Data Driven Campaigning in the 2021 German Federal Election: An inter and intra-party analysis

This paper will examine the adoption of new Data Driven campaign (DDC) techniques within the German party system, and how this is affecting inter- and intra-party power relationships. While DDC is still in an early stage of development in many countries (outside of the U.S.), several key features have been defined in recent academic literature. These features include the automated collection, analysis, and application of new forms of digital data to send voters more personalised or micro-targeted messages. To date, much of the attention has focused on the external uses of DDC and particularly changes in campaign advertising transparency and the impact on voters. However, DDC is also likely to have a significant impact on parties themselves in terms of their levels of competitiveness within the party system, and their internal distribution of power. Specifically DDC is likely to reinforce the advantage of bigger well-resourced parties who can build up their data reserves and technical expertise in targeting voters. It is also likely to affect intra-party organizational structures in terms of increasing specialisation of digital campaign expertise, and the centralization and automation of decision-making. In this paper, we examine these contentions with a case study of the German party system during the most recent Federal election. We start by contextualising the German case in the comparative literature and identifying a range of factors that constrain the use of DDC by parties. We then explore the rates, reasons and causes of adoption of DDC by a range of major and minor parties using original data collected in a post-election survey and interviews of parties’ digital campaign staff. We use these data to assess the extent to which DDC is affecting inter-party competition and to identify whether internal influencers play a role in its uptake. Our conclusions show that DDC is still relatively under-developed in Germany, that the larger parties are generally more advanced, and that the presence of pioneers interested in exploring the affordances of DDC within the party organisation influences parties’ adoption of DDC.