Daniel Kreiss

Seizing the moment: The presidential campaigns’ use of Twitter during the 2012 electoral cycle

Drawing on interviews with staffers from the 2012 Obama and Romney presidential campaigns and qualitative content analysis of their Twitter feeds, this article provides the first inside look at how staffers used the platform to influence the agendas and frames of professional journalists, as well as appeal to strong supporters. These campaigns sought to influence journalists in direct and indirect ways, and planned their strategic communication efforts around political events such as debates well in advance. Despite these similarities, staffers cite that Obama’s campaign had much greater ability to respond in real time to unfolding commentary around political events given an organizational structure that provided digital staffers with a high degree of autonomy. After analyzing the ways staffers discuss effective communication on the platform, this article argues that at extraordinary moments campaigns can exercise what Isaac Reed calls “performative power,” influence over other actors’ definitions of the situation and their consequent actions through well-timed, resonant, and rhetorically effective communicative action and interaction.

Political performance, boundary spaces, and active spectatorship: Media production at the 2012 Democratic National Convention

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, photographic documentation, and interview data, we detail the layered production of performance in the journalistic and political fields, revealing how performances were directed both internally and across fields for strategic advantage, as well as for co-present spectators and the public at-large. We argue that conventions provide ‘boundary spaces’ where actors from different fields gather and perform distinct democratic roles, as well as mediated, integrative spaces for the polity. Media events provide occasions for networked practices of ‘active spectatorship’ that offer citizens a means of control over the publicity of elites.

The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning, 2004–2012

Drawing on theories in organizational sociology that argue that transpositions of people,/ skills, and knowledge across domains give rise to innovations and organizational foundings that institutionalize them, we conducted a mixed-methods study of the employment biographies of staffers working in technology, digital, data, and analytics on American presidential campaigns, and the rates of organizational founding by these staffers, from the 2004 through the 2012 electoral cycles. Using Federal Election Commission and LinkedIn data, we trace the professional biographies of staffers (N = 629) working in technology, digital, data, or analytics on primary and general election presidential campaigns during this period. We found uneven professionalization in these areas, defined in terms of staffers moving from campaign to campaign or from political organizations to campaigns, with high rates of new entrants to the field. Democrats had considerably greater numbers of staffers in the areas of technology, digital, data, and analytics and from the technology industry, and much higher rates of organizational founding. We present qualitative data drawn from interviews with approximately 60 practitioners to explain how the institutional histories of the two parties and their extended networks since 2004 shaped the presidential campaigns during the 2012 cycle and their differential uptake of technology, digital, data, and analytics.

In Their Own Words: Political Practitioner Accounts of Candidates, Audiences, Affordances, Genres, and Timing in Strategic Social Media Use

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 active during the 2016 presidential cycle. Our analysis revealed that scholars need to account for the ways that campaigns perceive their candidates in addition to the audiences, affordances, and genres of different social media platforms, as well as the timing of the electoral cycle, in order to effectively study strategic social media communication. Our findings reveal that campaigns proceed from perceptions of their candidates’ public personae and comfort with engagement on social media. Campaigns perceive that social media platforms vary according to their audiences, including their demographics and other characteristics; with respect to their affordances, actual and perceived functionalities; the genres of communication perceived to be appropriate to them; and the timing of the electoral cycle, which shapes messaging strategies and the utility of particular platforms. These factors shape how campaigns use social media in the service of their electoral goals. We conclude by developing these findings into an analytic framework for future research, arguing that researchers should refrain from automatically generalizing the results of single-platform studies to “social media” as a whole, and detailing the implications of our findings for future political communication research.

The Virtues of Participation without Power: Campaigns, Party Networks, and the Ends of Politics

Following Francesca Pollettas 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 contemporary denunciations of partisanship and critiques of institutional participation by radical democrats. First, this article discusses the opportunities available for citizens to participate in electoral politics. Volunteering is often limited to fund-raising and instrumental voter contacts given the constraints of electoral institutions. Although campaign volunteerism is a fundamentally limited form of civic engagement, institutional and partisan participation has democratic value. Campaigns are institutionally linked to political parties that offer distinct moral, ideological, and policy choices to citizens. Recent analytical and empirical work shows that contemporary political parties are constituted by relatively coherent networks of civil society and social movement organizations that devote considerable resources to electoral politics to shape primary and general election outcomes and advance their agendas in governance. This reveals electoral participation to be tightly linked to larger partisan dynamics and institutional sites of power.

Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle

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 these firms and digital and social media directors of 2016 U.S. presidential primary and general election campaigns, in addition to field observations at the 2016 Democratic National Convention. We find that technology firms are motivated to work in the political space for marketing, advertising revenue, and relationship-building in the service of lobbying efforts. To facilitate this, these firms have developed organizational structures and staffing patterns that accord with the partisan nature of American politics. Furthermore, Facebook, Twitter, and Google go beyond promoting their services and facilitating digital advertising buys, actively shaping campaign communication through their close collaboration with political staffers. We show how representatives at these firms serve as quasi-digital consultants to campaigns, shaping digital strategy, content, and execution. Given this, we argue that political communication scholars need to consider social media firms as more active agents in political processes than previously appreciated in the literature.

The Problem of Citizens: E-Democracy for Actually Existing Democracy

This article argues that many contemporary e-democracy projects, particularly in the United States, have at their heart a model of atomistic, independent, rational, and general-interest citizens. As such, these projects, variously grouped under the labels of e-governance, online deliberation, open government, and civic technology, often assume a broad shared consensus about collective definitions of “public problems” that both does not exist and sidesteps debates over what these problems are and what potential solutions can and should be. Drawing on recent theories of political parties, social identity, and cultural cognition, this article argues that e-democracy efforts need to account for the fact that the citizens practitioners appeal to see themselves by default as members of social groups, and that this has implications for politics and what Jasanoff calls “civic epistemology.” Presenting the case of attempting to change Republican opinions about climate change, I argue that e-democracy initiatives should seek to foster collaboration and deliberation within, not between, parties and among partisans. To do so, e-democratic reformers need to explicitly structure the collaborative and deliberative environment so there is a range of intra-party opinions and beliefs as part of the consultative and policy-making process.

The Networked Democratic Spectator

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 studies reveal that social media platforms provide unprecedented opportunities for people to participate in political discourse. I argue that political actors see the discourse on social media that develops around media events as a representation of public opinion (even though this is problematic as an empirical matter). I conclude by suggesting that especially at extraordinary moments, public narratives about social media articulate the normative democratic ideal that these platforms create a collective social space for, and public representation of, the “people.”

Trump Gave Them Hope: Studying the Strangers in Their Own Land

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 the roles that identity, narratives, and emotions play in shaping the political beliefs and behavior of White Tea Party supporters. Building on these insights, through an analysis of 123 content analyses published in Political Communication between 2003-2016, we demonstrate gaps in our field and argue that scholarship can grow analytically and empirically by accounting for the findings of these books. We conclude with suggestions for future research into people’s perceptions of identity, group status, deprivation, and political power, as well as the role of media, political actors, and social groups in creating these narratives of American politics.

Digital Dilemmas: Power, Resistance, and the Internet, by M. I. Franklin; The Marketplace of Attention: How Audiences Take Shape in a Digital Age, by James G. Webster; Forging Trust Communities: How Technology Changes Politics, by Irene S. Wu

The study of the widespread adoption of the Internet and the medium’s implications for political communication is now entering its third decade. The medium has undergone remarkable changes during that time period. Brian McNair (2011) noted that when his Introduction to Political Communication was first published in 1995, the Internet did not play a significant role in political processes. By the book’s fifth edition in 2011, it was challenging to find an aspect of political communication that was not impacted in some way by the Internet and digital communications technologies more broadly. Scholarship advanced alongside the extraordinary growth of the medium, as theorists and researchers sought to understand the changing communications environment and its impact on the production of political communication, the knowledge, attitudes, and behavior of citizens, and the relationships among political elites, government officials, journalists, civil society organizations, movements, and citizens. James Webster’s The Marketplace of Attention, M. I. Franklin’s Digital Dilemmas, and Irene Wu’s Forging Trust Communities all offer nice summations of and contributions to various strains of scholarship that have taken place over the past two decades. These works, to greater and lesser extents, move us forward at the start of a third decade of the Internet and digital technologies more broadly being part of the background context of our political and social lives (see Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2013). Webster’s The Marketplace of Attention is a major work that makes a significant contribution to the political communication literature, and the field of communication more generally. Webster develops a robust analytical model regarding the relationships among media producers, audiences, and the contemporary media environment. Franklin’s Digital Dilemmas provides a sweeping legal, technological, social, and cultural analysis of