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Today, political leaders and candidates for office must campaign in a multimedia world through traditional forums—newspapers, radio, and television—as well as new digital media, particularly social media. Electoral Campaigns, Media, and the New World of Digital Politics chronicles how Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, email, and memes are used successfully and unsuccessfully to influence elections. Each of these platforms have different affordances and reach various audiences in different ways. Campaigns often have to wage different campaigns on each of these mediums. In some instances, they are crucial in altering coverage in the mainstream media. In others, digital media remains underutilized and undeveloped. As has always been the case in politics, outcomes that depend on economic and social conditions often dictate people’s readiness for certain messages. However, the method and content of those messages has changed with great consequences for the health and future of democracy. 

This book answers several questions: How do candidates/parties reach audiences that are preoccupied, inattentive, amorphous, and bombarded with so many other messages? How do they cope with the speed of media reporting in a continuous news cycle that demands instantaneous responses? How has media fragmentation altered the campaign styles and content of campaign communication, and general campaign discourse? Finally and most critically, what does this mean for how democracies function?

Essential reading on a hard-to-study but dominant communication tool, encrypted messaging apps—WhatsApp, Signal, and their kin—showing their promise and dangers.

Pundits have long pointed to social media’s power to catalyze or end political movements—and to strengthen or weaken democracies. But this power is shifting from social media platforms (such as Facebook and YouTube) to lesser-studied encrypted messaging apps (such as WhatsApp and Signal). This urgent book explains how these technologies work and how they differ from their predecessors, outlining their strengths and vulnerabilities at a crucial stage in their evolution.

While many Facebook users have at least heard of propaganda and the algorithms used to filter and highlight content on that platform, they are more likely to trust messaging apps as sources of authentic and secure information. Paired with a growing distrust of traditional media, more people are joining large groups on these apps and using them as news sources, even when those groups include relative strangers. This makes these apps particularly vulnerable to political propaganda—and even government espionage.

Security studies scholar Inga Kristina Trauthig and propaganda scholar Samuel Woolley consider both the role of these apps in spreading disinformation and as tools for maintaining free speech and civic discourse in the face of censorship. The same closed nature that makes these apps seem trustworthy has made them particularly difficult to research. And so this qualitative study draws on some 180 interviews with propagandists, activists, influence campaigners, and other users in fourteen countries. The book’s findings and the authors’ recommendations are crucial for understanding the future of online communication and safeguarding democratic speech.

Though not all people are religious believers, religion has played important historic roles in developing political systems, parties, and policies—affecting believers and nonbelievers alike. This is particularly true in the United States, where scholars have devoted considerable attention to a variety of political phenomena at the intersection of religious belief and identity, including social movements, voting behavior, public opinion, and public policy. These outcomes are motivated by “identity boundary-making” among the religiously affiliated. The contributors to this volume examine two main factors that influence religious identity: the communication of religious ideas and the perceptions of people (including elites) in communicating said ideas.

Exploring the Public Effects of Religious Communication on Politics examines an array of religious communication phenomena. These include the media’s role in furthering religious narratives about minority groups, religious strategies that interest groups use to advance their appeal, the variable strength of Islamophobia in cross-national contexts, what qualifies as an “evangelical” identity, and clergy representation of religious and institutional teachings. The volume also provides ways for readers to think about developing new insights into the influence religious communication has on political outcomes.