A Strategical Campaign Weapon? The Use of Online Political Microtargeting in Four European Democracies

Concerns about the use of online political microtargeting (OPM) by campaigners have arisen since Cambridge Analytica scandal hit the international political arena. In addition to providing conceptual clarity of OPM and the strategical potential of this technique, this papers seeks to be the first comparative empirical study on the use of this communicational technique by political actors. Accordingly, I try to answer two overarching questions: a) to what extent extent is this technique used in European democracies? b) are campaigners using this technique in a strategical fashion? To that end, I apply topic modeling and automatic text analysis methods over an original dataset of 1,000 political Facebook Ads during the last national elections in Austria, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Results show that parties are indeed starting to strategically use this method although the proportion of microtargeted ads is comparatively small. The article concludes providing potential explanations of campaigners behavior as an invitation for further research.