David Karpf

Digital politics after Trump

ABSTRACT This essay offers a retrospective review of three major recent books in the field of digital politics – Andrew Chadwick’s The hybrid media system: Politics and power, Zizi Papacharissi’s Affective publics: Sentiment, technology, and politics, and Daniel Kreiss’s Prototype politics: Technology-intensive campaigning and the data of democracy – in light of Donald J. Trump’s surprising 2016 electoral victory. Rather than critiquing these books for failing to predict Trump, the essay asks how the second editions of these books might differ if they were being written post-Trump. The central purpose of the essay is to think through how the research literature is likely to change in light of this major, disjunctive event.

The Internet and American Political Campaigns

Abstract This article provides an overview of major research findings regarding the Internet and American political campaigns. This is still a nascent subfield, but the research community has come to general agreement on five key points: (1) at the mass behavioral level, the Internet has not changed fundamental participatory inequalities; (2) we have seen an increase in small-donor activity, and these donations tend to flow toward polarizing candidates; (3) for political campaign operations, “mundane mobilization tools” carry the largest impacts; (4) with political campaigns, the new focus on data analytics and the “culture of testing” is substantially changing resource expenditures and work routines; and (5) there is currently a clear partisan divide between how Democrats and Republicans employ digital technology for campaigning. The article also discusses the methodological challenges that separate Internet-related research from many of the more established fields of campaign finance-related research. It concludes by posing a set of research questions for the 2014 and 2016 election cycles which will likely prove fruitful.

Collective Action in Organizations: Interaction and Engagement in an Era of Technological Change, by Bruce Bimber, Andrew J. Flanagin, and Cynthia Stohl

role of trust in media in the association between party identification and voting, and the effect of trust in media on citizens’ perceptions of national conditions (chapters 6 and 7), indirectly provide implicating evidence that the news media indeed play an important role in shaping these perceptions and decisions. In sum, this is a terrific book that advances our understanding of media trust and its implications tremendously. But reading it also highlights the problems of contemporary research on media trust in general. Ladd’s empirical analysis is rigorous. His methods are first rate (I was particularly impressed by the employment of statistical controls throughout, the careful attention to causal order, and the thorough examination of what people have in mind when they answer questions about “the media,” pp. 96–106). But his conceptualization of the focal variable of “trust in media” is relatively thin. As in many other pieces of research in the area, the question of what exactly is trust in media, and whether it is at all different from general like-dislike attitudes towards the media, is left unanswered. Like Ladd’s book, the field as a whole is focused on the U.S. context, and thus we are left wondering how trust in media operates in other contexts. In particular, when reading the book I was wondering whether media competition and party polarization are specific predictors of trust in media, limited to the American historical narrative Ladd so elegantly portrays, or would also predict media trust in other democratic societies. No single book can have it all. So, as always, much is left for future research. In the meantime, Ladd’s book is a very serious piece of scholarly research, certainly the very best book ever written on audience trust in the news media to date. I highly recommend reading it.

Analytic Activism and Its Limitations

Some of the most important impacts of social media on social movement organizations come not through the new forms of speech that are created but through new forms of listening. This article discusses “analytic activism”—the practice of applying analytics and experimentation to develop new tactics and strategies, identify emergent mobilization opportunities, and listen to their members and supporters in new ways. After defining the key components of analytic activism, the article then develops and illustrates two boundary conditions—the analytics floor and the analytics frontier—that define the limited context within which analytic activism operates. The article concludes by highlighting how a focus on digital listening leads researchers to capture phenomena that have previously been ignored in the social media and collective action literature.