2021 can undoubtedly be considered a super election year with several state elections and the federal election last September. It can be assumed that the Corona pandemic has brought the topic of digitalisation to the center of the election campaign. How and in which places digitalisation can actually be observed? And which parties have gained or lost from the digitalisation push? And what does ‘digital detox’ have to do with the SPD? We talk about this with Prof. Gerhard Vowe.
Prof. Gerhard Vowe joined the new ELSI unit at CAIS in April 2021. ELSI stands for “Ethical, Legal and Social Issues”. He is also a senior professor of communication studies at the Institute of Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, where he has been teaching and researching as a professor since 2004. The focus of his work is on political (online) communication. From 2011 to 2018, he was spokesperson for the DFG research group “Political Communication in the Online World”.
With a little distance, we look back at the 2021 Bundestag election campaign in #CAISzeit and talk about how digitally the election campaign and its campaigns were designed? We take a look at the relationship between parties, media and voters, ask what a digital door-to-door campaign can look like and take a look at how far the parties in Germany have come with microtargeting and dark ads.
Link list
Tips for further reading:
- Lazarsfeld, Paul F., Berelson, Bernard, Gaudet, Hazel (1944). The People’s Choice. How the Voter Makes Up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce.
Notes on the subject of microtargeting:
- Who Targets Me Project
- Kruschinski, S. & Haller, A. (2017). Restrictions on data-driven political micro-targeting in Germany. Internet Policy Review, 6(4). DOI: 10.14763/2017.4.780
- Haller, A. & Kruschinski, S. (2020). Politisches Microtargeting. Eine normative Analyse von datenbasierten Strategien der gezielten Wähler_innenansprache. Communicatio Socialis, 53(4), 519-530. DOI: 10.5771/0010-3497-2020-4-519
