Katharine Dommett

• Lecturer at The University of Sheffield

Ideology and political parties are frequently depicted as disparate entities, with scholars citing a range of exogenous and endogenous changes to demonstrate the decreasing relevance of ideology to party politics. This article moves away from such accounts by looking at the role of actors, and specifically party leaders, in contributing to percepti...

As the contributions to this special issue each demonstrate, modernisation is a slippery word. Although commonly used in political rhetoric, it is often unclear exactly what is meant by the term, or how successful modernisation can be discerned. This article reflects on the theory and practice of Conservative modernisation to cast some light on the...

How do public agencies respond when reform proposals threaten downsizing, reduction in functions, or termination? Agency survival during administrative reform is conventionally explained by structural characteristics, informed by the hardwiring thesis derived from the politics of the U.S. federal government. Parliamentary systems provide greater op...

The practice of political campaigning has evolved over time. Whilst once associated with public rallies and stirring political oratory, more recent campaigns are known for digital communication and targeted messaging. This article revisits the idea of campaign change by examining the idea of the datafication of campaigning. Exploring the dynamics o...

Much of the research on political microtargeting has focused on growing public concerns about its use in elections, fuelling calls for greater regulation or even a ban on the practice. We contend that a more nuanced understanding of public attitudes toward microtargeting is required before further regulation is considered. Drawing on advertising ps...

Contemporary political campaigning takes place both online and offline, and can be data-driven. In this piece, we review existing knowledge around data-driven campaigning (DDC) and introduce the new contributions made by the pieces within this thematic issue. We reveal how the studies included in this thematic issue of Media and Communication contr...

Concerns about online political advertising often focus on the techniques used to engage the intended audience. This article assesses the communicative strategies used in online political advertising and their reception by the public by analysing 2272 Facebook ads during the 2019 UK general election. By examining the prominence, tone, and source of...

This paper investigates how the acceptance of data-driven political campaigning depends on four different message characteristics. A vignette study was conducted in 25 countries with a total of 14,390 respondents who all evaluated multiple descriptions of political advertisements. Relying on multi-level models, we find that in particular the source...

The use of digital technology has become an increasingly prominent feature of election campaigns. While many of those using online tools are familiar partisan actors, many others are not. As concerns about electoral transparency have grown, policy makers have moved to implement regulation designed to help citizens recognize the identity of campaign...

What do modern election campaigns look like? According to the most recent accounts, they are data-driven operations in which extensive data are collected and targeted messages are deployed in efforts to maximize support. Whilst highlighting important new developments, in this article we argue that a focus on novel practices offers a distorted pictu...

The practice of political micro-targeting (PMT) – tailoring messages for voters based on their personal data – has increased over the past two decades, particularly in the U.S. Studies of PMT have to date concentrated largely on its effects on voters, or its implications for democracy more broadly. Less attention has been given to answering basic d...

What is data-driven campaigning? According to prevailing accounts, this idea describes the rise of increasingly sophisticated, highly targeted, and often invasive uses of data. Deployed to suppress votes, manipulate voter preferences, or boost a candidates’ popularity, the power of data is seen to be transforming campaign practice and raising conce...

Digital platforms, such as Google and Facebook, are under increased scrutiny as regards their impact on society. Having prompted concerns about their capacity to spread misinformation, contribute to filter bubbles and facilitate hate speech, much attention has been paid to the threat platforms pose to democracy. In contrast to existing intervention...

Despite British and European policymakers’ quest to regulate online political advertising, it is not clear what exactly constitutes an online political advert. As with many areas of digital governance, it is therefore necessary to impose definitional criteria, yet the process of doing so is by no means straightforward. Using qualitative interviews,...

Online political advertising is often portrayed in a negative light, yet there is limited evidence about what exactly the public deems unacceptable about it. This paper provides new insights into public attitudes through an online survey where 1,881 respondents evaluated all political ads placed on Facebook during the 2019 UK General Election. We f...

Digital election campaigning has undergone increased levels of scrutiny in recent years, with numerous calls for improved transparency. One key innovation has been the creation of online advertising archives offered by social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Snapchat. In this article, we compare what we know about digital campaigning i...

Discussions of data-driven campaigning have gained increased prominence in recent years. Often associated with the practices of Cambridge Analytica and linked to debates about the health of modern democracy, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the rise of data-driven politics. However, most studies to date have focused solely on practic...

Online political advertising has grown rapidly over the last two decades and played an important role in campaigns and elections. Arising with it are concerns around issues such as data privacy and transparency, which have sparked calls for regulation. Whilst change has begun to be implemented, in many contexts moves to regulate online political ad...

Data-driven campaigning has become one of the key foci for academic and non-academic audiences interested in political communication. Widely seen to have transformed political practice, it is often argued that data-driven campaigning is a force of significant democratic disruption because it contributes to a fragmentation of political discourse, un...

Digital technology is becoming an increasingly familiar part of the landscape of party politics, but to date few scholars have directly considered methodological questions about how we study digital parties. In this chapter, we address this gap, asking: ‘how can digital parties be studied, and what barriers do researchers need to overcome?’ Drawing...

Democratic debate has undergone a structural transformation due to the rise of the Internet, social media and online communities. Scholars of political communication have sought to diagnose the threat that these changes pose by theorising “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers.” Responding to a growing desire on the part of policymakers to react to th...

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...

To conclude this special section, this article looks at the possible avenues for regulatory reform in the field of digital campaigning. Diagnosing the need for a multi‐layered approach, we argue that action is needed from government, regulators, companies, and civil society. We take each actor in turn and consider the kind of change needed, the pro...

Over recent decades, scholars have explored political parties’ adoption of digital technology. Tracing successive eras of change, scholarship has examined the degree to which digital disrupts or embeds traditional power structures—with many studies finding evidence of ‘controlled-interactivity’. In this article, we revisit debates around the adopti...

Are digital parties the future of party organization? A symposium on The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo - Katharine Dommett, Jasmin Fitzpatrick, Lorenzo Mosca, Paolo Gerbaudo

A key question facing scholars of party politics is the journey engaged individuals take to becoming party members. We argue that the existing literature largely outlines one aspect – motivation. In this article, we present an alternative position: that a membership journey is only complete when a motivation, process and trigger are present. We out...

Contact between politicians and their constituents is the cornerstone of democracies globally but an area of scholarship that remains relatively under-developed. Political contact can help convey authority, provide legitimacy and facilitate governance. This article goes beyond the assumption that representatives need to communicate more with the pu...

Since at least the 1980s, scholars have highlighted parties’ reliance on external actors, with Panebianco’s ‘electoral–professional’ party model spotlighting the increasing role of professionals in supporting party activities and campaigns. Over successive decades, our understanding of the role of external actors, and particularly consultants, has...

Data-driven campaigning has become a feature of political campaigns around the world. There is growing evidence that political campaigners at the elite and grassroots level believe that data matters for electoral success. This belief is having important consequences for the way that political campaigns are being performed. However, in practice, dat...

Recent developments in contemporary politics have cast doubt on the status of expertise and led to the oft-repeated claim that the public have had enough of experts. In response, we review existing survey measures on experts and expertise in the European Union and United Kingdom with three main findings. First, there is insufficient survey data ava...

The declining legitimacy of political parties has become something of a truism in political science discourse. Less often reflected upon is how these legitimacy problems could potentially be resolved. This article contributes to this underexplored issue by examining the restorative potential of expertise as a supplement to intra-party democracy. Bu...

The coalition government elected in 2010 in the UK pursued a programme of quango reform focused on reducing the number and expenditure of arm’s-length bodies, increasing transparency, improving accountability and maximizing efficiency and effectiveness. This paper revisits Flinders and Skelcher’s 201216. Flinders, M. and Skelcher, C. (2012), Shrink...

Conventional understandings of what the Westminster model implies anticipate reliance on a top-down, hierarchical approach to budgetary accountability, reinforced by a post-New Public Management emphasis on re-centralizing administrative capacity. This paper, based on a comparative analysis of the experiences of Britain and Ireland, argues that the...

This article returns to Christopher Hood's influential work, The politics of quangocide, to examine the United Kingdom's coalition government's approach to public bodies reform since May 2010. It combines theoretical-innovation and fresh empirical research to argue that the coalition has not simply engaged in quangocide, but has adopted a dual-trac...

A growing literature on ‘agencification’, ‘quangocratization’, and the ‘autonomization’ of the state has highlighted a coordination dilemma in contemporary public governance whereby governments rely on delegated governance but are frustrated by the lack of control that arises from such structures. In the run-up to the 2010 General Election in the U...

Democratic politics is forged upon the creation and management of a number of complex social relationships that are mediated through the creation of a set of expectations about the respective obligations and responsibilities of each actor. However, we actually know very little about how the public’s expectations of political processes, political in...

Attitudes to quangos are paradoxical. On the one hand they are perceived to be undemocratic, unaccountable organisations, while on the other they are seen to improve effectiveness, limit political interference and increase public confidence in government. This paradox is reflected in the behaviour of political parties, which generally adopt a harsh...

The use of arm's-length bodies to deliver certain services, to regulate certain sectors or to assume responsibility for particularly salient political issues is neither new in historical terms or a feature unique to the UK in comparative terms. What is particularly distinctive, however, is the Coalition Government's attempts since 2010 to reduce th...

In recent history parties are perceived to have become less ideological. In the place of grand visions parties are increasingly seen to be preoccupied with electoral victory, focusing not on ideas but on aligning their messages with the views of swing voters. And yet ideology remains a pivotal component of politics, with parties continuing to debat...

They may be the new benchmarks for successful political science research, but impact and engagement are often seen by academics as an add-on. Katharine Dommett and Katherine Tonkiss discuss how impact and engagement can be integrated within research projects to maximise their success.

This article offers an argument of almost primitive simplicity: politics tends to promise too much and deliver too little. In order to substantiate this argument this article presents the results of the first attempt to analyse an experiment with participatory democracy through the lens of ‘gap analysis’. This approach focuses attention on the crea...

At the half way point of the UK coalition government attention is turning towards the general election, with both parties beginning to contemplate their electoral strategies. This article explores the predicament faced by the Liberal Democrats who, unlike their coalition partners the Conservatives, saw a dramatic decline in support soon after enter...