The Coming of Age of Paid Digital Campaigning: Equalization or Normalization in the 2019 Belgian Federal Elections.

A significant increase in the use of paid digital campaigning tools marked the 2019 electoral campaign in Belgium. This paper contributes to the equalization versus normalization debate by establishing the profile of the individual candidates who favor these online tools over the more traditional campaigning instruments. In addition, we investigate whether this investment pays off in terms of electoral performance. An increase in the preferential votes of less resourceful challengers with highly digitalized campaigns would support the equalization theory, refuting the normalization thesis. We make use of the official campaign expenditure declarations which contain detailed information on the resources spent on the different campaigning tools, digital as well as traditional, during the four months prior to the elections. We collected data on the 1850 electoral candidates running in the federal parliamentary elections. A fractional probit regression model finds support for the equalization thesis by suggesting that incumbents spent less on digital campaigning than their challengers. Our second model, a beta regression, shows that the proportion spent on digital campaigning has a positive effect on the candidate’s electoral performance.