Risk management and digital political campaigning: A computational analysis of European regulation

As threats to national security intensify with the potential of foreign interference in elections, European and national regulatory frameworks have transformed since 2016, in line with the multiple challenges of mis/dis/mal/information. We advance a risk management framework to analyse the regulation of digital political campaigning. We assess this original framework on regulatory EU documents through an innovative combination of qualitative and computational quantitative text analysis. Specifically, we investigate how stages of risk management - identification, assessment, mitigation, prevention - are reflected in EU legislation. Our findings reveal that type of laws and risks significantly influence the risk management process in digital political campaigning. We find that stages in risk management receive different degrees of attention both across and within types of laws. While not all risks are explicitly associated with with their bearer, systemic risks prevail across laws and the allocation of risk ownership often lacks clarity of responsibility. Our framework and methodology offer a versatile approach that can easily travel across other policy areas.