Professionalized digital campaigns? Analysing tasks distribution and attitudes of digital communication staff in Belgian parties

Shifts in voting patterns in Western European democracies have recently been connected to the ongoing transformation of the way election campaigns are fought, with more and more of it taking place online, especially via social media. The ‘permanent campaign’ logic that characterises digitalised campaigns has urged parties to adapt by reforming their organisational structures and further professionalising their communication. Previous research has focused on the profile of communication staff, questioning their degree of partisanship and professionalisation. But what is their level of autonomy and what does the overall coordination of tasks look like? To what extent do these tasks and roles vary across parties? And finally, how do parties’ organisational strategies influence their effective online communication? This paper proposes to answer these questions through a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative interviews with the digital communication staff of Belgian parties with a content analysis of social media data. We analyse the relationship of digital communication staff with the party hierarchy and find that respondents’ perceived level of autonomy is related to questions of resources, party discipline, size, and ideology. The analysis of social media content supplements these findings and shows that mainstream parties are present on a wide array of platforms whereas challenger parties are more engaging, in part due to their grassroot approach to online communication. Overall, our mixed approach enables us to better grasp the relationship between party organisation and campaign digitalisation.