Increasingly, parties have been able to resort to means of political mobilization in electoral campaigns that differ significantly from traditional face-to-face canvassing, the use of mail and leaflets, or phone contacts. E-mails, social media, and text messaging have largely expanded the gamut of tools available to parties to get out the vote and exercise political persuasion. In spite of many country- and election-based case studies, we have only now begun to obtain a clearer broad comparative picture of the use of these tools, with the help of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 4 on mobilization, particularly of cross-national variations in the prevalence of these new modes of mobilization and how they compare to traditional modes. However, one yet neglected aspect is related to cross-party variations. One conventional argument talks about the “bypassing” role of these new forms of political communication and mobilization: it allows opportunities to new, emerging, smaller, or simply “non-mainstream” players in party systems to connect to new constituencies, including younger voters and other groups that are difficult to target by traditional and more resource-intensive means. But what broad comparative evidence do we have of this phenomenon? Are new forms of digital and online communication levelling the playing field between mainstream/insider parties and new/outsider parties, or merely serving to reinforce existing differences? What macro-level political and societal features condition these phenomena?
