele and Ward, “German Parties and Internet Campaigning in the 2002 Federal Election”; Gibson, Römmele, and Williamson, “Chasing the Digital Wave”; Gibson et al., “Election Campaigning on the WWW in the USA and UK”; Kluver et al., The Internet and National Elections; Koc-Michalska, Gibson and Vedel, “Online Campaigning in France, 2007–2012”; Lilleker and Jackson, Political Campaigning, Elections and the Internet; Lilleker and Lees-Marshment, Political Marketing: A Comparative Perspective; Lilleker et al., “Social media campaigning in Europe”; and Woolley and Howard, Computational Propaganda: Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media.
32. Pal and Panda, “Twitter in the 2019 Indian General Elections.”
33. Mandavia and Krishnan, “Non-English Tweets Are Now 50% of the Total.”
34. Gerring, “Mere Description.”
35. See Just et al., Crosstalk: Citizens, Candidates and the Media in a Presidential Campaign; De Vreese et al., “Linking Survey and Media Content Data: Opportunities, Considerations, and Pitfalls.”
36. van Atteveldt, Trilling, and Carlos Arcila Calderón, Computational Analysis of Communication. See also: van Atteveldt and Peng, “When Communication Meets Computation: Opportunities, Challenges, and Pitfalls in Computational Communication Science”; Trilling and Jonkman, “Scaling up Content Analysis”; Welbers, Atteveldt, and Benoit, “Text Analysis in R”; and Theocharis and Jungherr, “Computational Social Science and the Study of Political Communication.”
37. Farrell and Schmitt-Beck, “Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums”; Holbrook, “Campaigns, National Conditions, and U.S. Presidential Elections”; Holbrook, Do Campaigns Matter?; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign; Hillygus and Jackman, “Voter Decision Making in Election 2000: Campaign Effects, Partisan Activation, and the Clinton Legacy”; Hillygus and Sheilds, The Persuadable Voter: Wedge Issues in Presidential Campaigns; and Woolley and Howard, Computational Propaganda Political Parties, Politicians, and Political Manipulation on Social Media.
38. Anuja, “Lok Sabha election clocks highest ever turnout at 67.11%.”