Election campaigns have become increasingly digitalized, with the advent of social media creating the basis for what Jay Blumler calls the fourth age of political communication. While most of the extant research on campaign digitalization has focused on either specific election campaigns taken as a whole or campaigns carried out by different political parties, intra-party diversity in terms of digitalization is to be expected. In fact, while digital tools allow individual candidates to communicate independently from their parties, due to their ease of use and low costs, some candidates may be more prone to resort to digital campaigning than others due to an array of different reasons, namely but not exclusively those hinted by the literature on individual differences in campaigning styles. In this paper, I use data from the Comparative Candidate Survey Modules II and III, covering 40 elections carried out between 2013 and 2024 in more than 20 countries, to depict inter-candidate variation in terms of campaign digitalization (operationalized as a stronger relevance of digital tools vs. legacy media or direct contact in campaigning). More importantly, hypotheses on the role of individual characteristics (age, gender, political experience), ideological dimensions (center vs. radical, right vs. left, populist vs. non-populist), time (more vs. less recent election campaigns; during vs. before or after the COVID-19 pandemic) and macro dimensions (electoral system, internet penetration, importance of legacy media as source of political information) in explaining variations in campaign digitalization at the individual level are tested. By doing so, this article not only contributes to the debate on levels of campaign digitalization in established democracies in the last decade, but also to refine theories on why some political actors are more open to surf the wave of campaign digitalization than others.
