Digital Campaigning for the 2018 Local Elections: Which Candidates and Local Parties Jumped on the Bandwagon?

This paper investigates the role of digital campaigning in the 2018 local elections in Belgium. While existing evidence shows that campaign tools such as social media are becoming increasingly important for political parties and individual candidates in national election contests, far less is known about their usage in local election campaigns. As the geographical scale of local elections is much smaller and campaigns are less professionalized, one can expect local candidates and parties to turn to more traditional campaign tools leading to face-to-face contact with voters. Simultaneously, however, the local level provides the ideal setting to familiarize with these relatively novel tools, to assess their electoral effectiveness and to experiment with internet and social media strategies which can be implemented in larger scale election campaigns. The latter is particularly the case for the 2018 local elections in Belgium, which were organized eight months before the 2019 federal, regional and European elections. We analyze which local election candidates and parties used internet advertising and social media throughout their campaigns, and how much campaign money was invested in these tools. As regards the individual candidates, we make use of the official declarations which candidates are legally required to submit at the court. In these declarations, candidates indicate whether and how much they invested in internet or social media advertising during the four months preceding the elections. We collected data on a sample of 3,588 individual candidates running in the 30 municipalities of the Arrondissement Leuven. We also collected data on the local and national office, gender and age of these candidates. Concerning the local parties, we make use of two data sources: list-level declarations and the 2018 Local Chairs Survey. Similar to individual candidates, local lists are required to officially declare their campaign expenses. We registered data on the 166 local lists that participated in the local elections in the arrondissement Leuven. Additionally, the Local Chairs survey contains a number of items on the usage of social media during the local campaign by both Flemish and Walloon local parties. These data allow us to perform a rich empirical analysis of digital campaigning at the local party level. Authors: Gert-Jan Put, Gunther Vanden Eynde, Gertjan Muyters and Bart Maddens