The Impact of Technologies in Political Campaigns

TL;DR

This paper presents a framework analyzing how technological targeting in political campaigns influences voter engagement and election outcomes, emphasizing the importance of technological precision and strategic regional targeting.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical and numerical framework for evaluating the impact of targeting technologies on vote-share gains and campaign efficiency.

Findings

Technological advantage can significantly increase vote-share.

Targeting precision must surpass a threshold to be effective.

Technology advantage alone can explain recent election outcomes.

Abstract

Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists use technologies to target voters. Voters are represented as nodes of a network. Political activists reach out locally to voters and try to convince them. Depending on their technological advantage and budget, political activists target certain regions in the network where their activities are able to generate the largest vote-share gains. Analytically and numerically, we quantify vote-share gains and savings in terms of budget and number of activists from employing superior targeting technologies compared to traditional campaigns. Moreover, we demonstrate that the technological precision must surpass a certain threshold in order to lead to a vote-share gain or budget advantage. Finally, by calibrating the technology parameters to the recent U.S. presidential election, we show that a pure targeting technology advantage is consistent with Trump winning against Clinton.