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.
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.