The impact of technologies in political campaigns

Moritz Hoferer, Lucas Böttcher, Hans J. Herrmann and Hans Gersbach

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2020, vol. 538, issue C

Abstract: Recent political campaigns have demonstrated how technologies are used to boost election outcomes by microtargeting voters. We propose and analyze a framework which analyzes how political activists can use technologies to target voters. Voters are represented as nodes of a network. Political activists reach out locally to voters and try to convince them. Depending on their technological advantage and budget, political activists target certain regions in the network where their activities are able to generate the largest vote-share gains. Analytically and numerically, we quantify vote-share gains and savings in terms of budget and number of activists from employing superior targeting technologies compared to traditional campaigns. Moreover, we demonstrate that the technological precision must surpass a certain threshold in order to lead to a vote-share gain or budget advantage. Finally, by calibrating the technology parameters to the recent U.S. presidential election, we show that a pure targeting technology advantage is consistent with Trump winning against Clinton.

Keywords: Campaigns; Opinion formation; Targeting; Dynamical systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:538:y:2020:i:c:s0378437119315857

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2019.122795

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