Digital Campaigning: Who Benefits? An Analysis of the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign

The 2021 German federal election campaign offers a unique setting to investigate the impact of digital campaigning on the election result. Our analysis starts from the observation that the pandemic forced all parties alike to drastically reduce their campaign efforts involving personal interaction and resort to digital campaigning instead. However, parties are likely to differ substantially as regards a) their ability to run online campaigns (the supply side) and b) the receptiveness of their target electorates (the demand side) to such campaign efforts. Therefore, we ask: Which candidates have benefited the most from digital campaigning? In recent years, an increase in social media use by German politicians can be observed, with politicians from different parties communicating differently. Regarding the supply side, politicians of minor parties tend to use new digital tools more intensively to compensate for the lower media coverage they receive (equalisation thesis). Moreover, politicians consider the demand side in their communication: They develop perceptions of what kind of communication their followers might expect and consider these perceptions in their social media communication (perceived audience expectations). Given that Greens and FDP have a substantially younger membership with higher expectations of politicians’ social media communication, we expect these two parties to be particularly well-placed to run effective online campaigns and meet a receptive target electorate. In addition, the AfD has always been very active in the digital sphere because it needed to circumvent the low level of coverage by conventional media. Yet few studies examine how candidates’ social media activities are related to their election results. Therefore, we will use the GLES candidate surveys – in particular the 2021st survey – to measure a wide range of digital campaign activities of constituency candidates and estimate its effect on electoral returns at the constituency level. As we know that not all candidates have answered the candidate survey, we will cross-validate this analysis with our own data set covering the Twitter activities of all Bundestag candidates of parties that are represented in the 20th Bundestag. In a nutshell, our main argument is that the enforced push towards digital campaigning has benefitted some parties more than others, and we will test this assertion at the constituency level, which will permit a very fine-grained analysis.