From newspapers to social media? Changing dynamics in Swiss direct democratic campaigns

The growing importance of digital technologies has sparked a lively debate on whether – and, if so, with what consequences – the Internet is altering political actors’ internal organization, their communication strategies, and practices. Previous research has shown that political actors in many established democracies are increasingly shifting their electoral campaign efforts to the digital sphere. Direct democratic campaigns – apart from singular events such as the 2016 Brexit referendum – have not been adequately considered so far. This paper explores the extent to which political elites in Swiss direct democratic campaigns have transformed their communication practices over time and argues that the relevance of digital technologies in relation to traditional communication channels has increased significantly. This expectation is tested on a large database of newspaper ads published before all direct democratic votes held in Switzerland between 1981 and 2020 and Facebook data from 2007 to 2020. Negative binomial regression and time series analyses reveal that the campaign logic in Swiss direct democratic campaigns is undergoing considerable changes. As one of the first, this paper empirically proves the changing dynamics in Swiss direct democratic campaigns. This has important implications for future research on political campaigning in Switzerland and beyond which will also be discussed in this paper.