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Towards hypermedia campaigning? Perceptions of new media's importance for campaigning by party strategists in comparative perspective

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-09-09, 08:46 authored by Darren G. Lilleker, Jens Tenscher, Vaclav StetkaVaclav Stetka
This paper analyses strategic thinking around election campaign communication in a rapidly evolving media environment, characterized by the rise of digital communication channels and online social networks as new tools of political campaigning. Using an expert survey with campaign managers of 68 political parties within 12 European nations, representing both old and new EU member states, the study investigates the perceived importance of different types of communication platforms in meeting campaign objectives, especially with regard to differences between new and direct modes of campaigning in comparison to traditional campaign channels. The attributed significance to these various channels is then analysed against a range of variables on macro (country) level as well as meso (party) level. The results suggest that while some differences can be observed in regard to the perceptions of particular types of social media between individual strategists working for parties as well as between strategists working in new and old EU member states (e.g. Facebook is seen as more important in younger democracies), overall we can see a relatively high level of homogeneity in the perceived importance of campaign communication in the sample. The data point to the embedding of new communication platforms within election campaign strategies across most nations and parties; this indicates that the move towards ‘hypermedia' campaign style, integrating both old and new campaign tools and communication platforms, is now becoming a standard feature of professional campaigning strategy in Europe.

Funding

Participation of Dr. Václav Štětka on this project was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, Standard Grant Nr 14-05575S.

History

School

  • Social Sciences and Humanities

Department

  • Communication and Media

Published in

Information Communication and Society

Volume

18

Issue

7

Pages

747 - 765

Citation

LILLEKER, D., TENSCHER, J. and STETKA, V., 2015. Towards hypermedia campaigning? Perceptions of new media's importance for campaigning by party strategists in comparative perspective. Information Communication and Society, 18 (7), pp.747-765.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2014-11-27

Publication date

2014-12-24

Copyright date

2015

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information, Communication and Society on 24/12/2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2014.993679.

ISSN

1369-118X

eISSN

1468-4462

Language

  • en