Daniel Kreiss

• University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This chapter offers a behind-the-scenes look at a public-facing research project that documented the expansive role technology firms play in contemporary politics and elections in the United States. It shows how the research proceeded through a “logic of discovery” and framed its findings in line with both scholarly and public debates. The chapter...

This edited volume brings together a diverse group of leading scholars in communication, media studies, political science, sociology, and related fields to analyze the relationship between media and the events of January 6, 2021. The authors in this volume argue that the attempted coup at the U.S. Capitol was a politically significant event that la...

This study develops a new normative and analytical framework of “democracy-framed electoral coverage” grounded in literatures that stress the role of governmental and communicative institutions in protecting democracies from threats. We define “democracy-framed electoral coverage” as journalism that embraces fairly contested elections as an establi...

In this manuscript we consider the inconsistent ways the concept of “counterpublics” has been taken up in the field to make the claim that considerations of social power must be recentered in the theorization of publics. To do this we provide an in-depth genealogy of the concept of counterpublics, analyze its use by critical scholars, and then cons...

Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored. The central theoretical claim of this piece is that political identities map more or l...

This study provides a comparative survey of policy‐making discourse in the United Kingdom and the United States from 2016 to 2020 around digital threats to democracy. Through an inductive coding process, it identifies six core ideals common in these two countries: transparency, accountability, engagement, informed public, social solidarity, and fre...

This Element argues that understanding media and democracy in troubled times requires an analytical framework that takes seriously the role of ideas in political life and communication. We develop a framework for analyzing ideas and argue that the empirical study of ideas should combine interpretive approaches to derive meaning and understand influ...

In this study, we map the legal work seven U.S. digital consultancies and public relations firms undertook across social media and digital platforms of behalf of four foreign governments. We find these firms used a range of different strategies on social and digital media, very few of which featured legally required disclosures linking the content...

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology on presidential campaigns in the United States. The book draws on a unique data set of 1,004 staffers working in political technology on presidential campaigns during the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 election cycles; analy...

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology on presidential campaigns in the United States. The book draws on a unique data set of 1,004 staffers working in political technology on presidential campaigns during the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 election cycles; analy...

This chapter demonstrates how women are deeply underrepresented in the field of political technology, especially in leadership roles. Women also do not have the same entrepreneurship opportunities in the field that men have. The barriers to the equal representation of women in the field of political tech are multifaceted and systemic. Women are und...

This chapter reveals that women have few ways of holding people accountable for inappropriate behavior, arbitrary exercises of power, and retaliation for reporting incidents on campaigns. In this context, women often avoid or ignore issues in the workplace. Women argued that campaign human resources departments often lack the time, staff, and resou...

This book offers the first in-depth look at the employment patterns and work experiences of women working in political technology on presidential campaigns in the United States. The book draws on a unique data set of 1,004 staffers working in political technology on presidential campaigns during the 2004, 2008, 2012, and 2016 election cycles; analy...

The introduction conveys how political technology lies at the intersection of two male-dominated fields—politics and technology—and has grown significantly in electoral importance in the 21st century. It relates how campaigns have increasingly organized dedicated divisions for technology, digital media, data, and analytics operations and have turne...

The conclusion turns the book’s findings into a set of recommendations for how campaigns can create the more equitable political technology field of the future. The conclusion argues that candidates and their campaigns must create more deliberate hiring processes designed to achieve gender equity, inclusion, and diversity more broadly, especially i...

This chapter discusses how political technology grew into the field it is today. Political technology lies at the intersection of two male-dominated fields, and it also has a number of unique features for politics. The ever-shifting nature of technology requires campaigns and political parties to garner significant amounts of knowledge and expertis...

This chapter outlines how men in leadership positions and male-dominated office cultures often shaped women's roles and work in campaign tech departments. Women often felt at a disadvantage when it came to taking credit for their work and found that their age, gender, and experience interacted to limit their opportunities. Women encountered differi...

This study develops the concept of identity ownership to explain how, in the course of electioneering, candidates perform their own identities to align with groups whose support they seek. We frame this from a communication perspective—media are increasingly central sites for constructing and conveying the identity of candidates and the groups of c...

This paper presents two case studies of Facebook’s rapid changes relating to international electoral politics: the “I’m a Voter” affordance and the platform’s data and targeting capabilities. The article shows how Facebook changed with respect to its policies, procedures, and affordances, especially given the normative pressure exerted by journalis...

The question of how Facebook and Google make and justify decisions regarding permissible political advertising on their platforms is increasingly important. In this paper, we focus on the U.S. case and present findings from interviews with 17 former social media firm employees (n = 7) and political practitioners (n = 11). We also analyze emails (n...

This article offers the first systematic study of the hiring patterns and career experiences of women working on U.S. presidential campaigns in the new field of political technology. We paired the quantitative analysis of a dataset of 995 staffers active in technology, digital media, data, and analytics across four presidential election cycles (200...

The 2016 US presidential election upended a number of scholarly expectations about electoral politics. Many academics and pundits predicted that president Donald Trump’s flaunting of democratic norms, from his rhetoric on the campaign trail to his financial conflicts of interest, would undermine his candidacy. How do we explain Trump’s appeal to hi...

This article offers the first analysis of the role that technology companies, specifically Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, and Google, play in shaping the political communication of electoral campaigns in the United States. We offer an empirical analysis of the work technology firms do around electoral politics through interviews with staffers at the...

This study inductively develops a new conceptual framework for analyzing strategic campaign communications across different social media platforms through an analysis of candidate social media strategies during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle. We conducted a series of open-ended, in-depth qualitative interviews with campaign professionals...

The 2016 U.S. presidential election upended a number of scholarly expectations about electoral politics. Many academics and pundits predicted that president Donald Trump’s flaunting of democratic norms, from his rhetoric on the campaign trail to his financial conflicts of interest, would undermine his candidacy. How do we explain Trump’s appeal to...

This article argues that a set of recent books published in advance of the 2016 U.S. presidential election provides a road map for understanding its outcome and a research agenda for political communication scholars in the years ahead. This article focuses on sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, a field study that documents t...

In this brief essay, I argue that the idea of “social media” is symbolically powerful in the political domain precisely because political actors conflate it broadly with “social relations” and, even more, “public opinion.” To do so, I draw on two recent empirical studies I conducted that analyze social media and contemporary media events. These stu...

Following Francesca Polletta's call to reconsider participatory democracy in a new millennium, this article analyzes and makes a normative case for institutional and partisan forms of participation without decision making. I draw on field research and interviews conducted over the last decade on Democratic Party campaigns to argue against contempor...

We present the results of a 5-day, observation and interview-based, multi-sited field study of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. We combine literatures on journalistic and political fields with scholarship on performance theory to provide a framework for understanding conventions as contemporary media events. Through analysis of field notes,...

Actor-Network Theory, as a theoretical and methodological approach, is particularly insightful when applied to domains of social activity that are in flux, thus making it particularly useful for ethnographic research about unsettled socio-technical systems. Drawing from field research conducted over the last decade, this paper presents two empirica...

There is general consensus that the press is undergoing a fundamental shift in how it functions as a profession, a business, and a social institution due, in part, to the proliferation and practices of online networked media. But there is still little understanding of exactly how this shift can and should relate to journalism's role as a public-fac...

In this paper we compare the institutional and strategic decision making structures of the civil rights movement with the Occupy movement with special emphasis on the role of self-expression as a political value versus strategic considerations. We argue that Occupy participants cast the values and form of the movement itself — how it operates and m...

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyze how campaigns, movements, new media outlets, and professional journalism organizations interact to produce political discourse in an information environment characterized by new actors and increasingly fragmented audiences. Design – To do so, this chapter offers a rare inside look at contemporary st...

On the South Side of Chicago in the early 1950s, jazz musician Sun Ra began a lifelong project to re-envision the relationship between music, technology, society, and African American identity. While the popular image of Sun Ra during much of his career was that of an offbeat, creative character at the margins of both mainstream and avant-garde jaz...

Many scholars argue that digital technologies are creating unprecedented opportunities for democratic expression, but fear that the networked public sphere is threatened by overly broad intellectual property rights. Focusing on journalism, we argue that this literature too narrowly emphasizes legal and technical restrictions on the fair use of cult...

Extending an emerging body of work documenting the migration of technical production models into other domains of social activity, this paper analyzes how ‘open source’ works at the level of both practice and ideology. Through interviews and analysis of public documents relating to Howard Dean's run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 200...

In the last few years, a powerful consensus has emerged among scholars of digitally enabled peer production. In this view, digital technologies and social production processes are driving a dramatic democratization of culture and society. Moreover, leading scholars now suggest that these new, hyper-mediated modes of living and working are specifica...

Political parties are among the most lax, unregulated organizations handling large volumes of personally identifiable data about citizens' behavior and attitudes. We analyze the privacy practices of political parties in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, and United States to assess the current state of electorate data, compare regulatory efforts, a...

The 2003–2004 Howard Dean campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination is often heralded as the prototypical example of peer-driven politics. Building from an emerging body of literature on the Dean campaign, through interviews with key staffers and a survey of public documents I complicate this view by analyzing the interplay between the fo...

Abstract This paper examines the evolution of ideas about participatory democracy,and expressive politics and their articulation alongside,new,media,with an eye towards,revealing the historical antecedents of the 2003-2004 Howard,Dean campaign. Through a comprehensive,survey of documents produced by social movements, media artists, computer hobbyis...