Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age

As the plugged-in presidential campaign has arguably reached maturity, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age challenges popular claims about the democratizing effect of Digital Communication Technologies (DCTs). Analyzing campaign strategies, structures, and tactics from the past five presidential election cycles, Stromer-Galley reveals how, for all their vaunted inclusivity and tantalizing promise of increased two-way communication between candidates and the individuals who support them, DCTs have done little to change the fundamental dynamics of campaigns. The expansion of new technologies has presented candidates with greater opportunities to micro-target potential voters, cheaper and easier ways to raise money, and faster and more innovative ways to respond to opponents. The need for communication control and management, however, has made campaigns slow and loathe to experiment with truly interactive internet communication technologies. Citizen involvement in the campaign historically has been and, as this book shows, continues to be a means to an end: winning the election for the candidate. For all the proliferation of apps to download, polls to click, videos to watch, and messages to forward, the decidedly undemocratic view of controlled interactivity is how most campaigns continue to operate. Contributing to the field a much-needed historical understanding of the shifting communication practices of presidential campaigns, Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age examines election cycles from 1996, when the World Wide Web was first used for presidential campaigning, through 2012, when practices were being tuned to perfection using data analytics for carefully targeting and mobilizing particular voter segments. As the book charts changes in internet communication technologies, it shows how, even as campaigns have moved responsively from a mass mediated to a networked paradigm, and from fundraising to organizing, the possibilities these shifts in interactivity seem to promise for citizen input and empowerment remain much farther than a click away.

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

Review :
"This clear and lucid book fills a glaring void in the literature by providing a direct comparison of digital media dynamics in five US presidential campaigns, from 1996 to 2012. Stromer-Galley makes the provocative case that even the striking campaigns of Barack Obama did not depart far from the historical practice of 'controlled interactivity, ' in which campaigns direct citizens' involvement while circumscribing genuine deliberation and engagement." --Bruce Bimber, University of California, Santa Barbara "Jennifer Stromer-Galley's Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age is a pathbreaking book that belongs on the shelves of every serious student and scholar of political communication." --Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania "The strength of Stromer-Galley's work lies not only in its ambitious approach that traces the rise and continued presence of controlled interactivity over the course of more than 15 years, but in the fact that such an approach asks us to think of practices as evolutionary and question how such evolution complicates and expands on traditional concerns of political communication." - Political Communication "Jennifer Stromer-Galley points to the establishment of a new 'two step flow' of political communications...highlight(ing) the dilemma of participatory democracy within the context of a well-disciplined online campaign. The Internet, or 'digital communication technology' as Stromer-Galley calls it, has become central to the successful political campaign" --Political Science Quarterly