Party Campaigns in the Digital Age: Theory and Evidence From India
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Political Science
First Advisor
Wilkinson, Steven
Abstract
How do Internet-based communication technologies—including social media—shape politics? How does the growing use of these technologies influence party campaign strategy on persuasion and mobilization of voters? Existing theories make two competing predictions. First, in today’s digital age, party strategies that utilize traditional, in-person politics—such as rallies and canvassing—are expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive, and will be substituted by persuasion and mobilization conducted online. Second, online politics will remain supplementary to traditional politics, which will merely be replicated on the Internet. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence from 14 months of fieldwork in India, an important developing democracy that epitomizes the ongoing digital revolution, I argue that party strategies to persuade and mobilize voters involve a new kind of politics, one characterized by a complementary, synergistic relationship between in-person and online politics. I show that this is the case for election campaigns and party organization, two fundamental aspects of politics on which parties expend significant resources. To address the puzzling persistence of in-person mass campaign rallies, in Paper 1, I develop a theory emphasizing that parties strategically leverage a content-complementarity, or the mutually reinforcing relationship between physical and digital campaigning. I show that parties utilize rally crowds as content in their online engagements to create virtual public spectacles. I also examine the effects of such rally content on voter perceptions and voter mobilization. In Paper 2, I contend that in the pursuit of maximizing rally crowds in multi-ethnic contexts, parties strategically place their rallies where there is an ethnic identity match between campaigners and voters, resulting in rallies of coethnic campaigners. Voters have a strong preference for participating in rallies that feature a campaigner who is their coethnic, and for online content which includes a coethnic campaigner. In Paper 3, I assert that equipped with digital technologies, robust online networks, and a steady stream of content about in-person party events, digital-era parties engage in continuous messaging. This, in turn, leads party functionaries, grassroots party workers, and voters to be in a state of constant mobilization. I built my theory inductively through intensive fieldwork across multiple party campaigns in the North Indian states of Delhi, Madhya Pradesh (MP), and Uttar Pradesh (UP). I gathered data from in-depth, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. To test my theory, I analyze social media content, original face-to-face surveys—including survey experiments—that I carried out with approximately 4,000 voters and approximately 400 party functionaries, and additional observational data from UP, India’s most populous state. I discuss the implications of my findings for multi-party democracy, representation, and gaps in political participation as well as in digital access in the developing context of India and beyond.
Recommended Citation
Sheikh, Shahana, "Party Campaigns in the Digital Age: Theory and Evidence From India" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1410.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1410
