Voters’ understanding and evaluation of data-driven political advertising

Citizens are increasingly confronted with data-driven campaigning strategies by European political parties on social media (Bene & Kruschinski, 2021). Examples include targeting political information such as tailored online ads to groups of citizens. Therefore, data-driven political advertising (henceforth DDPA) has received much attention from scholars. Despite this attention, we lack empirical findings on the role of voters in data-driven election campaigns. So far, research has shown that citizens lack understanding of data-driven strategies by companies (Gagrčin et al., 2021). More specifically, as scholars presented at the IJPP conference 2021, voters lack understanding of DDPA (Minihold et al, 2021). This is problematic because this lack of understanding likely affects the assessment of positive as well as negative real-life implications of DDPA. An example would be that certain voters would (not) receive certain campaign ad information, which is against their right to information (Bayer, 2021), and could subsequently matter for their potential political behavior adaptation. This study brings voters even more into focus by not only investigating their understanding of DDPA, but also answering the plea of persuasion knowledge scholars to incorporate their evaluation of (data-driven) personalization strategies (Boerman et al., 2018; Rozendaal et al., 2016). This paper addresses these research gaps by offering 1) an exploration of what predicts voters’ conceptual understanding, as well as their evaluative perceptions of DDPA, and 2) investigates to what extent both the conceptual understanding, as well as the evaluative perception of DDPA affect data-driven political campaign engagement, and avoidance. Our research relies on data from a multi-wave panel survey study conducted during the German Federal Election in August and September 2021(NW1= 1914, NW3 = 1303). Results indicate that the conceptual understanding of DDPA is related to the evaluative perceptions of DDPA. In other words, understanding data-driven tactics and strategies of political actors matter for the (dis)liking of DDPA, and vice versa. Furthermore, the findings suggest that conceptual understanding of DDPA matters for engaging with political campaign ads, but is not related to the avoidance of campaign ads. However, we find that evaluative perceptions of DDPA are negatively related to ad avoidance. This finding suggests that a negative evaluation of DDPA, such as perceiving DDPA as creepy, is related to actively avoiding data-driven campaign ads. With this paper, we contribute to a long-neglected discourse about voter agency and empowerment in increasingly digital campaign practices and democratic governance. Our findings imply that understanding and evaluating data-driven campaigning techniques and implications matter for voters’ campaign (dis)engagement. These findings are important for the voters’ role in participatory democracies, which are challenged by an increased (political) information asymmetry, which is fuelled by data-driven campaigning. Our study thereby directly informs future studies dealing with increasing voter agency in data-driven campaigns, and it can bring crucial findings for political campaigners and digital literacy initiatives aiming to empower voters in an online-environment, alike.