Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia: Data, Digital and Field (Political Campaigning and Communication) 3030682331, 9783030682330

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POLITICAL CAMPAIGNING AND COMMUNICATION

Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia Data, Digital and Field Glenn Kefford

Political Campaigning and Communication

Series Editor Darren G. Lilleker, Bournemouth University Bournemouth, UK

The series explores themes relating to how political organisations promote themselves and how citizens interpret and respond to their tactics. Politics is here defined broadly as any activities designed to have an impact on public policy. The scope of the series thus covers election campaigns, as well as pressure group campaigns, lobbying, and campaigns instigated by social and citizen movements. Research included in the series might focus on the latest strategies and tactics within political marketing and campaigning, covering topics such as the strategic use of legacy, digital and social media, the use of big data and analytics for targeting citizens, and the use of manipulative tactics and disinformation. Furthermore, as campaigns are an important interface between the institutions of power and citizens, they present opportunities to examine their impact in engaging, involving and mobilizing citizens. Areas of focus might include attitudes and voting behavior, political polarization and the campaign environment, public discourse around campaigns, and the psychologies underpinning civil society and protest movements. Works may take a narrow or broad perspective. Single-nation case studies of one specific campaign and comparative cross-national or temporal studies are equally welcome. The series also welcomes themed edited collections which explore a central set of research questions. For an informal discussion for a book in the series, please contact the series editor Darren Lilleker ([email protected]), or Ambra Finotello ([email protected]). This book series is indexed by Scopus.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14546

Glenn Kefford

Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia Data, Digital and Field

Glenn Kefford School of Political Science and International Studies University of Queensland St Lucia, QLD, Australia

ISSN 2662-589X ISSN 2662-5903 (electronic) Political Campaigning and Communication ISBN 978-3-030-68233-0 ISBN 978-3-030-68234-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Ani_ka/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Image This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Harriet

Preface

This book is the culmination of five years research. I first started researching campaigning in 2015 and did not think the initial interviews I did would lead to this much larger project. I continued working on a range of questions about campaigning, devoting a few hours one day a week on various projects between 2016 and 2018. The final product was only possible as I was fortunate enough to receive a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) Fellowship from the Australian Research Council for 2019–2021 (DE190100210). This bought out almost all my teaching and gave me the financial support and backing to do this research. For a range of reasons, the financial costs of this project were not immense, however, what was critical was the time the DECRA provided me. Not just to be able to do the research, but the time it gave me to allow the underlying ideas to percolate, and to put them to one side so that they could breathe and I could come back to them with a fresh perspective. This book would also not have been possible without those agreeing to talk to me having done so. Many interviewees were willing to discuss how they perceived contemporary campaign practices and gave their thoughts on what the consequences of this is for political parties, campaigning and liberal democracy. All interviews were conducted on the basis of anonymity. I discuss this more in the research appendix. I hope this book is of interest to not only other academics but also campaigners from the parties or other entities engaged in campaigning. With the exception of

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Stephen Mills’ excellent books ‘The Professionals’ and ‘The New Machine Men’ there is very little written about campaigning by political parties in Australia. Certainly not enough anyway. Hopefully what follows provides insight into the contemporary campaign practices of Australia’s political parties. Glenn Kefford Brisbane, Australia

Acknowledgements

Like all books, this has been a labour of love. For whatever reason, one of my main research interests is campaigning and, in particular, the way that political parties attempt to mobilise, persuade and message to voters. I argue that by understanding and digging into the approaches, strategies, traditions and logic underpinning party-based campaigning, we can learn an enormous amount about political parties as well as democracy. My starting point is that political parties are the most important democratic institution. They play such an important range of roles—or at least should—and they are the glue which holds our democracies together. They do not always live up to expectations and there is much more they can and should do, but they are a product of the institutional architecture that they emerge from. If we want parties to engage with the community more, if we want parties to listen to the citizens in their communities, we need to reform our institutions. In going through the list of interviews I completed since 2015 it dawned on me that many interviewees have moved back and forth between party-based campaigning roles and outside the ‘bubble’. This is perhaps not that surprising, the commitment that campaigners put into their craft is significant. I was fortunate throughout that so many took time out to talk to me about their experiences, how they understood what was happening in Australian politics, and how the way they campaigned was part of a much larger story about democracy. My impression is that for many campaigners it is sometimes hard to raise your head above the

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

parapet and see the larger picture as you are so invested in your political projects, so hopefully this book is thought-provoking and leads to many more conversations. To all those individuals across the parties, third-party actors and consultants I spoke to, thank you. Due to the pace of change in the campaign environment, by the time this goes to press, this account will already be dated. Part of this story is undoubtedly, then, historical. Another aspect, which is the lot of the researcher, is this will only ever be a partial account. Omissions, mistakes and errors in the story are mine alone. It is impossible to tell the whole story because it is too large and multidimensional, but hopefully this does justice to it and other scholars can fill some of the remaining gaps in our knowledge. There are numerous people that I need to thank who have played a role in the development of this book. I thank those who read draft chapters—Frank Mols, Alastair Stark, Duncan McDonnell, Kate Dommett, Stephen Mills, Anika Gauja and Chris Salisbury. I also need to thank those who provided invaluable research assistant support for this project, including collecting some of the secondary literature for me. Thanks to Josh Holloway and Chris Steer for the excellent assistance they provided in this regard. I presented parts of this project at Australian Political Studies Association (APSA) conferences in 2018 and 2019, as well as at APSA Political Organisation and Participation standing group workshops in those years too. Feedback at these conferences and workshops helped me clarify my arguments and thoughts so thank you to those who commented or raised questions. Finally, I would like to thank my publisher, Palgrave, especially the editor of the Political Communication and Campaigning series, Darren Lilleker, who was immediately interested and excited by this project, as well as everyone else at Palgrave for their excellent support and assistance in bringing this book to fruition.

Praise for Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia

‘Glenn Kefford has dragged scholarship about party campaigning into the modern day, with a study that for the first time properly integrates the campaign elements of data, digital and field work. Kefford has interviewed scores of campaigners in three Australian political parties, while also undertaking participant observation of campaigning on the ground. He brings a sceptical and astute mindset to the task of appraising this data and constructing a new theoretical model of contemporary campaigning and its effect on party organisation; the result will be of benefit to scholars internationally.’ —Dr. Stephen Mills, University of Sydney, author of The Professionals and The New Machine Men. ‘Kefford writes “To say that liberal democracy is in trouble is to state the bleeding obvious”. But are new forms of data-driven campaigning the answer? This compellingly written, ground-breaking book is underpinned by a treasure trove of original analyses: from participant observation in fieldwork campaigns, extensive interviews with party insiders, to public opinion data. But its answer is an emphatic “no”—we are systematically shown that parties are clumsy at persuading voters and Australian voters remain sceptical of parties.’ —Professor Ariadne Vromen, Sir John Bunting Chair of Public Administration, Australian National University, and author of Digital Citizenship and Political Engagement: The Challenge from Online Campaigning and Advocacy Organisations xi

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PRAISE FOR POLITICAL PARTIES AND CAMPAIGNING IN AUSTRALIA

‘Kefford offers the most extensive analysis of contemporary campaigning to date in the field through the lens of Australian political parties. Australia in particular offers a fascinating case study of campaign attempts at persuasion given compulsory voting—an animating question in the literature given public concern over the effects of digital micro-targeting. Kefford finds that campaigns are rarely effective at persuasion, but that data-driven practices are transforming the organizational structures and investments of parties, including blurring the distinction between party members and supporters. This is a fascinating and nuanced account of how data is powering digital and field campaigning, and how its effects might be less directly on voters and more on parties as organizations.’ —Dr. Daniel Kreiss, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, author of Prototype Politics: Technology Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy and Taking our country back: The crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama ‘How are political parties campaigning in Australia today? Presenting unparalleled insight into the activities of Australian parties, Glenn Kefford dives beneath the hype and sensationalised reporting of political campaigns to offer a detailed, and vitally important discussion of how parties actually work. Dispelling the myth of hyper-professionalised campaigns, Kefford outlines what it means to conduct data-driven campaigning, and shows the diversity of ways in which data is being used by parties today. Offering a vital conceptual contribution and unrivalled empirical insight into Australian parties, this book makes an important contribution to debates on political parties that will resonate far beyond Australia’s shores.’ —Dr. Katharine Dommett, Senior Lecturer in the Public Understanding of Politics, University of Sheffield, author of The Re-imagined Party: Democracy, Change and the Public

Contents

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1

Introduction

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Theorising Contemporary Campaign Practices

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Data and Analytics

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Campaigning Online

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Winning the ‘Ground War’

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Data-Driven Campaigning: A Case Study from the Ground

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Voter Attitudes to Data-Driven Campaigning

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Campaigning and Political Parties

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Conclusion

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Research Appendix

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Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

3.1 4.1 5.1 7.1 7.2

Fig. 7.3 Fig. 7.4

Fig. 7.5

The data-driven campaigning bullseye model, adapted from Duverger (1969) Number of trackers on Australian Party webpages How are voters following the election in the mass media Contact by a political party during the election campaign Political parties play an important role in our democracy Political parties need to spend much more time in the community talking to voters about their concerns than they currently do Political parties should be exempt from privacy legislation Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding who you said you would vote for to their database about you? Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding the issues that you said you are especially concerned about to their database about you?

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.6

Fig. 7.7

Fig. 7.8

Fig. 7.9

Fig. 7.10

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Fig. 7.12

Fig. 7.13

Fig. 7.14

Fig. 7.15

Image 5.1

Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding what you said your views were on the prime minister to their database about you? How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from banks or other financial institutions? How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from companies you buy things from? How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from social media companies? How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from the Australian Electoral Commission? Which one of the following approaches to displaying political advertisements on the Internet do you favour most? Suppose a political parties’ campaign wants to buy an online ad to reach certain voters on social media. What information about its individual users should a social media company offer to parties so they can decide who should see the ad? If a party wants to publish an ad which says a party or candidate supports a policy which they do not, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? If a party wants to publish an ad which makes unsubstantiated claims about an opponent’s character on social media, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? If a party wants to publish an ad that misrepresents a candidate’s position on an issue by providing some accurate facts or details but leaving out others on social media, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? Persuasive conversation training document from Victorian Labor

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List of Tables

Table Table Table Table Table

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The membership campaigning nexus Social media use in Australia Campaign participation Australian federal election 2019 2019 Australian federal election field campaigns Three models of campaigning in Australia

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Data-driven campaigning and microtargeting are said to not only be changing election campaigns, but democracy itself. Reports of this occurring are widespread. Christopher Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, told the Guardian (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018): We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.

Writing about the United Kingdom’s referendum to exit the European Union, journalist, Carole Cadwalladr (2017a), summed up what the result meant for the UK: This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook.

Claims about the power and significance of data are ubiquitous in the coverage of election campaigns across advanced democracies. In the aftermath of the 2016 United States (US) presidential election, campaign insiders claimed microtargeting was a key reason that Donald Trump won (Pramuk 2017). Likewise, similar assertions have been made about © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_1

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Australian democracy (Preiss 2018; Burns and Morris 2018). According to this view, twenty-first-century election campaigning involves political parties using ‘big data’, targeting voters with incredible precision, changing what we think and how we will vote. Except, almost none of this appears to be true. In fact, most of what is written in the media about election campaigns seems to be false. Some is the work of public relations teams looking to drum up business for their clients (Ball 2016). Some is campaigns exaggerating their capacities to scare their opponents (Lynch et al. 2018), and the rest are fantasies about how a new software program swung voters one way or the other, or how a new dataset completely revolutionised how we understand women aged between 35 and 45 who live in regional areas (Allen and Vogel 2014). The reality is that we have almost no scholarly evidence to support most of the claims made about data-driven campaigning. So, what is really going on? With the exception of the US, we have a patchy understanding of how prevalent data-driven campaign practices are. This includes how parties collect data, the way data is used in election campaigns, and how it informs microtargeting strategies online and offline. Similarly, we have a limited understanding of how data-driven campaigning is affecting political parties in parliamentary democracies. While a small but expanding group of scholars argue that the reality of data-driven campaigning is different from the way it is portrayed in the media (Hersh 2015; BaldwinPhilippi 2017; Anstead 2017; Baldwin-Philippi 2019), the breadth and depth of knowledge remains inadequate. In this book, I provide a fine-grained account of data-driven campaigning in Australia. I examine the campaigning practices of three political parties—the Australian Labor Party (Labor), the Liberal Party and the Greens.1 In doing so, I detail how prevalent data-driven campaign practices are, outline a new theoretical framework for understanding these practices, analyse the way these practices are affecting political parties and detail what voters think of these practices. What I demonstrate is datadriven practices are extremely uneven. And, even in those parties that are engaging in data-driven campaigning, the effect of these campaigns is debatable. Hence, while discussions of data-driven campaigning practices have become ritualised, and are part of the everyday discourse of political operatives in Australia—like elsewhere—the evidence I present suggests we should remain sceptical about many of the claims made about these practices.

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In making these arguments, I draw on unparalleled qualitative data and evidence for an Australian political science project. This includes 161 interviews conducted between 2015 and 2020 with party officials, members and supporters as well as third-party actors and consultants who have worked for the parties on election campaigns. I also draw on participant observation inside the field campaigns of two separate parties during the 2019 Australian federal election—Labor and the Greens. In total, I spent approximately 96 hours embedded in these campaigns undertaking orthodox field campaigning activities such as doorknocking and phonebanking. While participant observation has been used previously by scholars studying campaigns (Nielsen 2012; Baldwin-Philippi 2015), to my knowledge no other scholar has undertaken participant observation inside two different parties, and certainly not concurrently. I also draw on original survey data from a nationally representative sample of Australian voters (n = 1019) which explores voter perceptions of campaigning practices, including the collection and use of data and targeting. Finally, I draw on a large secondary scholarship from both Australia and internationally. More on this can be found in Chapter 10—the research appendix— which outlines in detail the methods used in this book and how data was collected and analysed.

Campaign Effects: Fact and Fiction That tales of data-driven campaigning are catnip to journalists and political commentators should not surprise us. They contain the best parts of any good story. They present a riddle or mystery. There are heroes and heroines. And they provide closure by telling us how elections were won or lost. Quelle surprise, it was only possible because of the unique set of skills and insights our heroes and heroines possess (Karpf 2019). These stories are influential and effect perceptions of campaigning as they appear to shine a light on processes and practices that most laypeople know very little about (Baldwin-Philippi 2020). Like many advanced democracies, Australia has its fair share of these stories (Bourke 2019).2 But whether it is Cambridge Analytica, Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s campaigns before that, or any other campaign, the scholarly evidence is clear, campaign effects are small and this has been the orthodox view for decades (Gosnell 1927). The cutting-edge literature on campaign effects says: mobilisation is easier than persuasion; mobilisation effects are likely to be larger than

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persuasion effects; the best way to mobilise or persuade voters is through a one-on-one conversation between a campaigner and a prospective voter (Green and Gerber 2015; Kalla and Broockman 2020); and, persuasion effects are likely to be zero except in a very specific set of circumstances (Kalla and Broockman 2018). Thus, while there is plenty of talk about the effects of digital campaigns—and there remains much that we do not know—what we do points in a similar direction: there is little to no effect on persuasion (Haenschen and Jennings 2019; Hager 2019). In fact, for all the talk of the game-changing effects Trump’s digital team had (for example, see Beckett 2017; Ellyat 2017), the most systematic analyses of the 2016 election from Sides et al. (2018: 194) states unequivocally: ‘there is little evidence yet that digital advertising has much impact on voters or consumers’. This literature does come with some caveats. One is that these effects can be hard to measure. Another is that we still have limited knowledge about effects in a range of contexts and institutional setups, including in a country like Australia that uses compulsory voting.3 But for now, the decades long consensus on campaign effects remains. Laypeople reading this may be surprised. After all, much of the commentary on data and electoral politics suggests it is an existential threat to liberal democracy or human agency (see, for example, Cadwalladr 2017a, b). But much of the media coverage confuses and conflates a range of related but distinct issues concerning data and electoral politics. In particular, it conflates the perceived sophistication of data and analytics operations—such as modelling to build scores and to target voters—with the claimed efficacy of such campaigns. In other words, it assumes that because statistical and computational methods used to analyse data are increasingly sophisticated that this inevitably leads to some enlarged effect on voting behaviour. However, the evidence to support this is flimsy to say the least (Baldwin-Philippi 2017, 2019, 2020). Campaign effects are also frequently conflated with data privacy and a range of other related issues. This includes: the use of tracking data about online activity; the acquisition and use of commercial data based on purchasing or financial history; and, the spread of disinformation (Bennett and Lyon 2019). We should be concerned about these issues (Franz 2013), and I would argue for stronger legislative and regulatory mechanisms in every single democracy, including Australia. But these are separate issues that need to be understood in isolation from one another. There is very little scholarly evidence to suggest that parties or

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any other campaigner have the types of persuasive effects often alluded to in the commentary. In fact, there is good reason to doubt the capacities of political parties to even execute data-driven campaigns (BaldwinPhilippi 2019). Hence, the journalistic sub-genre that I like to describe as ‘data dystopia’, should be largely ignored when trying to make sense of campaigning in the twenty-first century.

The Study of Political Parties and Campaigning The scholarly literature on campaigning is enormous, spanning sub-fields such as political science, political communication, journalism and internet studies. The international study of campaigning is also methodologically diverse and rich with empirical and theoretical contributions. Interviews remain one of the primary methods used, especially by many scholars in political science and communication. Quantitative methods are common, as are experimental approaches and designs. However, just like in political science more generally, fine-grained qualitative accounts are increasingly rare. In contrast to this vast international literature, there is little written on campaigning in Australia, and especially campaigning by political parties. Mills (1986, 2014) has written two seminal books. There have been important contributions on digital from Chen (2010, 2012, 2013, 2015), as well as Gibson and co-authors (2002, 2008, 2011), analyses of advertising campaigns and strategies from Young (2003, 2004, 2015), considerations of various reforms to party organisation which affects campaigning from Gauja (2014, 2016, 2017), and a number of relevant contributions from Ward (1991, 2001, 2006) and Van Onselen (2007, 2008).4 Yet for all the virtues of these contributions, we still know little about how campaigns actually function and are organised. We also know next to nothing about how data is collected, analysed and used, and what those involved in the campaigns actually think about these practices. Unlike previous contributions, this book brings the various threads together so that we can better understand not just data and analytics but also digital and field campaign practices. It does so to make sense of these associated phenomena, including how they affect party organisation. Campaigning is—as I discuss in much more detail in Chapter 2—unlike any other aspect of party organisation for the simple fact that it is subject to disruption technologies and there is no ‘official’ story (Kefford 2018a). Even modes of campaigning which appear to have remained

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largely the same since the 1970s such as television advertising or direct mail, are no longer simply about market saturation. Instead, these legacy techniques are underpinned by growing datasets. In the words of one former campaign director from the Liberal Party: ‘Better use of data and targeting means that direct mail and TV are now much more like voter contact and social media and are now much more effective in persuading voters’. While parties in Australia, like elsewhere, are still engaged in broadcast campaign techniques such as television and print advertising (as well as direct mail), these are not the focus of this book. Instead, this book is anchored around three themes: data, digital and field. The reason for this is that while other practices and campaign channels remain important, they are significantly less important than they once were. Moreover, the nature of these campaign activities have far less to do with the parties themselves. Indeed, this was the whole point of much of the scholarly literature which spoke of the professionalisation of politics from the 1960s onwards, including the work of Epstein (1968), Panebianco (1988), and, of course, Katz and Mair (1995). As this book is not just about how parties’ campaign, but what effect these campaigns have on the parties themselves, I focus on what I argue are three core ingredients of contemporary party-based campaigns. Each of these is worth speaking about in more detail. Scholarly research on data-driven campaigning is a burgeoning field, albeit one dominated by US scholars who almost exclusively write on one case, their own. Many of these contributions are, however, excellent. This includes those from Kreiss (2012, 2016), Hersh (2015) and Baldwin-Philippi (2017, 2019, 2020). There have also been important contributions from a range of scholars who have analysed developments in parliamentary democracies such as the UK (Anstead 2017, 2018), and Germany (Kruschinski and Haller 2017; Papakyriakopoulos et al. 2018). Moreover, as the field has expanded, the theoretical insights have also deepened, and attempts to understand the psychological bases of targeting and the analytics process are increasingly common (for example Dobber et al. 2017; Madsen 2019). Significant gaps do, however, remain. While I discuss this more in Chapter 2, I define data-driven campaigning as a set of interlocking practices and processes which includes collecting data, building models of the electorate, creating supporter and persuadability scores, segmenting and targeting voters at the individual level, and the use of testing to refine messaging and

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campaign strategy (Baldwin-Philippi 2017). The data I talk about above and in the title of this book, therefore, is the information collected and analysed so that political parties and other organisations can contact voters online and offline. Discussed more in Chapter 3, the practices associated with collecting and analysing this information are often referred to as data and analytics. Depending on the sophistication of the data and analytics operations, targeting may be at the individual level—which is commonly seen as a key characteristic of data-driven campaigning—or at the demographic or segmented level—which I describe as a characteristic of narrowcasting. Of the three key components of campaigning that will be the focus of this book, digital receives the most attention from commentators. I define digital as online communications which aim to go directly from parties to voters. This includes: (a) the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; (b) online advertising via Google, YouTube and other similar sources; and (c) email to message, advertise and fundraise. While data may have underpinned the Cambridge Analytica scandal, or Trump’s Facebook campaign in 2016 (Lapowsky 2016), digital steals the headlines. We now have over a decade of sustained indepth scholarly attention devoted to digital from a variety of sub-fields and approaches. These contributions are too many to note but some worth pointing to include: Vaccari’s (2013) comparative study of digital in seven Western democracies, and Baldwin-Philippi’s (2015) account of digital campaigning and the construction of citizenship in the US. Each of these, in their own way, points to how digital affords campaigns new ways to organise and create opportunities for supporters to engage and participate in democracy. Field campaigns, or the ‘ground war’, are an essential component of the campaigns that many political parties in advanced democracies employ. In simple terms, field campaigns are the doorknocking and phonebanking operations that political parties conduct. In describing field campaigns in the US, Nielsen (2012: 7) argues that American political campaigns are pursuing ‘personalised political communication’. These practices are increasingly informed by data and analytics to allow field organisers to mobilise and co-ordinate volunteers5 for maximum impact. In Australia, canvassing has long been a part of the ‘ground war’ (Mills 2015: 123), but we still know very little about how field campaigns are affecting party organisation and the relationship between parties and citizens.

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While data and analytics, digital and field are distinct areas of a campaign, the goal of many political parties is to integrate relevant insights across other areas of the campaign. Therefore, studying them together is important. Each of these has, of course, been the focus of scholarly books. However, no monograph that I know of has pulled these strands together in this way. Moreover, the focus of most books is on the US. While hugely influential in regard to campaigning practices and approaches, the US is an outlier due to its unusual institutional architecture and campaign finance regime. Much more evidence of how these practices are affecting parliamentary democracies is required. We also need more in-depth fine-grained analyses of how prevalent data-driven campaigning practices are within party systems. This book does just that.

Cases and Macro-Political Context The primary unit of analysis for this book are the three parties that contest the most elections in Australia. These three parties provide useful contrasts with one another organisationally and ideologically, while confronting the same set of institutional, regulatory and contextual factors. The Australian party system, the way these parties organise themselves, and the institutional architecture of Australian democracy are complex and need to be explained, especially for non-Australian readers who may be unfamiliar with the players or the ‘rules of the game’.6 The defining feature of Australian democracy is the use of compulsory voting.7 Unsurprisingly, this has a significant effect on how political parties’ campaign. The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) estimates that as of December 2019, 96.9 per cent of eligible Australians were registered to vote (AEC 2020). Turnout for Australian federal elections also remains high. From those registered to vote, between 91 and 95 percent have done so since 2001 (AEC 2019). Put another way, out of almost 17 million eligible voters, over 15 million cast a ballot in the 2019 federal election. Australian federal election results are decided by a mixed electoral system.8 The Alternative Vote system is used for the House of Representatives and the Single Transferable Vote system is used for the Senate.9 This mixed system—the former a preferential system and the latter a proportional system with preferential elements—means that election contests are never just about the major parties. Despite what many continue to claim, Australia is not and has not been a two-party system for decades (Kefford

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2017; Kefford et al. 2018).10 The nature and shape of electoral competition in Australia is multi-party and multi-dimensional. The major parties are in competition with one another, as well as an array of insurgent forces. The preferences of minor parties are significant, and the major parties need to not only persuade voters to support them but also to preference them above their competitors. Westminster legacies still cut deep and affect how Australian politics is conducted, but this legacy is eroding, and the shape of the electoral contest is fought in new and surprising ways in each cycle. The declining vote for the major parties is both symptom and cause in this (Kefford 2018b, 2020). The three parties I focus on are worth elaborating on further. The first of these is Labor, which is Australia’s oldest surviving party. This longevity means the organisation has had to evolve and respond to multiple changes in the political landscape. Labor was a classic mass party. What it became next is, like so many other parties, a source of serious debate. Electoral-professional, catch-all and cartel have all been used to describe it (Warhurst and Parkin 2000; Jaensch 2006; Ward 2006). Labor is organised along federal lines, meaning that there is a degree of power-sharing that occurs between the state-based parties and the national organisation. The party has been extremely proficient and successful at winning subnational elections, but has been the party of opposition at the federal level (Moon and Sharman 2003). The Liberal Party, at the federal level at least, is an election-winning machine. Since 1949, they have held office for 49 of the 71 years. In that time, they have won 19 out of the 28 elections. Their dominance is multicausal but has meant they are often second best when it comes to engaging with new technologies and approaches to campaigning. The organisation of the Liberal Party, like Labor, is along federal lines (Brett 2003, 2006). However, at the federal level—and in most states—they are in a formal and long-standing coalition with the Nationals, the dominant party in regional Australia. In Queensland, a key battleground state in federal elections, the two parties merged into one in 2008, becoming the Liberal National Party (LNP). The Australian Greens sit at the apex of a confederation which consists of the various state-based green parties. Yet, like most parties in multilevel jurisdictions, federal (or national) issues and actors have increasingly shaped the organisational structure of the party (Jackson 2015; Miragliotta and Jackson 2015). While they had previously been more successful at the subnational level, the Greens have maintained a presence

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in the Australian Senate since 1998.11 In that time, they have increased their representatives in the Senate from one to ten (currently nine), and since 2010 have held the seat of Melbourne in the House of Representatives. The rise of the Greens as the third force in Australian politics places them in direct competition with Labor and the battle between the two over who best represents the interests of progressives, reflects a critical schism in Australian electoral politics (Crowe 2018). A key reason for studying campaigning in Australia is that it is a near-perfect—though not unique—laboratory for understanding a critical component of many modern campaigns: persuasion. Australia’s use of compulsory voting means parties devote almost no resources to mobilising voters to turnout. Like most advanced democracies, Australia is suffering from declining trust and satisfaction in our political institutions. Yet turnout remains high because we are incentivised to vote. We are socialised into a political culture where voting is normalised, uncontroversial and election days have a carnival-like atmosphere (Brett 2019).12 Hence, while there are often issues in determining whether a strategy is effective at mobilising voters as opposed to persuading them in systems which use voluntary voting, in Australia that is largely irrelevant. On many of the measures used to gauge how healthy democracies are, Australia performs relatively well. In fact, Australia is close to the median on many of these measures (Cameron and McAllister 2019: 15). However, this obscures the precipitous decline in the way Australian voters feel about their democracy. One proxy we can use to test democratic health is voter satisfaction with democracy. On this measure, satisfaction has dropped dramatically in the last decade or more. Hitting an all-time high in 2007 of 86 per cent, since then a sustained decline has been evident, with only 59 per cent of respondents to the Australian Election Study in 2019 saying they were satisfied. Another aspect of the macro-political environment that Australian parties are dealing with is the extreme fragmentation of the media landscape. Like many advanced democracies, the decline of broadcast media—television, newspaper and radio—and the rise of the internet not just as a source of information, but as an arena in which politics is conducted and fought, has had significant effects that we are still coming to grips with. While there are tens of thousands of scholars interested in questions related to the intersection of politics and the internet, blind spots in our knowledge remain. There is no clear sense of whether the changes, and especially the rise of the internet, has been a positive or a

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negative for political parties, let alone liberal democracy. Scholars remain divided not just on the size of effects, but even the direction (Gibson and Ward 2020). There is quite obviously a whole range of other measures and indicators that can be used to explain the health of Australian democracy.13 However, within the confines of what is possible in this chapter, what can be said is that while Australian democracy has some relatively unique institutional features, the broader forces affecting liberal democracy across the globe are also shaping the dynamics of democracy here as well.

Research Questions, Key Argument & Structure of Chapters The key research questions of this book are: How prevalent are datadriven campaigning practices in Australia? What effect are data-driven campaigning practices having on how political parties organise themselves? And, what effect is data-driven campaigning having on Australian democracy? Understanding how widespread these practices and processes are can tell us a lot about modern liberal democratic politics in the twentyfirst century, including the incentives and drivers of political and social change. The central arguments of this book are as follows. The three parties that consistently contest the most seats, and therefore do the most campaigning in Australia, have responded to a complex set of exogenous and endogenous pressures—including fragmentation of the media landscape and changing modes of political participation—wrought by significant social and political forces in three distinct ways. This reflects the organisational and cultural politics of these parties and three distinct strands of Australian politics. Thus, while there is a broad shift towards a set of campaign practices which Kreiss (2016: 3) describes as ‘technologyintensive campaigning’, the ability of parties to leverage these capacities remains uneven. This is both a product of the resources these parties have at their disposal as well as strategic decision-making about investments in infrastructure and personnel. Of the three parties covered in this book, only one—Labor—is engaged in data-driven campaigning. In contrast, I argue Liberal Party campaigns are better understood as a form of narrowcasting and Greens campaigns are better understood as a form of community organising. There are certainly aspects to the Liberal and Greens campaigns which align with how I and others define data-driven campaigning—primarily

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online—but this is because of the functionality provided by social media and technology companies, not because these parties are investing in the type of infrastructure, personnel or data which is indicative of data-driven campaigning. The evidence collected here therefore adds weight to the ‘sceptical account’ of data-driven campaigning (Baldwin-Philippi 2017; Dommett 2019). The Liberal Party has been slower to respond to data-driven modes of campaigning than their primary electoral competitors, Labor. The reasons for this are multifaceted, but one driver is that they continue to win at the federal level without needing to overhaul their campaign operations. This differs significantly from what we have seen in other jurisdictions such as the US where there is an electoral politics ‘arms race’ taking place (Kreiss 2016). In contrast, Labor has devoted considerable resources to infrastructure and staffing. The Greens have drawn on lessons from international campaigns, civil society and their own experiences in a technologically minimalist, yet powerful mode of electoral politics. While the dynamism of new and interesting communications technology captivates popular attention, Australian political parties—like those internationally—have been slowly and quietly building enormous datasets on Australian voters. Data is increasingly perceived to be an asset worth investing in and building capacity around. Data harvesting operations are now common and Australian parties with any level of organisational know-how, are now actively harvesting data online and offline. Given developments elsewhere, it is likely that data-driven campaigning will only increase in scope and scale in Australia. I also argue that the major parties are out of touch with community expectations when it comes to the ethical use of voter data. Other parties, such as the Greens, also have questions to answer, although the evidence suggests their use of data is less ethically questionable. While digital—often in conjunction with data—are the focus of most media commentary and analyses, field campaigning is the dominant mode of campaigning in Australia. Digital campaigning is certainly widespread and likely to increase, but there is little to suggest that these campaigns are effective at persuading voters. More significant is the effect that digital campaigning is having on party organisation, as the major parties are utilising a range of external actors to perform a variety of functions for them. But these effects are still likely to be less than those wrought by field campaigns. Field is highly valued by the parties and this is one factor (among many) which is encouraging the parties to open themselves up

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to non-member supporters in ways that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Data and analytics, which has received little attention in the scholarship thus far, is also affecting how parties organise themselves and require much more attention from scholars interested in the relationship between campaigning and party organisation. In advancing these central arguments this book will make significant empirical and theoretical contributions to the literature. It will demonstrate, empirically, the way campaigning practices—including data and analytics, digital and field campaigns—are affecting the organisational structure of political parties. The depth and richness of the data will also provide a unique insight into the practices and cultures of party-based campaigning, including how campaigners perceive the social and political world and where they think opportunities are present for them to nudge voters towards their preferred positions. The rest of the book is structured in the following way. In Chapter 2— I describe the relationship between how a political party campaigns and the way they organise themselves. I introduce the key theoretical literature on political parties and campaigning and my original theoretical framework to understand data-driven campaign practices. Chapter 3 explores data and analytics, including how parties collect and analyse data so that they can target voters. I demonstrate that the data and analytics operations commonly associated with data-driven campaigning are not as common as is often assumed. I also explore some of the challenges of data-driven campaigning in Australia. In Chapter 4, I trace the rise of digital campaigning in Australia, including the use of targeted social media advertising and the challenges digital campaigning presents for political parties in Australia. Chapter 5 begins the discussion of field campaigning. I show how twenty-firstcentury doorknocking and phonebanking operations are often underpinned by data and targeting is a key component. I also discuss a range of metrics and experiments the parties have conducted to test the efficacy of field campaigns in Australia. Building on the previous chapter, in Chapter 6 I provide a fine-grained case study of field campaigning. I describe how Labor attempted to target voters who were perceived to be ‘persuadable’ and who were intending to vote for Australia’s populist radical right party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Drawing on extensive interview data, I demonstrate that while the strategy was

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underpinned by a sophisticated data and analytics operation, the experiences of campaigners on the ground highlight some of the challenges of data-driven campaigning for political parties. In Chapter 7 I explore what voters think of data-driven campaigning. Drawing on data from an original survey instrument that I designed and fielded, I investigate Australian voter attitudes to a range of relevant issues and themes. This includes questions about the collection of data by political parties, whether parties engage with voters enough, as well as online political advertising and misinformation. In Chapter 8 I begin the task of making sense of the evidence and consider what the findings suggest in light of the framework outlined in Chapter 2. In particular, I argue that orthodox scholarly frameworks that deal with parties and campaigning underappreciate the scale of change that has occurred. I set out what I see as three distinct types of campaign practices of the three Australian parties covered. In the conclusion, I bring the threads of analysis together. I make some final comments on campaigning and party organisation, and I discuss future research opportunities and the limitations of the project. This is followed by a research appendix in which I outline the data collection processes and the research design.

Notes 1. I simply say the ‘Greens’ here because while they come together as the Australian Greens in the federal parliament, they come from different state-based parties (Jackson 2016). 2. An important historical note here is that even before the data and analytics revolution, media stories aggrandising campaign directors and consultants were common, see Mills (2014: 193). Jennifer Green, the executive director of the Analyst Institute, has said that after every election, the media is filled with ‘guru-ism’, stories of how this operative or that consultant was the key difference between winning and losing. But most parties, like most social scientists have a very limited understanding of voter decision-making (Sides and Vavreck 2014). 3. For scholars to measure campaign effects, this usually requires cooperation with the campaign on a field experiment to test effects between different groups who receive some form of campaign treatment—for example, a doorknock or a phone-call—and a control group. Not only is it very unusual for campaigns to provide researchers with this level of access, in many countries—such as Australia—it is extremely unlikely that university ethics boards would allow you to do this research. Survey

1

4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

INTRODUCTION

15

experiments provide one potential way to overcome these issues. But the artificial and often wildly unrealistic delivery mechanisms, means findings need to come with significant caveats. There are of course contributions beyond these, especially in communication and marketing, but this is a good cross-section of the political science scholarship on campaigning in Australia. From this point, when I refer to volunteers, I mean both members and non-member supporters who participate in campaigns. I will speak specifically about members and non-member supporters when talking about their respective role and functions. For more on the Australian party system and other relevant institutional factors, see Jaensch and Mathieson (1998), Marsh (2006), Ghazarian (2015), Miragliotta et al. (2015). It is important to note for non-Australian readers, that voters merely need to turn up and have their name marked off the roll and they can do whatever they choose with the ballot. The penalty for not turning up to vote in Australian federal elections is $20 AUD as of 2019. While the focus will primarily be on federal elections, sub-national elections will also be discussed as relevant. The House of Representatives at the time of writing consisted of 151 single member electorates which are contested at every federal election. The Australian Senate has 76 Senators, 12 for each of the six states and two from each of the territories. Senators have nominal six-year terms, meaning normal federal elections are half-senate elections. However, if a double dissolution, as occurred in 2016, is enacted, elections for all seats in both chambers are required. What is true is that the electoral system used for the House of Representatives and in many states produces a two-party preferred result at the electorate and national level. However, this is often conflated with the nature of the party system. The West Australian Greens did have representation in the Senate prior to this, however, they were not formal members of the Australian Greens till 2003. Clearly, one important part of this is that we have an independent electoral commission so political parties cannot try to change district size or the number of voters to suit their agendas. The various national election study series’ are a good place to start, but other valuable sources include the World Values Survey, studies from Pew and other polling agencies, as well as work emerging out of The Centre for the Future of Democracy at the University of Cambridge. See Foa et al. (2020) for their initial report on democratic malaise.

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References Allen, Mike, and Kenneth Vogel. 2014. Inside the Koch data mine. Politico. https://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/koch-brothers-rnc-113359. Accessed 18 July 2016. Anstead, Nick. 2017. Data-driven campaigning in the 2015 United Kingdom general election. The International Journal of Press/Politics 22 (3): 294–313. Anstead, Nick. 2018. Data and election campaigning. Political Insight 9 (2): 32–35. Australian Electoral Commission. 2019. Voter turnout. https://www.aec.gov.au/ elections/federal_elections/voter-turnout.htm. Accessed 3 Mar 2020. Australian Electoral Commission. 2020. Size of the electoral roll and enrolment rate 2019. https://www.aec.gov.au/enrolling_to_vote/enrolment_stats/nat ional/2019.htm. Accessed 4 Mar 2020. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2015. Using technology, building democracy: Digital campaigning and the construction of citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2017. The myths of data-driven campaigning. Political Communication 34 (4): 627–633. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2019. Data campaigning: Between empirics and assumptions. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2020. Data ops, objectivity, and outsiders: Journalistic coverage of data campaigning. Political Communication (Online first). Ball, Molly. 2016. There’s nothing better than a scared, rich candidate. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/10/the res-nothing-better-than-a-scared-rich-candidate/497522/. Accessed 12 Sept 2018. Beckett, Lois. 2017. Trump digital director says Facebook helped win the White House. The Guardian. https://goo.gl/HUKRS8. Accessed 9 Oct 2017. Bennett, Colin J., and David Lyon. 2019. Data-driven elections: Implications and challenges for democratic societies. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–16. Bourke, Latika. 2019. Boris Johnson’s conservatives hire Kiwi gurus who worked on Morrison’s shock win. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www. smh.com.au/world/europe/boris-johnson-s-conservatives-hire-kiwi-guruswho-worked-on-morrison-s-shock-win-20191008-p52yia.html. Accessed 7 Nov 2019. Brett, Judith. 2003. Australian liberals and the moral middle class: From Alfred Deakin to John Howard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brett, Judith. 2006. The liberal party. In Government, politics, power and policy in Australia, ed. J. Summer and D. Woodward A. Parkin. Frenchs Forest, NSW: Pearson Education. Brett, Judith. 2019. From secret ballot to democracy sausage: How Australia got compulsory voting. Melbourne: Text Publishing.

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Jackson, Stewart. 2015. The Australian Greens. In Contemporary Australian political party organisations, ed. Narelle Miragliotta, Anika Gauja, and Rodney Smith, 37–49. Clayton, VIC: Monash University Press. Jackson, Stewart. 2016. The Australian Greens: From activism to Australia’s third party. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Jaensch, Dean. 2006. Party structures and processes. In Political Parties in Transition? ed. Ian Marsh, 24–46. Sydney: Federation Press. Jaensch, Dean, and David Scott Mathieson. 1998. A plague on both your houses: Minor parties in Australia. St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin Academic. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2018. The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments. American Political Science Review 112 (1): 148–166. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2020. Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: Evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review 114 (2): 410–425. Karpf, David. 2019. On digital disinformation and democratic myths. Mediawell. https://mediawell.ssrc.org/expert-reflections/on-digital-disinformation-anddemocratic-myths/. Accessed 9 Feb 2020. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1995. Changing models of party organization and party democracy the emergence of the cartel party. Party Politics 1 (1): 5–28. Kefford, Glenn. 2017. Rethinking small political parties: From micro to peripheral. Australian Journal of Political Science 52 (1): 95–109. Kefford, Glenn. 2018a. Digital media, ground wars and party organization: Does stratarchy explain how parties organize election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs. Kefford, Glenn. 2018b. Minor parties’ campaigns. In Double dissolution: The 2016 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Jennifer Curtin, and Juliet Pietsch, 335–357. Canberra: ANU Press. Kefford, Glenn. 2020. The Minor Parties. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer, and Marian Simms, 343–355. Canberra: ANU Press. Kefford, Glenn, Hannah Murphy-Gregory, Ian Ward, Stewart Jackson, Lloyd Cox, and Andrea Carson. 2018. Australian politics in the twenty-first century: Old institutions, new challenges. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Kreiss, Daniel. 2012. Taking our country back: The crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreiss, Daniel. 2016. Prototype politics: Technology-intensive campaigning and the data of democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kruschinski, Simon, and Andre Haller. 2017. Restrictions on data-driven political micro-targeting in Germany. Internet Policy Review 6 (4): 1–23.

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Lapowsky, Ipie. 2016. Here’s how Facebook actually won Trump the presidency. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-ele ction-not-just-fake-news/. Accessed 9 May 2017. Lynch, Gabrielle, Justin Willis, and Nic Cheeseman. 2018. Claims about Cambridge analytica’s role in Africa should be taken with a pinch of salt. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/claims-about-cambridge-ana lyticas-role-in-africa-should-be-taken-with-a-pinch-of-salt-93864. Accessed 27 Mar 2018. Madsen, Jens Koed. 2019. The psychology of micro-targeted election campaigns. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Marsh, Ian. 2006. Political parties in transition. Sydney: Federation Press. Mills, Stephen. 1986. The new machine men: Polls and persuasion in Australian politics, vol. Book, Whole. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin. Mills, Stephen. 2014. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Mills, Stephen. 2015. Parties and Campaigning. In Contemporary Australian political party organisations, ed. Narelle Miragliotta, Anika Gauja, and Rodney Smith, 115–126. Clayton: Monash University Publishing. Miragliotta, Narelle, Anika Gauja, and Rodney Kenneth Smith. 2015. Contemporary Australian political party organisations. Melbourne: Monash University Publishing. Miragliotta, Narelle, and Stewart Jackson. 2015. Green parties in federal systems: Resistant or compliant to centralizing pressures? Government and Opposition 50 (04): 549–577. Moon, Jeremy, and Campbell Sharman. 2003. Australian politics and Government: The commonwealth, the states and the territories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Political parties: Organization and power. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Papakyriakopoulos, Orestis, Simon Hegelich, Morteza Shahrezaye, and Juan Carlos Medina Serrano. 2018. Social media and microtargeting: Political data processing and the consequences for Germany. Big Data & Society 5 (2): 2053951718811844. Pramuk, Jacob. 2017. Trump’s digital director explains how he used Facebook to help win the White House. CNBC. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/ 09/brad-parscale-says-trump-campaign-used-facebook-to-beat-clinton.html. Accessed 14 Oct 2017. Preiss, Ben. 2018. Big data: Political groups aim to win by homing in on small details. The Age. https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/big-data-pol

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itical-groups-aim-to-win-by-homing-in-on-small-details-20180914-p503w7. html. Accessed 9 Mar 2019. Sides, John, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck. 2018. Identity crisis: The 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of America. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Sides, John, and Lynn Vavreck. 2014. Obama’s not so big data. Pacific Standard. https://psmag.com/social-justice/obamas-big-data-inconclusiveresults-political-campaigns-72687. Accessed 6 May 2019. Vaccari, Cristian. 2013. Digital politics in Western democracies: A comparative study. Baltimore: JHU Press. Van Onselen, Ainslie, and Peter Van Onselen. 2008. On message or out of touch? Secure web sites and political campaigning in Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science 43 (1): 43–58. Van Onselen, Peter, and Wayne Errington. 2007. The democratic state as a marketing tool: The permanent campaign in Australia. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 45 (1): 78–94. Ward, Ian. 1991. The changing organisational nature of Australia’s political parties. Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 29 (2): 153–174. Ward, Ian. 2001. Trudeaumania and it’s time: The early use of TV for political communication. Australian Canadian Studies 19 (1): 1–21. Ward, Ian. 2006. Cartel parties and election campaigning in Australia. In Political parties in transition, ed. Ian Marsh, 70–93. Sydney: Federation Press. Warhurst, John, and Andrew Parkin. 2000. The Machine: Labor confronts the future, vol. Book, Whole. St Leonards, N.S.W: Allen & Unwin. Young, Sally. 2003. A century of political communication in Australia, 1901– 2001. Journal of Australian Studies 78: 97–110. Young, Sally. 2015. Campaign advertising and communication strategies in the election of 2013. In Abbott’s gambit: The 2013 Australian federal election, ed. Carol Johnson and John Wanna, 95–107. Canberra: ANU Press. Young, Sally Ann. 2004. The persuaders: Inside the hidden machine of political advertising. Sydney: Pluto Press.

CHAPTER 2

Theorising Contemporary Campaign Practices

To say liberal democracy is in trouble is to state the bleeding obvious. What role political parties have played in the crises and whether they can play a role in leading us out of it is far less certain. Political parties are required to thread the needle between short-to-medium term desires— such as winning or retaining office—and long-term necessities—such as ensuring the organisation exists as a meaningful entity that can deliver for members and supporters. This task is not an easy one. Some political parties seem to only respond to significant exogenous events or crises, and this shapes strategic decision-making. In the public policy literature, this is often referred to as a Punctuated Equilibrium Model (PEM) of change; stasis followed by periods of rapid change (True et al. 1999). Changes to other political parties appear more incremental and are affected by path dependency. In Schmidt’s (2008) terms, institutions such as political parties are ‘sticky’ and agents are constrained by the path-dependent effects of organisational change. The Australian political parties covered in this book have responded to diverse and complex forces reshaping our democracies and have arrived at three distinct positions on campaigning in the twenty-first century. It might seem strange to talk about the broader democratic crisis and then segue into campaigning, especially as many critics view campaigning as the shallow and crass under-belly of democratic decision-making. But © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_2

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the two are inextricably connected. How political parties in Australia are campaigning—just like elsewhere—is at least partially explained as a response to the broader sociopolitical context. This includes the broader crisis of democracy which is affecting most advanced democracies. There are certainly more variables that need to be accounted for in the strategic decision-making process and the role of intra-party actors, including the ideas they hold are also important (Deschouwer 1992; Gauja 2017). But this is one driver interviewees often pointed to and is also addressed in many party reviews which stress declining trust in political institutions, dissatisfaction with democracy and declining turnout are existential crises for liberal democracy (for example, see Liberal Party of Australia 2015; Australian Labor Party 2019). Parties are, whether critics like it or not, at the centre of this tumult. This chapter will map the literature on campaigning and party organisation, paying attention to key theories which implicitly or explicitly deal with the way campaigning is affected by both endogenous and exogenous forces. It will then discuss the literature on data-driven campaigning, including the effect data and technology is having on the practices and culture of political parties. I then introduce the original theoretical framework of contemporary campaign practices I developed inductively from the empirical research collected for this project. In doing so, this chapter establishes the empirical and theoretical foundations for the subsequent chapters that describe contemporary campaign practices in Australia and consider how these practices are affecting party organisation and Australian democracy.

Political Parties and Campaigning Campaigning has significant implications for party organisation. The party organisation literature has told us this time and time again. In making the case for the cartel party thesis, Katz and Mair (1995: 136) spoke of the ‘nature of party work and party campaigning’ as one of the central characteristics of party organisation.1 While a heuristic and not meant to reflect actual empirical cases, the thesis is critically important as it clearly elucidates the central characteristics of parties in each of these eras or models of party organisation (see Table 2.1). Additional insights in regard to campaigning and party organisation come from Panebianco (1988) and his ‘electoral professional model’. In it, Panebianco suggested that parties were increasingly reliant on external actors for support with

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Table 2.1 The membership campaigning nexus Characteristics

Elite party

Mass party

Catch-all party

Cartel party

Time-period

nineteenth century

1880–1960

1945–

1970–

Nature of Irrelevant party work and party campaigning

Labour intensive

Both labour intensive and capital intensive

Capital intensive

Principal Personal source of party’s contacts resources

Members’ fees and contributions

Contributions State from a wide subventions variety of sources

Relations between ordinary members and party elite

The elite are the ‘ordinary’ members

Bottom-up—elite accountable to members

Top-down; members are organised cheerleaders for elite

Stratarchy; mutual autonomy

Character of membership

Small and elitist

Large and homogenous; actively recruited; membership a logical consequence of identity; emphasis on rights and obligations

Membership open to all (heterogeneous) and encouraged; rights emphasised but not obligations; membership marginal to individual’s identity

Neither rights nor obligations important (distinction between member and non-members blurred);

their campaigns, such as pollsters and advertising experts. The growth of such external support was seen to lie in these actors’ ability to perform key functions for parties that were beyond the political parties’ institutional capacity to deliver (Farrell et al. 2001: 12), or in providing strategic campaign advice above what the parties possessed (Grossmann 2009: 91).2 This signalled an important shift, showing parties were paying specialists for support. This table is based on the characteristics of the elite, mass, catch-all and cartel parties as outlined by Katz and Mair (1995: 18). A different yet equally significant area of the scholarship has spoken of ‘eras’ or ‘phases’ in campaigning (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999; Farrell 2006). There are too many of these to mention all of them, but some worth expanding on include those of Norris (2000) and Roemmele and

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Gibson (2020). According to Norris (2000: 138) there have been three distinct eras of campaigning. First, was the pre-modern era typified by direct communication. Second, was the modern era which was typified by the linkages between voters and parties declining and communication occurring primarily through broadcasting via the mass media. Finally, in the post-modern era, Norris argued, the links between parties and voters returned, but this was largely superficial, via microtargeting. Campaigning was therefore largely viewed as capital intensive rather than labour intensive. Roemmele and Gibson (2020) have recently argued, however, that we have now entered a fourth phase. This fourth phase consists of two types of campaigns, the scientific on the one hand and the subversive on the other. While the party types and the eras or phases of campaigning are useful, especially when used as a heuristic, what is particularly lacking in most of these accounts is a clear sense of how campaigning is affected by and in turn affects party organisation. This is why the work of Scarrow (2015) is particularly significant. According to Scarrow (2015), parties have responded to the changing dynamics of political participation by opening their previously impenetrable membership walls to non-members. Parties, as a result, have become ‘multi-speed membership’ organisations with different types and forms of affiliation. What Scarrow convincingly shows is that parties have responded to and recognised that the sociopolitical environment they are working in has changed dramatically from 30 years earlier. This change has meant that political parties have—to use the language of the party scholarship—moved from the ‘bullseye’ model to this new ‘multi-speed membership’ model. The bullseye model, devised by legendary political scientist, Maurice Duverger (1969), was designed to explain how mass parties provided increased rights only to those who moved closer to the bullseye or centre of the party. Scarrow’s model, in contrast, suggests the rights of non-members have expanded, but their obligations have not. In effect, supporters, which come in a variety of forms—for example, ‘light members’ and ‘cyber members’—can choose how, how much and when they want to participate. Scarrow’s thesis is increasingly being tested in different contexts and conditions and there is reason to think the model has significant explanatory power. One such example comes from the UK. Webb et al. (2017), ask an important question for political parties, ‘Who does the donkey work’ that

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an election campaign requires? As they would go on to say, it has traditionally been obvious that this was party members. Members get together in their branches to discuss upcoming elections and develop a strategy for how the local membership would contribute to the campaign. But most parties no longer have an enormous membership to draw on, so who does this ‘donkey work’? Enter the multi-speed membership party. While Webb, Bale and Poletti (2017: 72)3 would find that ‘members of political parties are far more likely to engage in campaign activity on behalf of their party than are people who support that party but who do not formally belong to it’, the amount of non-member activity remained significant. These findings support a number of other studies, including from the UK and Australia (Fisher et al. 2014; Bale et al. 2019; Gauja and Jackson 2016; Gauja and Grömping 2020). To quote Webb et al. (2017: 72), ‘Looking solely at party members restricts us to only half of the picture and may provide an exaggerated impression of parties losing their grip on society’.4 The key takeaway, then, is that non-member supporters are playing a significant role in the campaigns that political parties are conducting in countries like Australia and the UK. The debate is about the size of the role in comparison to members, the reasons that parties are so open to the involvement of these non-member supporters, and what the long-term effects of this are on political parties as membership organisations (Gauja 2015, 2017). Another significant question the scholarly community is grappling with is how digital campaigning affects political parties. At present, there is significant disagreement and the literature points to contradictory trends. Some scholars argue that the internet reduces costs and provides participatory opportunities (Boulianne 2009; Vaccari and Valeriani 2016). Chadwick (2007) has suggested that the internet has caused new organisational types to emerge and existing structures to adapt, shifting how we understand party activities and power structures. Chadwick and StromerGalley (2016) argue that digital affordances cause parties to be renewed and reshaped ‘from the outside in’. However, not all scholars agree with this. Indeed, some argue digital reinforces existing hierarchies about campaign professionals and the centralised control of campaigns, the socalled ‘normalisation thesis’ (see Gibson and Ward 2012), while others point to different developments. Gibson’s (2015) account of the rise of ‘citizen-initiated campaigning’, for example, points to a decentralising trend which challenges more widely held models of professionalised

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campaigning.5 Questions therefore remain about the effects of digital on party organisation, especially in parliamentary democracies. Despite the lack of clarity, the effect of campaigning on party organisation is a question taken up by an ever-increasing number of scholars. Some have tapped into broader debates about whether campaigning has a stratarchical effect on party organisation (Kefford 2018), others have theorised about the role of external actors in digital campaigning (Dommett et al. 2020), the effect of data-driven campaigning on party organisation (Roemmele and Gibson 2020), or the role of social media in affecting parties linkage role (Vaccari and Valeriani 2016). While useful contributions to the debate, many of these studies only deal with one aspect of campaigning, and often the focus is on digital. While not surprising, digital is just one aspect of the campaign cache. Quite evidently, campaigning is multifaceted and multidimensional. This by itself separates it from other areas of party organisation. In contrast to developing and maintaining the membership, developing policy, or selecting candidates or the leadership, campaigning is more open to intra-party insurgency by influential actors and technological disruption. Campaigning is, as I’ve said elsewhere (Kefford 2018), unlike these other areas of party organisation as it is not a part of the ‘official story’ of political parties. Instead, it is informal and there is little if anything said about it in most party documents. This partially explains why it has received so little attention in the party organisation literature and why it remains ‘one of the most secret of gardens’ for political scientists (Farrell 2006: 130).

Data-Driven Campaigning The secretive nature of campaigning has implications for how we understand and explain it. The concepts remain fuzzy and questions remain about how widespread practices really are. One challenge is even defining what data-driven campaigning is and what it is not. This is a source of debate (Baldwin-Philippi 2017; Dommett 2019). For example, what data are we talking about? And how fine-grained is the targeting? Bennett and Gordon (2020) argue that ‘the concept of political microtargeting is vaguely used, poorly understood, and only sparsely studied outside the US’. I agree. But I would add that it is another example of the way that the domination of US single country case studies has shaped the parameters of the debate. And, the way data-driven campaigning is reported on

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in the media implies that campaigning is homogenised and there has been a diffusion of US campaign practices across advanced democracies.6 The reality is that we simply do not know whether this is true or not. Another challenge is dealing with what is and is not new. Often overlooked is that while the scale of data collection is greater and campaign channels have changed, parties have been collecting data and using that information to target voters for decades. Campaigns across the globe used the information they had on voters to send personalised and targeted messages via direct mail for thirty years before Mark Zuckerberg and his friends came up with Facebook in his Harvard dorm room (Renner 2012). Mills (2014: 196–200), for example, has described the way that both major parties in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s combined direct mail with insights from their growing databases to target voters, primarily in marginal seats. Therefore, while there is a tendency to point to a time, well before now, and to suggest that in this previous era politics was uncorrupted by scheming campaign professionals, this is nothing more than navel-gazing. What do we know, then, about how data-driven campaign practices are shaping party organisation? The evidence collected so far is decidedly unclear in parliamentary democracies, especially in contrast to analyses which focus on the US (Kreiss 2016). There are some exceptions. Anstead (2017), for example, has shown how data-driven campaign practices are very uneven in the UK. I have (2018: 668) previously written about the way that different campaigning practices affect the locus of intra-party power in the Australian parties. But these insights are, at best, incomplete explanations and the problems with the literature go well beyond the lack of fine-grained empirical evidence about what these practices look like. There are practically no theoretical frameworks which seek to understand the relationship between data-driven practices and party organisation. In the following section I set out a new framework for understanding there practices. I use this framework in the rest of the book to consider how they are affecting Australian political parties.

Campaigning and Party Organisation: A New Theoretical Framework The theoretical and empirical literature on how parties organise themselves is rich with insightful contributions. However, it has failed to systematically incorporate how campaigning affects party organisation

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into the extant models and frameworks. Those which have considered this question have also focussed solely on digital or field. None, that I know of, try to bring the various strands together. Similarly, none try to make sense of how data and analytics operations affect party organisation in parliamentary democracies.7 There are good reasons for this, the challenge in trying to make sense of the various developments is immense. While party scholars interested in how political parties organise themselves have dealt with related issues for decades (Katz and Mair 1995), even the much-vaunted cartel party thesis is heavily criticised for its limited relationship to the empirical reality of most political parties (Koole 1996; Kitschelt 2000; Smith and O’Mahony 2006).8 Rather than developing an all-encompassing theory of party organisation, which likely misses most of the detail about campaign practices, I instead focus on conceptualising data-driven campaigning practices so they can be mapped onto what we already know about party organisation. Underpinning my framework is the idea, widely accepted in the scholarship, that established parties across advanced democracies collect data on voters and this has increased in recent decades (Hersh 2015; Anstead 2017; Bennett and Gordon 2020; Jungherr et al. 2020).9 This data is used to inform campaign strategies across different channels, whether that is direct mail, digital, field campaigns or whatever else. This has, of course, been facilitated by a range of technological advances, whether in telephony, computerisation or data analysis (Kreiss 2012, 2016). These practices also range from the relatively benign—such as collecting publicly available data—to the more subversive, such as harvesting data on voters via social media (Roemmele and Gibson 2020). Nonetheless, the key here is that parties all rely on at least some data. The question is whether the way they use data and the way data underpins their campaign practices aligns with scholarly explanations of data-driven campaigning. Put simply, while all parties use data, not all conduct data-driven campaigns. Understanding and unpacking these differences is important. To improve how we understand contemporary campaign practices, I outline four types of campaign practices—each of which is informed by data to varying degrees. I describe the four sets of practices as— voter outreach, community organising, narrowcasting and data-driven campaigning. These are not new descriptions of campaigning practices (Simpson 2013; Vromen 2016; Baldwin-Philippi 2017). What is new, however, is that I explain how they relate to one another and how they map on to party organisation. My framework for understanding

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how campaigning affects party organisation re-packages the taxonomy of Duverger (1969), who used concentric circles to illustrate increasing affiliation and participation in political parties. In simple terms, Duverger’s framework suggested that the closer a citizen were to the bullseye, the stronger their affiliation to the party.10 While the framework from Duverger (1969) has now been replaced as the orthodox explanation of party affiliation by the work of others such as Scarrow (2015), the schema is a useful one to repackage to conceptualise data-driven practices. I have done just this but re-purposed it from an individual-centric model to a party-centric model. Each of the sets of campaign practices builds upon one another, with parties drawing on more and more of these practices the closer they move towards the bullseye (Fig. 2.1). The four types of campaign practice are as follows: Generic voter outreach: This is a set of practices which are now part of the standard fare that established parties in most advanced democracies deliver to voters. It is likely to include most of the following: social media pages and advertising, untargeted direct mail, local community engagement and events. These practices are moderately labour intensive and are not capital intensive. The party is likely to have some database on voters which they try to maintain and update based on interactions with constituents. Depending on local contexts and conditions, this may be

Data-driven campaigning

Narrowcasting

Community organising

Generic voter outreach

Fig. 2.1 The data-driven campaigning bullseye model, adapted from Duverger (1969)

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built from publicly available information provided to them or a voter file that they have developed themselves. Community organising: This is a set of practices and processes that involves mobilising and persuading voters by using stories and narratives in an attempt to engage with voters. These practices draw on insights from civil society such as trade unions, advocacy organisations and environmental groups and are based on theories of change that are frequently informed by the work of Marshall Ganz, among others (Kreiss 2012; Karpf 2012; Vromen 2016). These practices aim to activate and mobilise supporters to take part in campaigns, although there is debate about the transactional v transformational organising capacities of these practices (Han 2014). These campaigns are bottom-up and generally start from some overarching principles, and then via engagement with local communities, messaging, strategy and sometimes even policy are developed from conversations between campaigners and voters. These types of campaigns often use generic CRM11 systems, such as NationBuilder, as well as a range of other operating systems, which are designed either internally by volunteers, or purchased by the party (Dommett 2019). These campaigns are labour intensive rather than capital intensive and involve little sophisticated targeting or testing and often rely almost entirely on publicly available data or polling data the campaign may have purchased. Online this will usually involve building a community and experiences for supporters, which mobilises them to donate and participate in campaigns either online or offline and to amplify campaign messages. These practices build upon the generic voter outreach activities. Narrowcasting: While sharing similarities with data-driven practices, narrowcasting requires less investment in internal personnel and infrastructure and is a set of practices and processes that have been used in campaigns for decades. While the type of data, infrastructure or campaign channels may have changed, these practices primarily rely on market research techniques common in commercial marketing operations and political polling. Testing is likely to be less of a focus than in data-driven practices. Data and analysis may be outsourced to external consultants and targeting of voters is often at the demographic or segmented level. For example, female voters in outer metropolitan areas between the ages of 30 and 40. These segments or demographics are then targeted via a range of channels. Online this is likely to be facilitated by social media companies which allow campaigns to target segments of the population, as well as ‘lookalike audiences’. While it is common for parties who engage

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in this type of campaigning to have a CRM system, it does not need to be bespoke as the granularity is less than in a data-driven campaign and there is likely to be less desire to integrate data and analytics across different channels. This type of campaigning is capital intensive but does not need to be as labour intensive as data-driven campaigning. This is likely to depend on the local contexts, and the strategic advantages the party has in terms of resources as well as the campaigns of other parties in the party system. Data-driven campaigning: a set of interlocking practices and processes, which includes collecting data, building models of the electorate, creating supporter and persuadability scores, segmenting and targeting voters at the individual level, and the use of testing to refine messaging and campaign strategy (Baldwin-Philippi 2017). The primary function of datadriven campaigning is to improve campaign efficiencies. This includes when and where to use resources as part of direct and indirect voter contact operations and to determine ways to spend less money per vote won. This type of campaigning requires significant investment in personnel and infrastructure. It is likely that this means investment in a bespoke CRM system that is built to deal with the local conditions and context. Data and testing can help to shape messaging and scripts for direct voter contact, where and when to use resources on ad buys, who to target and where these voters are so that targeted messaging reaches them. This is primarily a top-down model of campaigning and is theoretically meant to be tightly controlled and centralised. However, data-driven campaigning also requires the mobilisation of significant numbers of volunteers to undertake ‘high-intensity’ direct voter contact campaigning activity.12 Hence, building on campaigning practices such as community organising. This type of campaigning is both labour intensive and capital intensive. Data-driven campaigning does have consequences and this includes challenging the dominance of the party in ‘public office’ and elected officials and empowers the organisational wing of parties, the so-called ‘party in central office’ (Katz and Mair 1993). It is important to emphasise two points about my framework. First, in contrast to that of Duverger (1969), my framework posits that the closer a party is to the bullseye, the larger the effect on party organisation. Data-driven campaigning is both capital intensive and labour intensive. The second key difference between my framework and that of Duverger (1969) is that in my framework the rings are not mutually exclusive. I suggest all types of campaign practices which deal with data can be located

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within the rings. Hence, most established parties in advanced democracies are likely to undertake the types of generic voter outreach activities located in the outer ring. As they move towards the bullseye, and the number and intensity of data-driven practices increase, they build upon these generic voter outreach practices. Some parties, for example, will undertake the type of generic voter outreach in the outer ring as well as some form of community organising.13 Others may undertake generic voter outreach, community organising and narrowcasting practices. While those parties at the centre of the bullseye will be building on the practices in the three outer rings and employing data-driven practices across their channels of communication. In simple terms, parties located in one of the inner rings, are also likely to undertake at least some of the types of practices located in the outer rings. My framework also recognises the organisational complexity of political parties (Carty 2004). Parties may be simultaneously located in different parts of the model for different types of campaign activity—such as field or digital. Thus, while parties may, for example, be closer to the bullseye when it comes to digital, their offline campaigning may be better understood as a form of narrowcasting or community organising. For example, while the Liberal Party may be placed closer to the centre of the bullseye for their digital campaigns, they may be in the narrowcasting circle for their field operations. Or, take the Greens, they may be closer to the bullseye for digital, but are in the community organising circle for field. The same is true of different strata or party layers, such as subnational divisions which may be more or less data-driven depending on resources, personnel and infrastructure. For example, in parties in federal systems or those which are highly decentralised, resources may not be shared, and one division may be more data-driven than others. One of the key conceptual and empirical issues scholars confront when dealing with data-driven campaigning is that, for all the talk of eras or phases, most underestimate the extent of the blurring between different campaign practices. As alluded to earlier, the set of practices often associated with data-driven campaigning—such as collecting data, building models, developing voter scores and targeting voters at the individual level—are interlocked with existing campaign practices, frequently in ways which are clunky and unwieldy. I argue this framework overcomes this deficiency in our theoretical models as it is built on the idea that all parties collect and use some data, how they use this data and what they use the data for are the key questions.

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Hence, rather than talking about campaigning as if practices are universal or homogenous, this framework takes local contexts and conditions seriously. For example, if a country has a set of legislative or regulatory mechanisms which limit how data can be collected, this may affect how data-driven the practices of parties are likely to be. A good example here is in relation to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union. This may affect how political parties in the jurisdictions covered by the GDPR can campaign online and the types of campaign practices which are useful to them. Hence, this framework does not assume that there is a unidirectional move towards increasingly sophisticated forms of data collection, analysis and targeting and this is occurring across all available campaign channels. The case of the Trump 2016 campaign is instructive here. While the granularity of the online advertising is still debated (Jungherr et al. 2020), and the campaign relied on the various technology companies to help them with their strategy and spend (Kreiss and McGregor 2018), they spent far fewer resources on data-driven practices to aid their field campaigns than was the case in the Mitt Romney campaign in 2012. While the US case is certainly an outlier, there are many reasons why the resources a party has at its disposal change and we should not expect that there will be an inevitable march towards more data, more granular targeting and more resources expended on these practices. Again, the point here is that campaign practices are not fixed; my framework allows us to think about when and why parties are moving closer and further away from the bullseye from one election cycle to the next. The framework is intentionally designed, therefore, to deal with the multifaceted nature of campaigning. Campaigns cover distinct areas of communication—field, digital, direct mail, ad buys, and each of these is often underpinned by a distinct set of data points and analytics and parties often struggle to synchronise data and analytics insights across channels. Thus, the framework acknowledges that there is the possibility that one area of campaigning becomes increasingly data-driven over others. This could be because of the regulatory and legislative environment, the role of intra-party actors or a range of reasons. Under this scenario, different parts of the campaign could be seen to be closer or further away from the bullseye. For example, it is not uncommon for parties to devote significant resources to digital campaigning, while devoting far less to field campaigns.

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In conceptualising contemporary campaign practice in this way, this framework explicitly aims to change the parameters of the debate. Rather than suggesting the relationship between data-driven campaigning and party organisation is likely to produce the same results no matter the context or conditions, my framework provides the capacity to understand both changes towards and away from data-driven practices. This is significant as while it is often assumed that campaigns are becoming more data-driven, this ignores the fact that changes within organisations, let alone party systems, can include changes in more than one direction simultaneously. By placing data-driven practices at the centre of the framework, we can move beyond simplistic explanations of party transformation, to deal with the reality of how organisations evolve. In setting out the four types of campaign practices, I suggest that a great many media analyses assume campaigns in Australia and elsewhere are in the middle of the bullseye. Some certainly are, but many are definitely not. In considering the way data-driven campaign practices affect party organisation, it is useful to return to two of the key contributions to the scholarship mentioned earlier. The ideal-types from Katz and Mair (1995) set out in Table 2.1 and Scarrow’s (2015) multi-speed membership model. My framework draws on both theories. It relates the intensity of data-driven campaign practices to how labour and capital intensive they are for party organisations. It also draws on the argument of Scarrow and others that parties are opening themselves up to nonmember supporters (Gauja 2015; Van Haute and Gauja 2015). These non-members supporters are a resource that parties can draw on to undertake some of these campaign practices for them, especially in relation to the field campaigns. My framework posits contemporary campaign practices—including the collection and analysis of data for targeting voters—as a set of interlocking practices that are more or less data-driven depending on an extensive range of variables such as the legislative, regulatory and electoral environment, as well as the culture and resources of the individual party. Hence, rather than providing arbitrary timelines of when campaigning changed, or suggesting that we have entered a new era of campaigning which is transformative, this framework deals with the empirical reality of campaign practice. Most change is mediated by institutional factors, the influence of significant actors and is gradual. This is why parties may draw on similar sets of practices as other parties in their party system or internationally, yet their campaigns can contrast sharply with one another. An example of this from the Australian parties is that both the Greens and Labor draw on insights from community organising as part of their field campaigns.

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However, the models look quite different and the reason is that one is primarily a top-down data-driven campaign, and the other is a bottom-up organising model. The other point here is that there is a whole range of organisational challenges that are likely to arise for political parties that maximise datadriven campaign practices. For one, these practices rely on elected officials working in sync with the organisational wing on policy, strategy and messaging. There are numerous questions which arise from this. One is whether and how this diminishes or challenges the authority of the elected officials and their staff that was so evident in the broadcast era. Another relates to who will undertake this work. Parties who utilise a set of practices closer to the bullseye, will likely need to employ a range of new actors internally, as well as work with a range of consultants to do some of this work for them. Hence, the closer to the bullseye a party is, the more it becomes like a vortex, pulling resources and personnel towards it affecting the types of campaigns parties conduct, the way they engage with their members and supporters, as well as with the general public. Data-driven campaign practices, therefore, have a path-dependent effect on party organisation. But to re-emphasise an earlier point, the framework does not assume that parties which engage in a set of practices closer to the bullseye, are likely to be more successful electorally. There are all sorts of reasons why the most sophisticated data-driven campaigns may not be effective. This could include a disconnect between the campaign and the elected officials, issues with the broader strategy, policies, leadership or any number of exogenous factors that data-driven practices cannot control for. Indeed, the debate about the effectiveness of these practices is still unresolved. In any event, this framework is not about campaign effects. It is, like the research questions set out in the previous chapter suggested, a theoretical framework that can be used to describe and explain data-driven campaign practices and how they affect political parties in the twenty-first century.

Conclusions Campaigning is unlike any other aspect of party organisation for the simple fact that it is subject to disruption technologies and there is no formal story about campaigning. In terms of the core areas of party organisation, campaigning has changed the most and the most often. What it does share with other areas of party organisation is that it has a

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path-dependent effect on intra-party power and resource allocation. This shapes how parties project themselves to the community at large. There have been very few attempts to develop theoretical frameworks which deal with data-driven campaigning and relate this to party organisation. The data-driven bullseye model I have outlined in this chapter provides a path forward for party scholars trying to make sense of these developments. This includes providing a way for scholars to map these developments on to what we already know about party organisation. In the chapters that follow, I focus on three critical aspects of contemporary campaign practice—data and analytics, digital and field—and describe in detail how Australian parties collect and analyse data, use the data for targeting, as well as campaign online and offline. I do this to show the variation in campaign practices, to highlight how uneven data-driven campaign practices are, and to relate this to the bullseye framework. This work begins with a discussion of data and analytics in the chapter that follows on from this one.

Notes 1. There is often confusion about the cartel party thesis and the reason for this is that it is really two models at once; one a model of party organisation and the other a theory of how party systems operate in liberal democracies. 2. For more on the consulting literature, see, as examples, Sabato (1981), Plasser (2000), Plasser and Plasser (2002), Medvic (2003), and Johnson (2000), Farrell et al. (2001). 3. Also see Webb et al. (2019: 99–102). 4. See also Fisher et al. (2014). 5. See also Margetts (2006) and Gibson (2009). 6. For an excellent discussion of the problems with the ‘Americanisation’ thesis, see Vaccari (2013). 7. One that does not try to deal with party organisation but provides important insights into the range of data activities is that of Dommett (2019). What is most significant about this framework is that it does not assume that there is a homogenous set of data-driven practices. 8. There is a significant debate in Australia, like in many countries, about how applicable the cartel thesis is despite it being meant to be a heuristic. Some of this debate is captured in a collection edited by Marsh (2006). 9. The other aspect here is that while the way data is collected is different, and targeting is increasingly granular, data insights have long been a part of campaigning. It was just that what is often perceived to be the previous

2

10. 11.

12.

13.

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era or phase of campaigning relied on market research. But these insights still rely on data. There are a range of strengths and weaknesses to each approach in terms of how data is collected and analysed. It has been repurposed on a number of other occasions, including by Kenig et al. (2014) and Hazan and Rahat (2010). CRM stands for customer relationship management system and describes the software or platform that parties use to track and keep details of their interactions with voters, as well as to maintain their voter database. It is used to enter notes from direct voter contact, donations, email list sign-up and much more. Clearly, this is one of the pressure points for parties engaging in these types of campaign practices, they are simultaneously trying to embed top-down and bottom-up structures into the campaign and this naturally enough produces organisational challenges. Some types of community organising are more commonly associated with progressive parties and as I indicate draw on the work of Marshall Ganz among others, but this does not mean that similar practices of trying to engage in meaningful conversations with voters are not undertaken by other parties. Parties which are drawing on the types of practices I associate with narrowcasting may draw on some of the practices associated with community organising, but not all of them. Again, this goes to the point that context and conditions are important drivers of how parties campaign and how many of these practices that parties employ in their campaigns.

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Boulianne, Shelley. 2009. Does Internet use affect engagement? A meta-analysis of research. Political Communication 26 (2): 193–211. Carty, R. Kenneth. 2004. Parties as franchise systems the stratarchical organizational imperative. Party Politics 10 (1): 5–24. Chadwick, Andrew. 2007. Digital network repertoires and organizational hybridity. Political Communication 24 (3): 283–301. Chadwick, Andrew, and Jennifer Stromer-Galley. 2016. Digital media, power, and democracy in parties and election campaigns: Party decline or party renewal? The International Journal of Press/Politics 21 (3): 283–293. Deschouwer, Kris. 1992. The survival of the fittest: Measuring and explaining adaptation and change of political parties. Paper presented at the Paper presented at the workshop on ‘Democracies and the Organization of Political Parties’ European Consortium of Political Research, Limerick, Ireland, 30 March–4 April. Dommett, Katharine. 2019. Data-driven political campaigns in practice: understanding and regulating diverse data-driven campaigns. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Dommett, Katharine, Glenn Kefford, and Sam Power. 2020. The digital ecosystem: The new politics of party organization in parliamentary democracies. Party Politics (online first). Duverger, Maurice. 1969. Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state, vol. Book, Whole. London: Methuen. Farrell, David M. 2006. Political parties in a changing campaign environment. In Handbook of party politics, ed. R. Katz and W. Crotty, 122–133. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. Farrell, David M., Robin Kolodny, and Stephen Medvic. 2001. Parties and campaign professionals in a digital age: Political consultants in the United States and their counterparts overseas. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6 (4): 11–30. Fisher, Justin, Edward Fieldhouse, and David Cutts. 2014. Members are not the only fruit: Volunteer activity in British political parties at the 2010 general election. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16 (1): 75–95. Gauja, Anika. 2015. The construction of party membership. European Journal of Political Research 54 (2): 232–248. Gauja, Anika. 2017. Party reform: The causes, challenges, and consequences of organizational change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gauja, Anika, and Max Grömping. 2020. Australian labor as a federal organisation: State uniformity or distinctiveness? Australian Journal of Politics & History 66 (1): 35–49.

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Gauja, Anika, and Stewart Jackson. 2016. Australian Greens party members and supporters: their profiles and activities. Environmental Politics 25 (2): 359– 379. Gibson, Rachel K. 2009. New media and the revitalisation of politics. Representation 45 (3): 289–299. Gibson, Rachel K. 2015. Party change, social media and the rise of ‘citizeninitiated’ campaigning. Party Politics 21 (2): 183–197. Gibson, Rachel K., and Stephen Ward. 2012. Political organizations and campaigning online. In The SAGE handbook of political communication, ed. Holli Semetko and Margaret Scammell, 62–74. London: Sage. Grossmann, Matt. 2009. Going pro? Political campaign consulting and the professional model. Journal of Political Marketing 8 (2): 81–104. Han, Hahrie. 2014. How organizations develop activists: Civic associations and leadership in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press. Hazan, Reuven Y., and Gideon Rahat. 2010. Democracy within parties: Candidate selection methods and their political consequences. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hersh, Eitan D. 2015. Hacking the electorate: How campaigns perceive voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Dennis W. 2000. The business of political consulting. In Campaign warriors: Political consultants in elections, ed. James A. Thuber and Candice J. Nelson, 37–52. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Jungherr, Andreas, Gonzalo Rivero, and Daniel Gayo-Avello. 2020. Retooling politics: How digital media are shaping democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Karpf, David. 2012. The MoveOn effect: The unexpected transformation of American political advocacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1993. The evolution of party organizations in Europe: The three faces of party organization. American Review of Politics 14 (4): 593–617. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1995. Changing models of party organization and party democracy the emergence of the cartel party. Party Politics 1 (1): 5–28. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Digital media, ground wars and party organisation: Does stratarchy explain how parties organise election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs 71 (3): 656–673. Kenig, Ofer, Gideon Rahat, M. Philippov, and O. Tuttnauer. 2014. Shifting political sands: When politicians, voters and (even) party members are on the move. In ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops. Salamanca. Kitschelt, Herbert. 2000. Citizens, politicians, and party cartellization: Political representation and state failure in post-industrial democracies. European Journal of Political Research 37 (2): 149–179.

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Koole, Ruud. 1996. Cadre, catch-all or cartel? A comment on the notion of the cartel party. Party Politics 2 (4): 507–523. Kreiss, Daniel. 2012. Taking our country back: The crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreiss, Daniel. 2016. Prototype politics: Technology-intensive campaigning and the data of democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreiss, Daniel, and Shannon C. McGregor. 2018. Technology firms shape political communication: The work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google with campaigns during the 2016 US presidential cycle. Political Communication 35 (2): 155–177. Liberal Party of Australia. 2015. Good government for Victoria review of the 2014 state election. https://vic.liberal.org.au/siteData/UploadedData/191 125-014249_Good%20Government%20for%20Victoria%20(FINAL)%20Oct% 20Update.pdf. Accessed 9 June 2016. Margetts, H. 2006. The Cyber Party. In The handbook of party politics, ed. R.S. Katz and W. Crotty, 528–535. London: Sage. Marsh, Ian. 2006. Political parties in transition. Sydney: Federation Press. Medvic, Stephen K. 2003. Professional political consultants: An operational definition. Politics 23 (2): 119–127. Mills, Stephen. 2014. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Norris, Pippa. 2000. A virtuous circle: Political communications in postindustrial societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Political parties: Organization and power. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Plasser, Fritz. 2000. American campaign techniques worldwide. Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 5 (4): 33–54. Plasser, Fritz, and Gunda Plasser. 2002. Global political campaigning: A worldwide analysis of campaign professionals and their practices. Westport, Conneticut: Greenwood Publishing Group. Renner, Tari. 2012. Political parties—Beyond revitalisation. In Campaigns on the cutting edge, ed. Richard J. Semiatin, 103–120. Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press. Roemmele, Andrea, and Rachel Gibson. 2020. Scientific and subversive: The two faces of the fourth era of political campaigning. New Media & Society 22 (4): 595–610. Sabato, Larry. 1981. The rise of political consultants: New ways of winning elections. New York: Basic Books. Scarrow, Susan. 2015. Beyond party members: Changing approaches to partisan mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schmidt, Vivien A. 2008. Discursive institutionalism: The explanatory power of ideas and discourse. Annual Review of Political Sci. = ence 11 :303–326.

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Simpson, Dick. 2013. New political campaigns and democracy. In Campaigns on the cutting edge, 226–240. Los Angeles: Sage. Smith, Rodney, and John O’Mahony. 2006. The cartel parties model and electoral barriers. In Political parties in transition, ed. Ian Marsh, 94–115. Sydney: Federation Press. True, James L., Bryan D. Jones, and Frank R. Baumgartner. 1999. Punctuatedequilibrium theory: Explaining stability and change in public policymaking. In Theories of the policy process, ed. Paul A. Sabatier, 175–202. Vaccari, Cristian. 2013. Digital politics in Western democracies: A comparative study. Baltimore: JHU Press. Vaccari, Cristian, and Augusto Valeriani. 2016. Party campaigners or citizen campaigners? How social media deepen and broaden party-related engagement. The International Journal of Press/Politics 21 (3): 294–312. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1940161216642152. Van Haute, Emilie, and Anika Gauja. 2015. Party members and activists. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Vromen, Ariadne. 2016. Digital citizenship and political engagement: The challenge from online campaigning and advocacy organisations. London: Springer. Webb, Paul, Monica Poletti, and Tim Bale. 2017. So who really does the donkey work in ‘multi-speed membership parties’? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters. Electoral Studies 46: 64–74.

CHAPTER 3

Data and Analytics

For over a decade, numerous commentators, scholars and advocates have written about the increasing emphasis political parties are placing on collecting and analysing data to microtarget voters (Kreiss and Howard 2010; Bennett 2016; Bennett and Lyon 2019). While certainly not unique to the Obama campaigns, nor originating in those campaigns, data-driven practices rose to international prominence because of the way the Obama campaigns captured popular imagination (Issenberg 2012a). The extent to which these campaigns were celebrated by participants and mythologised by external consultants and commentators had a significant effect across the democratic world, spawning an avalanche of campaign consultancy businesses. Some of these were even able to ‘make hay’ in Australia for a period of time, such as Blue State Digital.1 The coverage of data-driven campaigning in the media during this period was relatively serene with the practices viewed as ‘cool’ and innovative. But there has been a dramatic shift in how these campaigns are reported on, with datadriven campaigns now frequently seen as an existential threat to liberal democracy. Data dystopia is a growing cottage industry. Journalists, academics and all manner of commentators continue to make claims about the threats data-driven campaign practices present for liberal democracy. The reality, ignored by many, is that this new era of campaigning while © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_3

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different in some respects, builds upon pre-existing campaign fundamentals (Issenberg 2012b; Nickerson and Rogers 2014; Mills 2014). Data-driven practices appear to have increased but this has been evolution rather than revolution. The success of the Obama campaigns, especially the 2012 campaign, are certainly significant and had wide-ranging effects on campaigning in Australia (Vromen 2016; Gauja 2017).2 But there are other forces at play. Technological advances are a critical driver on their own. It is now easier for political parties to maintain extremely rich and detailed datasets, and to theoretically use these datasets across multiple channels, thereby integrating data and analytics across the campaign. Moreover, quantitative literacy, especially in relation to data and analytics, are increasingly emphasised within Australian political parties and this is changing how campaigns operate. But this is also part of a much larger story which spans the commercial sector, academia and beyond. ‘Big data’ analyses and insights are all the rage. Scholarly research into the ways that data can improve campaign efficacy are still in their infancy. However, a number of significant studies raise the potential spectre of data-driven campaigning. This includes studies which have sought to examine how personality types affect how persuasive or responsive consumers or voters are (Gerber et al. 2010; Hirsh et al. 2012; Gerber et al. 2012), what capacity there is for parties or other organisations to develop accurate profiles of voters from online or offline activity (Kosinski et al. 2013; Settanni et al. 2018; Azucar et al. 2018), and what personalised data can tell campaigns about voter preferences (Matz et al. 2017; Madsen 2019). What we have learnt supports what we have known about campaigns for decades: effects are likely to be marginal. Although debate remains about the contexts and conditions where these effects are likely to be larger (Sharp et al. 2018; Gordon et al. 2019). For all the focus and attention that Cambridge Analytica received, their strategies and techniques were not that dissimilar to how many campaigns operate. They just had a bigger dataset and it was acquired in an ethically and commercially dubious manner (Wylie 2019).3 This chapter is focussed on the data and analytics that underpin campaign practices such as digital and field. Parties can quite obviously still campaign online and offline without a data and analytics operation as is evident from the framework in Chapter 2. However, to determine how widespread data-driven campaign practices are and their effects on political parties, a range of questions about the way parties in Australia use data requires answers. These include: what, if any, data is used?; Where

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does data comes from?; How do party operatives analyse data?; And, what are the effects of more or less sophisticated data-driven practices on political parties? There are real reasons to be sceptical of the self-interested claims made by political parties, consultants and other campaigners, and it is therefore critical that the process of collecting data, building models, and developing voter scores is unpacked.

Collecting Data There is significant ambiguity around the collection and use of data by political parties in Australia and many other advanced democracies. The one major exception to this is the US (Hersh 2015). It is therefore important to establish what data is collected by campaigns. According to Dommett (2019), ‘The presumption inherent in much coverage of datadriven campaigning is that campaigners possess complex databases that hold numerous pieces of data about each and every individual’. The three Australian parties covered here certainly have databases with numerous datapoints on voters, but the amount of data collected and how it is used is uneven. Some parties collect and analyse data in ways that resemble data-driven practices, others do almost none of this. Australian parties, like parties in the US, are given basic information about voters that they can use to maintain their voter files and databases.4 The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) shares with registered political parties the information it has on voters, which includes names, addresses, phone numbers and where voters have voted. Parties often use aggregate level data about the electorate and other smaller geographical areas available from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) which is, for the most part, data from the previous census. These two sources of data are the foundation of the databases the parties maintain. Equally important is data that comes from voters themselves. This could be via direct voter contact such as doorknocking or phonebanking, all manner of surveys such as national or local level polling conducted by the parties, online mailing lists or through methods such as robo-polls or Interactive Voice Response (IVR) polls. Again, this is largely in line with the US experience (Hersh 2015). The key data points that parties in Australia seek to collect are: past vote; vote intention; issues that the voter feels especially strongly about; issue positions; and a range of demographic variables. While both major parties—or external consultants they

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appoint—frequently use robo-polling, the Greens are far less likely to collect data on voters in this way. Primarily, this comes down to resources. In addition to this, external data is purchased from commercial sources. For example, this includes lists of subscribers to various media or customer data acquired from data brokers. Interviewees from both major parties said that they had used commercial data that they had purchased. Some interviewees at the subnational level in both parties suggested it was useful for them in thinking about and mapping out their strategy and modelling, while others were of the view that it was less useful than is often assumed and the datasets contain plenty of ‘noise’. Whatever the case may be, there was a view that purchasing commercial data was an increasingly common practice. Interviewees from the Greens suggested purchasing external commercial data was not something most in the party would be happy to accept, nor did they have the resources to do so. Finally, and perhaps most controversially, parties harvest data from online sources. The data that comes from tracking and online engagement is vast and parties are now just starting to understand the implications of it, a point discussed more in Chapter 4 (see Tactical Tech 2019). Nonetheless, according to interviewees it contains information such as how long those being tracked spent on certain sites, as well as what sites they visited. This replicates what most commercial organisations do when trying to understand their current customers and who they should market their goods or service to, including where they should place that marketing material (Tactical Tech 2019). Some of this comes via tracking pixels in the emails parties send out to those who have either signed up to their email lists or have had their emails harvested and added to the list (Bogle 2019). Tracking pixels can provide information such as IP address, whether the user visits the intended website, how long they spent on the site and a range of other online behaviour (Campaign Monitor 2019). But one of the most important ways that parties collect data online is through their websites. To provide an insight into the types of tracking data the Australian parties are aiming to collect, I analysed the tracking cookies embedded into their webpages.5 Using the Ghostery plugin for Google Chrome,6 it was shown that the primary webpages for the Australian parties had significant numbers of tracking cookies (see Fig. 3.1).7 Each of the party webpages had tracking cookies from Google and Facebook, while those from two other minor parties, One Nation and the United Australia Party, also had cookies from Twitter. While not

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UAP

One NaƟon

Greens

Liberal Party

ALP 0

5

10

15

20

25

30

Fig. 3.1 Number of trackers on Australian Party webpages (Source Data taken from Ghosterly Google Chrome plugin on 24 June 2020)

surprising, the function of these tracking cookies needs to be clearly articulated.8 Their function is to collect data on anyone who visits these websites and this data includes information about the online activity of website visitors, but also data on location and, potentially, personal information. For example, the Google Analytics tracker, which was on the primary webpage of every Australian party in Fig. 3.1, collects data under three different categories—anonymous, pseudonymous and with Personal Identifying Information (PII). The data collected under these three categories, depending on the jurisdiction you live in, according to Ghosterly (n.d.) are: Anonymous: Ad views, analytics, browser information, cookie data, date/time, demographic data, hardware/software type, Internet Service Provider, interaction data, page views and serving domains; Pseudonymous: Search history, location-based data and device ID; PII: name, address, phone number, email address.

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Unlike many other advanced democracies,9 including those in Western Europe where data practices are regulated through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), political parties in Australia are completely exempt from privacy legislation.10 This means they potentially have the capacity to access all this information on Australian voters who visit their websites. Concerns about what data Google, for example, is collecting on Australians has even led the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission to launch legal action against the company (Zhou 2020). While troubling, and certainly raising concerns about data privacy, it is important to acknowledge that interviewees overwhelmingly asserted that the data they collect online is of limited utility. This certainly does not mean they should possess this data, but data-driven practices are not defined by how much data parties collect or warehouse. It is what they do with the data and the granularity of their targeting.

Analysing Data As is evident from the above, the three Australian parties covered here collect data in a consistent way, with the major parties collecting data from a larger range of sources. The data that the major parties possess is significant. More than one operative said that their party had no idea what to do with most of the data they had, with one digital staffer for Labor describing the amount of data they had as ‘overwhelming’. The Victorian Liberal party, in their post-election review of the 2018 state campaign, even acknowledged that ‘500,000 data points were established across various electorates’ (Nutt 2019: 59). The mountains of data that the major parties possess is directly related to the extremely weak regulatory and legislative environment. To contextualise what is happening, including what has changed in terms of the way data is collected and used in electoral politics, it is useful to consider what has been occurring in Australia for the last 40 years. According to Mills (2013: 97), from the 1970s, both of the major parties started to draw on the techniques of market research. As he notes, Campaign market research would typically begin with a large-sample survey to establish ‘benchmark’ voter attitudes to relevant issues and leaders; subsequent waves of ‘tracking’ polls could use smaller samples to track short-run, typically overnight, shifts in mood.

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Over time, the major parties also started to combine qualitative insights collected via focus groups to contextualise the data collected. The quantity of data the parties were collecting therefore started to increase exponentially. This provided interesting opportunities for the parties, including tracking public opinion longitudinally, thinking about strategy and messaging in new and novel ways, as well as targeting voters. At first, this was via direct mail operations but expanded over time (Mills 2013, 2014). But this increased collection of data also presented challenges. Like with the model outlined in Chapter 2, the more data the parties were collecting and analysing, the more resources that were required. What has really changed is the way data is collected and analysed, including how this is used to identify targets for messaging, as well as the granularity of the targeting.11 Of course, the research programs the parties draw on still rely on some of the techniques outlined above. Focus groups and qualitative data collection remain one of the ways that the major parties ‘perceive’ the electorate and interpret the quantitative data. But data-driven campaign practices are at their core, about giving campaigns the capacity to target voters at the individual level, rather than the demographic or segmented level and this is done to improve campaign efficiencies. Market research techniques do not provide this to political parties. The question, then, is which of the Australian parties undertake the type of data and analytics practices associated with data-driven campaigning? The answer is that only one of them do this. Overwhelmingly, what the Greens do with the data they possess is not consistent with most definitions of data-driven campaigning in the scholarly literature, including my framework in Chapter 2. Instead, their practices around data consist almost entirely around collecting data via direct voter contact and then using that data to shape messaging, estimate their vote share, as well as to think about future strategies, including where to use their finite resources to layer their messages. Online data is primarily used to message to party supporters or those they perceive to be supporters. Online messaging is largely facilitated via social media companies and the functionality they provide. There is very little modelling and what is done is generally not sophisticated compared to other parties in Australia and internationally. Voters are not targeted at the individual level based on individual characteristics. Testing, especially offline, is also not a feature of Greens’ campaigns. To use Dommett’s (2019) ideal-types, this fits with the ‘activists without data expertise’ model.12 What the Greens campaign practices actually look like online and offline are discussed more

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in Chapters 4 and 5. Nonetheless, in terms of data and analytics, we can say unequivocally that their campaign practices do not align with those commonly associated with data-driven campaigning. The party has not invested in a bespoke CRM, nor has it invested in any meaningful way in data or analytics personnel. Indeed, as shown in Chapter 5, the biggest effect that campaigning is having on the Greens, is in relation to the field campaigns. Data and analytics operations in the Liberal Party are uneven. I argue that they are a generation behind Labor in terms of the sophistication of their data and analytics operation for a few reasons. They are overly reliant on external sources, such as CrosbyTextor, for research insights. They have not committed to developing a bespoke CRM, like Labor has with Campaign Central. And, they have not invested in data and analytics personnel to the same extent that Labor has. Instead, the party is divided across and within state divisions as to how much money to devote to data and analytics as well as which operating system to use to manage much of this process, with some divisions still relying on the antiquated Feedback system and others having experimented with other CRM systems such as i360.13 Another point here is that the modelling and fine-grained targeting operations synonymous with how I and others define data-driven campaigns are primarily an online feature for the Liberal Party. But even then, there have been doubts raised about the granularity. One party official, for example, suggested that the party was some way off individual targeting via their field campaigns and was not sure if they would reach that stage unless the party commits to investing in a new CRM. Another former campaign director at the subnational level when asked about the granularity of targeting and data analytics put it this way, In terms of data modelling or anything like that, there’s none of that in place for any of the campaigns I’ve worked on for the Liberal Party. It was based on market research from CrosbyTextor, which was as broad as, ‘We’ve got to target ute men’. Well, what do ute men look like? ‘Well, you know, guys who like cars’.

Similarly, a digital consultant who worked on a federal Liberal campaign and was embedded into the campaign apparatus suggested they were surprised by the limited insights they were provided.

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It was just vague to the point of being useless and so when you’re in an agency, you’re hungry for, ‘Well, tell me exactly who we need to drill down into, you know, which characteristics or which personas do we need to be able to connect with?’ The Liberal Party is a long way from that.

Other interviewees suggested that while data was collected by state divisions via robo-polls, this was mainly used to gauge public opinion or for internal polling purposes. Hence, while the Liberal Party expend more resources internally and externally on data collection, targeting, trialling new CRM systems, software and hardware to complement their campaigns than the Greens, the way they analyse and use data is also not consistent with data-driven campaign practices. I argue that the granularity of the targeting, the lack of a bespoke CRM and the reliance on market research rather than data and analytics, suggests Liberal Party campaigns are better understood as a form of narrowcasting.14 This type of campaigning certainly has some effect on party organisation and the way resources are spent, but it requires less investment in infrastructure and personnel than data-driven campaign practices. An interesting question is why has the Liberal Party not shifted to the datadriven model that many major parties across the democratic world have? One answer is that they keep winning at the federal level without having to do so. And, given the federal nature of the organisation, an exogenous shock in the form of a loss at the federal level, might be what pushes the party to spend the required capital on a bespoke CRM fit for Australian purposes. It is highly unlikely that a single state division of the party would be able to afford a CRM comparable to Labor’s Campaign Central given Labor interviewees suggested it cost more than $1 million dollars to build. Hence, the state divisions and federal secretariat would likely need to come together to invest in such a system. While there is certainly a sense that the Liberal Party are moving towards more datadriven practices and many party officials want to invest more heavily in data and analytics, their research program is not dissimilar to that which they have drawn on for decades. That leaves the Labor Party. Labor is the only party in the Australian party system that currently employs a set of practices and processes consistent with data-driven campaigning. They collect data to build models of the electorate, which they use to test and map out campaign strategy, to test messaging, and to create supporter and persuadability scores so voters can be targeted at the individual level rather than the demographic

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or segmented level. Given we know so little about what these operations look like internationally, it is important to describe these processes in some detail. The focus for Labor is on data collected from robo-polls, direct voter contact and the data the parties can access from the ABS and AEC. All very similar to the US (Hersh 2015). The analytics process, which involves moving from data collection to models, is opaque but according to one data operative is as follows: Essentially what we do is we try to get a big sample of voters to respond to a range of questions about vote intention and policies. Usually that’s collected through robocalls. Obviously that has some question marks over the representativeness of the sample, but given it’s robos the data is quite clean and given you can get a good volume, we reckon it’s worth the pitfalls that come with collecting data that way. You then combine that with data from the electoral roll, data from the census, other data you might have and then we use various statistical processes to produce scores based on how likely they are to vote for each of the parties as well as how persuadable they potentially are.

These supporter and persuadability scores are derived from a predictive model which is meant to identify patterns in the data, including pockets of attitudinal and demographic incongruity where campaign messages may be effective at mobilising or persuading voters.15 The overarching goal of this approach to campaigning is to increase resource efficiency. Campaign resources, including time, remain finite so using them efficiently is critically important. As one former Labor campaign director said: You want to go and call lots of people, knock on lots of doors, try and persuade people to vote for you, but that’s obviously a very resource intensive process if you’re having one-on-one conversations with people. It’s much more efficient if you can be targeted in the way that you’re having conversations, to try and focus on people whose minds you think can be changed and that’s where the model and scores come in.

Generating marginal campaign efficiencies is important in a country like Australia as, while we have a relatively weak campaign finance regime, the level of expenditure in Australian federal campaigns remains modest, especially relative to the US. This was exemplified most notably when in

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the middle of the 2016 federal election campaign, the prime minister and parliamentary leader of the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, donated a million dollars of his own money to keep the campaign liquid. Given the financial challenges parties in Australia confront,16 increasing campaign efficiency can be critically important and this is one of the key drivers of data-driven campaigning. A Liberal Party operative put it this way: By finely targeting, by finely focusing your targeting on specific individuals, you are reducing the number of dollars you have to spend to get an extra vote. This matters, especially in the contemporary media and political environment. This is why data matters.

Given the significance of the support and persuadability scores (Nickerson and Rogers 2014; Hersh 2015), their development is worth describing. Persuadability scores are, in simple terms, an attempt to understand how persuadable individual voters are to campaign messaging. These are the voters that the major parties think they are probably going to need to persuade win the election. They have traditionally been described as ‘swinging voters’ in Australia,17 but this descriptor implies that they ‘swing’ between different parties which is debatable and there is little evidence to support such a claim. The more likely scenario is that in each election, given different political and economic contexts, that a considerable number of weak or non-partisans may lean one way or the other but are open to voting for the other major party, or a minor party. These voters are persuadable. So how do the parties work out who are likely to be a part of the persuadable cohort? One Labor data and analytics operative put it this way: We run phone surveys and we try and find people who are not committed to one of the two major parties or the two major candidates in their seat, so it might be that they were unsure or maybe they were leaning towards one of the two major candidates, but they weren’t really sure yet. Maybe they were planning to vote for a minor party, but they were not willing to put one of the two major candidates first. We would identify that group of people from our phone surveys and say, ‘Okay, these are the kinds of people we want to be targeting our persuasion efforts to’. As we run our phone surveys on a relatively small number of people, we need a way to extrapolate from this group to the rest of the population. So, we ask, who else in the population looks like these high persuasion targets from our

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phone surveys? We use this as the training set, we then validate the model on a separate dataset.

In building out the characteristics of these persuadable voters, Labor can and does draw on the vast swathes of data they have, but thought is also given to geographic data. Data from the ABS is not individual level data but is still fine-grained as it can be drilled down to what is called the Statistical Area level 1—often referred to as SA1’s. This contains between 200 and 800 households and can be used to think about other demographic characteristics such as income, age, gender or religion. They then focus on working out which characteristics correlate with persuadability. One former Labor operative explained the process like this: Let’s say you’ve constructed – it might be a few features about these people, a few features about the area that they live in. You put that alongside your phone surveys and the model can then learn patterns about them and the particular features of people who we think make good persuasion targets and then you extrapolate that out to the rest of the population. So, we’ll whip out all of those features, extracted for the rest of the people on the electoral roll who are not participating in the phone surveys, try and make an assessment of how good a persuasion target they are and then try and target our field resources at those areas, at those people.

Another former data and analytics operative for Labor explained how they viewed the process of moving from data to individual level characteristics that may correlate with persuadability: You might go in pretty agnostic about which features you think are predictive. Let’s say you’re trying to find people who fall into your persuasion target groups that haven’t made up their mind about supporting a particular party. You don’t know in advance whether they have particular income characteristics or particular linguistic or religion or past vote characteristics. You’re not sure which characteristics it’s going to be. You can learn that from your training set. So, using, as one example, logistic regression as the algorithm, you can determine which features are important. My experience is that the actual choice of algorithm is not the most important decision. It’s probably more about the way that you’ve set up what you’re trying to predict… Having said that, you have to remember these are people. They behave in unpredictable ways, especially in the Australian system, we’re not a super polarised society like the US. So it can actually be hard to

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predict how someone’s going to vote. So you definitely get some signal, but you’re a long way from perfect accuracy, put it that way.

From these models, voters are then given a score for how well they fit what the model is suggesting are important characteristics for being persuadable to campaign messages or policies. While the Liberal Party and the Greens also commonly use scores to indicate persuadability or supporter scores, their scores are not based on individual characteristics and are often based on how volunteers perceive the voter as a result of direct voter contact operations. The significance of this for understanding how campaigns perceive the electorate should not be underestimated. The supporter scores are developed in a similar way to the persuadability scores. The difference is that they are created to provide a score based on how likely you are to support one party over another.18 In other words, how likely are you to vote for party X based on your demographic or attitudinal characteristics. Why would parties be interested in producing supporter scores? Because in a country like Australia, with compulsory voting, parties may not need to mobilise voters to turnout, but they do need to mobilise these supporters to take part in their campaigns, to donate and to amplify campaign messages among their social circles. Just like the development of persuadability scores, Labor uses robo-polls to develop their training set and then extrapolate to the population at large. Most data and analytics operatives agreed that supporter scores were relatively easy to develop and more accurate than persuadability scores. This was especially the case for the major parties, as interviewees said that there were demographic or attitudinal characteristics which strongly correlate with support for one of these parties. In talking through these characteristics, one data analyst put it this way: ‘Tories are easy to find. Just look for old, white, rich dudes. Minor party voters are the problem’.19 These ‘problem’ voters will be discussed more in the next section, but what does the type of campaigning mean for Labor and the way they organise themselves? The answer is that, as the framework in Chapter 2 suggested, the party has had to invest significant resources and personnel to put them in a position to campaign this way. Given the finite resources parties in Australia have, the effects of this on party organisation are profound.

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Data and Modelling Issues Quite evidently, critical in the development of the persuasion and supporter scores are the statistical applications underpinning them. Increasingly, data and analytics operatives from Labor are turning to insights from machine learning, which provides them with the ability to automate model building as demonstrated in the previous section. This approach is common in commercial marketing operations, albeit there are clear and important differences in targeting someone to buy a new pair of sneakers as opposed to vote for a political party. And, the literature suggests that the exact nature of the machine learning operations vary because while commercial marketing approaches may be able to group consumers together around various types like ‘blue-collar, grilling, SUV owner….these statistical methods are less useful for campaign data analysts because…knowing that a set of citizens are similar in many dimensions does not assist with targeting if those dimensions are not highly correlated with behaviours like voting, ideology, and propensity to donate’ (Nickerson and Rogers 2014: 60). Despite claims that data-driven practices provide objectivity, the reality is that they rely very heavily on the preferences and rationale of data and analytics operatives (Boyd and Crawford 2012; Baldwin-Philippi 2019). The agency of these actors in shaping and constructing meaning from datasets should not be underestimated. They are actively making sense of data and thereby informing campaign strategies based on their understanding of the social and political world. Thus, while data collection and analysis methods may have changed since the era in which market research underpinned many research programs, it is debatable whether the data and analytics revolution has overcome the issues that were evident in market research. Namely, that research insights were still influenced by the actors involved. While previously this may have been the pollster, it is now the data analyst. Data still needs to be interpreted, and an argument could be made that the scale and scope of interpretation has, if anything, increased since the market research era. Is this problematic? Potentially. As we have seen in other data-driven areas, if the data or analysis underpinning the algorithm or analysis is flawed, or embeds a set of prejudices or biases about how different groups will behave, the consequences can be dramatic (Heilweil 2020). The consequences for data-driven campaigning are likely less severe than they are for what is recommended on YouTube, but the point is that flawed

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assumptions produce flawed models. In explaining the use of modelling in the US, Nickerson and Rogers (2014: 55), helpfully explain part of the problem. Campaigns are primarily concerned with the practical question of how accurately predictive scores forecast the behaviours, preferences, and responses of individual citizens, not with testing an academic theory. As a result, the variables included in the construction of these scores often have thin theoretical justifications…Successful predictive scores need not be based on theories or imply causal relationships, but campaign data analysts must still think critically and creatively about what variables sensibly relate to their outcomes of interest to generate predictions with the external validity required by campaigns.

There is certainly much more we need to know about how and why data and analytics operatives make the choices they do in interpreting data. Nonetheless, what we can say is that data-driven campaigning is a set of practices designed by an epistemic community of operatives20 who in no way, shape or form resemble the median party member or supporter in Australia or elsewhere. Let alone the median voter. This is not necessarily problematic, but the potential for a principal-agent problem to emerge is certainly a valid concern (Enos and Hersh 2015). Another potential pitfall for parties such as Labor that have embraced the maximum capacities of data-driven campaigning is that data takes on prophetic qualities. While some scholars have talked about the ‘myth of data-driven campaigning’ (Baldwin-Philippi 2017), I would argue that there are actually numerous myths that go beyond debates about whether parties can even execute these campaigns effectively. One of these is that more and ‘better’ data leads to more ‘winning’. This view, which was expressed by a small number of interviewees across the parties, is prefaced on the idea that data and analytics injects unparalleled insight and rationality into a world of uncertainty (Baldwin-Philippi 2019). But this is, for the most part, baloney. Some of this was evident in the comments from interviewees at the subnational level, who were often critical of national campaigns not investing enough in data. One Labor state campaigner suggested that while the 2019 federal campaign was moving in the right direction, it was still well below what they would collect for state campaigns. In their words:

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We spend a lot of money on modelling and the federal campaign does not. We used 250,000 data points to get our model right for the state campaign and the feedback we had from our teams was that it was very accurate…At a federal level, they had 60,000 data points for the entire country. So you’re going to get it wrong because there’s not enough volume there and it can mean the model can skew towards certain demographics.

Others strongly disagreed with these views, and made the point that models were being given more power than they deserve. When asked about what level of accuracy we should expect from their models, one Labor data and analytics operative explained what levels of efficiency the models can provide to improve direct voter contact. … If we are evaluating the model, a common way to do this is with what is called under the curve, so basically what that means in layperson’s language is let’s say you’ve got two people, one of whom is a good persuasion target and one of whom isn’t. One person might be undecided, the other person might be a committed supporter of one of the two major parties. You would like to understand the probability that your model will rank the persuasion target higher on your score than the other person. So if you were just making a random guess, you’d end up with an area under the curve of 0.5. The models in my experience are usually between 0.6 to 0.8 and a perfect model would be 1. So that should tell you a fair bit about the efficiencies we are going for.

Clearly, institutions matter for how parties’ campaign and in the Australian system accurate modelling is complicated by, among other variables, the multi-party system. What data and analytics operatives in Australia openly acknowledge is that while there are some sub-populations of voters that are relatively easy to model and identify for targeting, others are far more challenging. One former data analyst for a nonparty actor said, ‘the group that you care about most, which are people kind of flip-flopping in the middle,21 that’s actually the least stable category demographically. And so, the issue is that the group you care most about is also the least well-characterised demographically, relative to the extremes’. While this is discussed more in Chapter 6, it certainly raises questions about the potential ‘payoff’ in campaigning this way, as opposed to the simpler narrowcasting model.

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Conclusions Most commentary on data and analytics across the democratic world assumes that parties are all campaigning the way parties in the US are. There is an assumption that parties are all investing heavily in data and analytics, infrastructure and personnel (Burns and Morris 2018). But this is false. It is assumed that parties across the democratic world have extremely detailed databases filled with 10s or 100s of 1000s of data points on voters. This is not accurate. It is also assumed that these data provide, as the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) claimed (2018), ‘a highly detailed understanding of the behaviour, opinions and feelings of voters’. But this is also wrong. Australian parties, especially the major parties, have significant data. But the way data is analysed and used is extremely uneven and in two of the cases—the Liberal Party and the Greens—does not resemble the types of data-driven campaign practices often assumed to be the orthodoxy. If data and analytics are the future of campaign research programs, understanding the way data is collected, analysed and used to target voters is of critical importance. This chapter has set out to explain how parties do this in Australia. It has shown that parties in Australia collect data in ways which are similar to other advanced democracies like the US and the UK (Nickerson and Rogers 2014; Hersh 2015). Nonetheless, the Australian case suggests there is significant variation in terms of the amount of data collected, the methods through which data is collected and how it is used in campaigns. Whether developments in Australia are likely to be different to other comparable countries because of compulsory voting is an open question. What is curious about developments in Australia is that while many party officials acknowledged that the campaign practices they were drawing on were designed primarily for Get Out The Vote (GOTV) campaigns in the US, there appeared to be few attempts to adapt these practices to Australian electoral conditions. Arguably, this is part of the problem for parties attempting to use these strategies to message and target voters, especially minor party voters in the Australian system. In voluntary voting systems and those which use the Single Member Plurality electoral system, this may be less important as mobilising supporters to turnout to vote becomes as much of a focus for campaigns as persuasion. In Australia, however, the weak partisans and minor party voters can and often do determine the winner not just of individual seats but who forms

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the government. Institutions always matter, but this demonstrates why they matter for data-driven campaigning practices. While Australian parties have historically drawn inspiration and insights from campaign practices in the US and the UK, they ultimately need to go it alone in integrating the additional variables of compulsory voting into their data collection, analytics and modelling programs. While Australian data and analytics operatives are abundantly aware of these challenges, it appears that there is some way to go in dealing with changing voting behaviour and the increasingly fragmented party system. In confronting this context, the parties are increasingly engaging in Randomised Controlled Trials (RCT) and measurement exercises, including message testing. More on this will be discussed in the next two chapters, the first of which deals with online campaigning and the second deals with the field campaign.

Notes 1. This is no longer the case and instead Australian parties are much more likely to attempt to cultivate in-house capacities as well as use domestic consultants to complement existing resources. 2. As discussed elsewhere, the Obama campaigns spawned a wave of consultants. But more importantly, during those campaigns a number of key party operatives from Australia were in the US. Some were involved formally on campaigns in 2008 and 2012 for the Democrats and for the Republicans. Others were not formally involved, but were in the US, following the campaign. Interviews with some of these current and former operatives revealed this had a transformative effect on their views on campaigns across data, analytics, field and digital. 3. Of course, Cambridge Analytica was heavily reliant on psychometric profiling which is not what many parties are doing. 4. For more details about the evolution of the party databases and voter files, see Mills (2013: 97) and Van van Onselen and Errington (2004). 5. For comparison purposes, I have included two additional Australian political parties. The United Australia Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Additional information about these parties can be found in Kefford (2018, 2020). 6. I replicated what Patel (2018: 3) did for US campaigns here. 7. A list of the most common trackers and who owns them can be found at https://whotracks.me/trackers.html. 8. It is worth noting that when you visit the Greens website, a popup appears at the bottom of the screen clearly stating that they use “trackers” and

3

9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17.

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which takes you to a page which outlines how they use the data they collect. This is the only party in Australia that does this. For example, see Bennett (2016) and Kruschinski and Haller (2017) for a discussion of how this shapes data-driven campaigning. As per the Privacy Act (1988), ‘A registered political party—defined as a political party registered under Part XI of the Commonwealth Electoral Act is specifically excluded from the definition of organisation and, therefore, is exempt from the operation of the Privacy Act ’. There are other dimensions to these changes. That includes improving what polling can tell parties and there have certainly been attempts to improve the quality of electorate-level polling. Labor, for example, has been drawing on multi-level regression with post-stratification—so-called ‘Mr P’—to improve what polling and other datasets can tell them about sub-populations. Albeit there are data-analysts that either volunteer for the party or are in temporary paid positions during election periods. For a discussion of the use of i360 in the state of Victoria by the Liberal Party, see Koslowski (2018) and Nutt (2019). Market research inspired campaigning has a long history in Australia. See Mills (2014). This approach is more or less the same as used in the US, and emerges out of the commercial marketing sector (Halpern 2018). Another example of parties not maintaining some level of financial probity can be found in what happened to the Labor Party following the 2007 federal election, which they won. They were said to have ‘bet the house’ on them winning that election, and they struggled for years to get back into a strong financial position. Hence, over-spending has dire long-term consequences in Australia where private donations are dwarfed by public funding and membership fees. It is instructive to bear in mind that, as far back as 1958, it was noted that due to compulsory voting, parties are required to focus their attention on undecided voters thereby shaping the nature of electoral competition (Taft and Walker 1958). There are also issue-based models. Some interviewees suggested that modelling around particular issues such as same sex marriage was useful as this issue divided the Liberal Party electoral coalition into distinct groupings, the liberals and the conservatives. Moreover, the view expressed by some progressive campaigners was that views on same-sex marriage, and especially support for it, strongly correlated with a range of other economic and social policies that progressive parties were putting forward.

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This included policies such as changes to Australia’s refugee and asylum seeker policies and greater action on climate change. Thus, some interviewees thought this could be a useful exercise to think about voters who lean Liberal but for whom there may be some issue position incongruity that progressive parties could try to exploit. 19. Academic studies also offer little assistance here for parties. While in other countries such as the US and the UK, parties may be able to access and use rich datasets compiled by scholars to better understand sub-populations, the Australian Election Study offers little assistance in this regard, and often contains very few of these minor party voters. Not that this stops analyses emerging from this data. For example, see Marr (2017). 20. To be clear here, I am talking about the data and analytics operatives who speak about politics the same way that quantitative political scientists do. Their view on how politics operates could not be more different from the members and supporters who actually act as the delivery mechanism for much of the campaigns messaging. 21. While the operative says ‘the middle’ here, I did not interpret this as necessarily meaning centrist or moderate. They probably, in all likelihood, meant, non-major party voter. Nonetheless, there is an interesting question here about whether there is any way for campaigners to segment lists and target voters that have no clear partisan alignment based on attitudinal measures or demographics. It would appear unlikely and the only evidence that I know of that brings the ‘centrists’ or moderates together suggests that these voters are the least satisfied with democracy (Adler 2018).

References Adler, David. 2018. The centrist paradox: Political correlates of the democratic disconnect. SSRN . https://ssrn.com/abstract=3214467. Accessed 1 Mar 2020. Azucar, Danny, Davide Marengo, and Michele Settanni. 2018. Predicting the Big 5 personality traits from digital footprints on social media: A meta-analysis. Personality and Individual Differences 124: 150–159. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2017. The myths of data-driven campaigning. Political Communication 34 (4): 627–633. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2019. Data campaigning: Between empirics and assumptions. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Bennett, Colin J. 2016. Voter databases, micro-targeting, and data protection law: Can political parties campaign in Europe as they do in North America? International Data Privacy Law 6 (4): 261–275.

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Bennett, Colin J., and David Lyon. 2019. Data-driven elections: Implications and challenges for democratic societies. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–16. Bogle, Ariel. 2019. How the Australian federal election invaded your inbox with email tracking tools. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/201905-02/email-tracking-parties-lobby-groups-australian-federal-election/110 56186. Accessed 10 May 2019. Boyd, Danah, and Kate Crawford. 2012. Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society 15 (5): 662–679. Burns, Andy, and Madeline Morris. 2018. Political parties may know a lot more about you than you think. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-1122/political-parties-know-a-lot-more-about-you-than-you-might-think/105 11590. Accessed 4 Mar 2019. Campaign Monitor. 2019. Email tracking pixel: Learning about your audience. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/04/ email-tracking-pixel-learning-about-your-audience/. Accessed 20 Nov 2019. Dommett, Katharine. 2019. Data-driven political campaigns in practice: Understanding and regulating diverse data-driven campaigns. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Enos, Ryan D., and Eitan D. Hersh. 2015. Party activists as campaign advertisers: The ground campaign as a principal-agent problem. American Political Science Review 109 (2): 252–278. Gauja, Anika. 2017. Party reform: The causes, challenges, and consequences of organizational change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, and Conor M. Dowling. 2012. Personality and the strength and direction of partisan identification. Political Behavior 34 (4): 653–688. Gerber, Alan S., Gregory A. Huber, David Doherty, Conor M. Dowling, and Shang E. Ha. 2010. Personality and political attitudes: Relationships across issue domains and political contexts. American Political Science Review 104 (1): 111–133. Ghosterly. n.d. Google Analytics tracker. https://apps.ghostery.com/en/apps/ google_analytics. Accessed 19 May 2020. Gordon, Brett R., Florian Zettelmeyer, Neha Bhargava, and Dan Chapsky. 2019. A comparison of approaches to advertising measurement: Evidence from big field experiments at Facebook. Marketing Science 38 (2): 193–225. Halpern, Sue. 2018. Mind games. New Republic. https://newrepublic.com/art icle/151548/political-campaigns-big-data-manipulate-elections-weaken-dem ocracy. Accessed 9 Dec 2018. Heilweil, Rebecca. 2020. Why algorithms can be racist and sexist. https://www. vox.com/recode/2020/2/18/21121286/algorithms-bias-discrimination-fac ial-recognition-transparency. Accessed 5 Mar 2020.

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Hersh, Eitan D. 2015. Hacking the electorate: How campaigns perceive voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hirsh, Jacob B., Sonia K. Kang, and Galen V. Bodenhausen. 2012. Personalized persuasion: Tailoring persuasive appeals to recipients’ personality traits. Psychological Science 23 (6): 578–581. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance. 2018. Digital microtargeting. https://www.idea.int/sites/default/files/publicati ons/digital-microtargeting.pdf. Accessed 4 May 2020. Issenberg, Sasha. 2012a. How Obama’s team used Big Data to rally voters. MIT Technology Review. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/509026/how-oba mas-team-used-big-data-to-rally-voters/ Accessed 6 May 2019. Issenberg, Sasha. 2012b. The victory lab: The secret science of winning campaigns. New York: Broadway Books. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Minor parties’ campaigns. In Double dissolution: The 2016 Australian Federal Election, ed. Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Jennifer Curtin, and Juliet Pietsch, 335–357. Canberra: ANU Press. Kefford, Glenn. 2020. The minor parties. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian Federal Election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer, and Marian Simms, 343–355. Canberra: ANU Press. Kosinski, Michal, David Stillwell, and Thore Graepel. 2013. Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (15): 5802–5805. Koslowski, Max. 2018. ‘Extremely risky’ $1.2 million voter data project abandoned by Liberals. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/ federal-election-2019/extremely-risky-1-2-million-voter-data-project-abando ned-by-liberals-20190417-p51eym.html. Accessed 4 June 2019. Kreiss, Daniel, and Philip N. Howard. 2010. New challenges to political privacy: Lessons from the first US Presidential race in the Web 2.0 era. International Journal of Communication 4: 19. Kruschinski, Simon, and Andre Haller. 2017. Restrictions on data-driven political micro-targeting in Germany. Internet Policy Review 6 (4): 1–23. Madsen, Jens Koed. 2019. The psychology of micro-targeted election campaigns. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Marr, David. 2017. The white queen: One Nation and the politics of race. Quarterly Essay 65: 1. Matz, Sandra C., Michal Kosinski, Gideon Nave, and David J. Stillwell. 2017. Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114 (48): 12714–12719. Mills, Stephen. 2013. Campaign Professionals: Party officials and the professionalisation of Australian political parties. PhD thesis, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney.

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Mills, Stephen. 2014. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Nickerson, David W., and Todd Rogers. 2014. Political campaigns and big data. Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (2): 51–74. Nutt, Tony. 2019. 2018 Victorian state election review. https://vic.liberal. org.au/siteData/UploadedData/191120-092540_2018%20Victorian%20E lection%20Review%20by%20Tony%20Nutt.pdf. Accessed 16 Dec 2019. Patel, Valmik. 2018. The 2018 United States congressional midterm elections: A case study of third-party tracking scripts on candidate websites. Ghostery. https://www.ghostery.com/blog/ghostery-news/2018midterm-elections-ghostery-study/. Accessed 24 Apr 2020. Settanni, Michele, Danny Azucar, and Davide Marengo. 2018. Predicting individual characteristics from digital traces on social media: A meta-analysis. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 21 (4): 217–228. Sharp, Byron, Nick Danenberg, and Steven Bellman. 2018. Psychological targeting. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (34): E7890– E7890. Tactical Tech. 2019. Personal data: Political persuasion. Inside the influence industry. How it works. https://ourdataourselves.tacticaltech.org/posts/ins ide-the-influence-industry. Accessed. Taft, Ronald, and Kenneth Walker. 1958. Australia. In The institutions of advanced societies, ed. Arnold M. Rose. Lund: University of Minnesota Press. van Onselen, Peter, and Wayne Errington. 2004. Electoral databases: Big brother or democracy unbound? Australian Journal of Political Science 39 (2): 349– 366. Vromen, Ariadne. 2016. Digital citizenship and political engagement: The challenge from online campaigning and advocacy organisations. London: Springer. Wylie, Christopher. 2019. Mindf* ck: Inside Cambridge Analytica’s plot to break the world. London: Profile Books. Zhou, Naaman. 2020. ACCC sues Google for collecting Australian users’ data without informed consent. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2020/jul/27/accc-sues-google-for-collecting-australian-usersdata-without-informed-consent?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Outlook. Accessed 28 July 2020.

CHAPTER 4

Campaigning Online

Digital campaigning, more than any other mode of campaigning, is ascribed with mythical powers by commentators (Cadwalladr 2017). The supposed power of Facebook and other social media platforms to effect election outcomes has now become an accepted narrative in much coverage of elections in advanced democracies (Lapowsky 2016). However, the game-changer narrative related to social media advertising, including targeted messaging, has no empirical basis. There is not a single study in the vast academic literature on digital campaigning that I know of which suggests that the persuasive or mobilising effects of digital are even remotely close to what is claimed in much of the commentary. There is emerging evidence that digital can have a small but significant effect on mobilisation (Haenschen and Jennings 2019; Birnholtz 2018), potentially a small effect on persuasion in certain contexts (Hager 2019), and it has been suggested that it is useful for fundraising and other small scale actions (Baldwin-Philippi 2019). However, there is no evidence which suggests that Facebook is the reason that Trump or any other candidate or party in advanced democracies won.1 In fact, the most comprehensive analysis of the 2016 US presidential election from Sides et al. (2018: 194) said that ‘there is no evidence that digital ads “won Trump the presidency” and little reason to believe that those ads persuaded many voters to choose either Trump or Clinton’. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_4

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Beyond the aforementioned mobilisation and fundraising effects, it appears that the larger effects of digital may actually be to demobilise voters (Green and Issenberg 2016; Lapowsky 2018). Of course, this effect is moderated in a country which uses compulsory voting like Australia. Thus, digital might be even less effective in Australia.2 This is not to say that digital does not have an important place and role in Australian election campaigns, but the exaggeration and lack of clarity is problematic because there is almost no evidence to support many of the claims made. Digital campaigning is not the magic bullet many commentators claim it is and voters are not easily manipulated, as is often assumed. Parties hope it helps them in their persuasion efforts, but this is through layering their messages across as many channels as possible, and by reaching hard to reach voters through the network effect that social media provides. To understand the way digital is used in Australian election campaigns and to investigate how digital has come to play the role that it currently does, clear parameters for what this chapter will do is required. As a starting point, it is useful to clarify what is and is not included as digital for the rest of this chapter. Digital here refers to all online messaging which aims to go directly from parties to voters and includes: (a) the use of social media such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram; (b) online advertising via Google, YouTube and other similar sources; and (c) email to message, advertise and fundraise. It is also important to emphasise that while in other advanced democracies scholars have access to a range of data on, for example, how much was spent on Facebook advertising via the Facebook ad library or other information related to digital from the parties themselves in the information they have to disclose to electoral regulators, no such data exists in Australia on previous federal elections. The Facebook ad library in Australia remains vastly inferior and many of the features available elsewhere were only made available in Australia in 2020. Australian parties also provide practically nothing of value to researchers in what they disclose to the Australian Electoral Commission. Data on digital campaign practices in Australia, therefore, comes with caveats and the only way to gain data on these practices is through interviews. Despite this, there have been important contributions about digital campaigning in Australia, most notably from Chen (2013, 2015b), Chen and Walsh (2010), Gibson and Ward (2002), Gibson et al. (2008), and Gibson and McAllister (2011) with a range of collaborators. What really sets digital apart from other aspects of campaigning is the range of

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actors who potentially may be involved in forming a campaign assemblage (Nielsen 2012). As Dommett et al. (2020) showed, there is a diverse range of actors involved in the digital ecosystem and the sharing and copying of ideas and practices between like-minded and competitor parties, as well as non-party campaigners is common. The story of digital in Australian election campaigns is also incomplete without reference to the influence of movements, and advocacy organisations. In particular, GetUp!, the left-leaning advocacy organisation has been extremely influential in shaping campaign practices and approaches on the left. Their influence is multi-faceted but includes: staffing, with some of their former staffers going on to work for Labor and the Greens; their use of online petitions (Sheppard 2015); and, their use of storytelling to mobilise supporters and to disrupt popular narratives about various policies (Vromen 2016, 2018). Each has, to different degrees, become a common feature of the online campaigns Australian parties conduct. Another significant influence remains consultants, whether domestic or international. While it is well-known that political parties have long used external actors to assist them with a range of functions (Panebianco 1988), consultants play a significant role in digital campaigning. The increasing use of digital to fundraise, mobilise and persuade has transformed party activities, requiring parties to navigate new competencies and tools (Kreiss 2012, 2016; McKelvey and Piebiak 2018). With only limited staffing and resourcing, many parties have turned to external actors to support such activities. Kreiss and McGregor (2018) have highlighted the prominent role now played by commercial companies in election campaigns, while other scholars have shown how data brokerage companies and providers of campaigning technology are playing an important role (Rubinstein 2014; Bennett 2016). Consultants and other actors remain influential when it comes to digital in Australian election campaigns. In considering online campaigning by the Australian parties, this chapter will proceed in the following way. It will first consider why parties are using digital and why it is an important part of the arsenal of the party-based campaigns. I will then trace the rise of digital campaigning in Australia, including how the use of digital is evolving as is the types of online campaigns the parties conduct, before moving on to discuss the challenges digital campaigns present for political parties, including how they affect the way that parties organise themselves.

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Why Do Parties Turn to Digital? To say that the socio-political environment political parties are operating in has changed is to state the obvious. Changes are apparent in both the supply and demand sides of politics. One aspect which cannot be underestimated is changes to the media landscape, and there is significant debate about the implications of this for Australian politics (Errington 2015; Chen 2013, 2015a). Yet perhaps more than any factor, it is fragmentation which is significant, as it has altered not just the channels used but the way messaging is created and underpinned by data and analytics. One former Liberal campaign director contextualised the changes in the following way: ‘When I first started out as a campaign director you could literally buy an ad on Channel Nine on Sunday night and know you were going to hit 40 per cent of the audience. That is really just hopeless now’. A former campaign director for Labor put it this way: The overwhelming thing that everyone has been grappling with is the complete fragmentation of how people get their information. So when I worked on my first campaign…there were three television stations, there were about six radio stations, and there were three daily newspapers. So if you got ads on all of them, you got total saturation…And now there are certain demographics who get next to no information from any mainstream media source. How do we reach these voters?

This is captured quite well in the raw data from the Australian Election Study which shows the ways that voters have accessed information about the election during the campaign period (see Fig. 4.1) and data from the Australian Co-operative Election Study (see Table 4.1). While there is a need to be cautious as online also includes news sites attached to traditional media outlets, it is not too much of a stretch to suggest that for many Australians, the information they are drawing on now comes entirely from online sources. Moreover, as is evident from Table 4.1, the use of social media, especially Facebook across demographics is now extremely high, with the data suggesting that in every age cohort except one, over half of Australians use Facebook daily. For the youngest two demographics, Instagram use is also extremely high, and we can imagine that if TikTok was included, the results would be similar. The changing nature of media means parties have had to adapt to these changing environments and to engage with voters through digital channels. Hence, rather than turning to digital

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Followed the elecƟon in the mass media 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 1987 1990 1993 1996 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 2019 Television

Radio

Newspapers

Internet

Fig. 4.1 How are voters following the election in the mass media (Australian Election Study 2020)

because they perceive it to have some magical capacity to manipulate voters, parties turn to digital in an instrumentalist way; voters are easily accessible and they are there in sufficient numbers to make it worth their while. The other key reasons that parties turn to digital are equally straightforward. Digital is cheap, especially given the reach. While it has been shown that using Facebook to advertise in Australia is more expensive than other democracies, it still remains very affordable when compared with broadcast advertising, with some suggesting that it costs approximately $6.40 for 1000 impressions (Bennett 2018). Facebook is of course not the only channel parties need to focus on, and increasingly advertising appears across various social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram and dating apps such as Tinder. But the point is that the cost of designing and implementing a digital campaign across the various digital platforms or search functions remains well below what it costs for a smaller broadcast campaign on television or in print. Finally, digital offers a relatively easy way to target voters at the individual level. This is best exemplified by Facebook’s custom and lookalike audience function, but most platforms or digital advertising channels offer a similar capacity for campaigns to target voters, albeit usually they are not as effective (Kafka 2019).

N

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

Table 4.1

Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly Daily Weekly Monthly Yearly

70.2 13.9 4.6 1.4 17.1 12.9 8.5 3.5 63.7 13.3 4.4 0.9 904

18−24 70.9 15.3 3.9 1.3 14.2 12.2 8.8 4.1 50.6 14.4 7.5 3.0 1448

25−34 64.4 15.8 5.5 1.3 13.4 10.1 8.1 4.8 29.9 16.8 9.1 2.9 1282

35−44 54.9 15.9 4.7 1.4 8.4 8.6 6.8 3.5 16.1 13.2 9.1 2.1 1057

45−54 53.3 14.1 5.6 1.4 5.2 5.2 4.0 1.9 10.0 8.1 6.0 2.9 1181

55−64 47.9 16.5 5.5 1.5 2.9 3.6 3.7 1.5 5.7 5.3 5.5 1.5 1464

65+ 53.0 17.6 5.8 1.4 11.9 10.7 6.7 3.4 21.8 11.9 7.1 2.6 3656

M

Social media use in Australia (Co-operative Election Study 2019)8

66.8 13.2 4.2 1.3 7.9 6.4 6.4 3.0 34.3 11.5 6.9 1.9 3674

F 58.0 15.6 4.2 1.3 8.8 9.5 5.7 2.7 26.2 12.2 6.5 1.4 1574

Lib

54.6 15.8 4.3 1.3 6.2 5.1 4.3 3.0 22.1 9.6 5.6 2.8 467

LNP

63.4 14.8 4.7 0.7 12.5 9.7 7.0 2.6 29.2 12.2 7.3 2.2 2153

Lab

64.7 13.3 5.5 2.8 13.8 10.7 6.1 4.9 39.6 12.6 8.1 2.3 652

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Digital Campaigning in Australia While the macro-political context appears ripe for Australian parties to focus on the online environment, sophisticated digital campaigns are relatively new and change has been slow and incremental. The digital journey the Australian parties have been on really began in the late 1990s when the major parties started to develop a web presence (Gibson and Ward 2002). But digital use remained rudimentary for a number of election cycles. The tipping point for digital in Australia, arguably, was the 2007 Australian federal election. Chen (2013: 1) described the campaign in the following way: Then Opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, was placed front and centre of a campaign employing a slick presidential-style website, and strong use of social networking services (SNS) and online video.3 This marked the beginnings of political campaigning in Australia that employed direct video and ‘social media’ to target supporters and key groups, moving party campaigns further away from the mass-media strategies that dominated political campaigns since the 1960s. Additionally, this use of technology had other meanings for the electorate. Rudd’s use of digital media emphasised his ‘newness’: not just a change of government, after a long period under Prime Minister John Howard, but a generational change from a man associated with talkback radio and television, to Rudd and his emphasis on information technology and the internet.

The subsequent campaigns, conducted in the wash of the Obama wave, were increasingly digital-centric and this was not simply a product of parties innovating, or learning from like-minded parties, movements or advocacy organisations. Ideas and assistance also came from technology companies and platforms, as is the case in the US (Kreiss and McGregor 2018). Chen (2013: 24) provides an insightful anecdote of these interactions, describing how before the 2010 Australian federal election, Google: hosted a series of events for political insiders to advise them of the services the company offered for election campaigning. Far from being simply a search engine, the multinational IT giant offers a range of products, from advertising to web metrics, and the company was keen for Australian campaign professionals to consider the most effective/extensive way to use those products in the campaign.

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However, despite the scope of digital operations slowly expanding, digital teams remained under-funded and resourced. One former Labor digital staffer said that when they began working for the party, the national digital team consisted of two to three people and much of their job at that stage was to ‘build webpages, write copy for emails, some basic coding and general social media management but we were a long way from a sophisticated digital campaign’. Digital operatives from the Liberal Party reported a similar story. One suggested that for 2010 the focus was on ‘fitting out the website and improving functionality, but we were some way from running targeted campaigns of any substance’. Interviewees from the Greens also suggested the online campaign remained basic at this stage. For example, one former digital staffer said the state parties4 struggled at first to transition to the digital environment because of the resources required to create the type of presence they wanted online. From this point, however, the digital campaigns started to expand rapidly. In examining the use of ‘new media’ in the 2013 election campaign, Chen (2015a) argued that the major parties and the Greens had in contrast to previous campaigns, displayed a far more disciplined and instrumental approach to the management of new media communications. This is reflected in decisions to increase levels of expenditure on online advertising, systems acquisition and staff, to reduce the visibility of candidates through discouraging their use of some channels, as well as increasing the organisational importance of new media managers within the core campaign team.

In reflecting on how things changed during this period, one former digital staffer for Labor put it this way: ‘Pre-2013, there was pretty much no analytics undertaken whatsoever for what we were doing online’. Again, Liberal operatives told a similar story, with one suggesting that while the party had been engaging with like-minded parties internationally in regard to social media for some time, 2013 was when ‘the true power of digital finally started to resonate with some of the hardheads who could barely send an email’. Another noted that preparations for the 2013 digital campaign began earlier than they ever had—in 2011—and the party started to engage frequently with colleagues in the Republican Party on cutting edge practices, including sending staff to the US to undertake training and work on US campaigns.

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One such innovation that the Liberal Party introduced in 2013 was a data harvesting operation embedded into Facebook. One former digital operative explained that: we set up an app in Facebook where you sign up and get regular email updates from the party and sign in using your Facebook details. Absolutely, entirely legitimate, but as part of that sign up, you had the option to provide the app with a list of all your friends, all your Facebook activity and so on…So I think we got maybe 10,000 people to sign up, but we ended up with a database of 1,000,000 Australian Facebook users very quickly which we could then use to model various things like supporting one party over another.

Former Liberal Party Federal Director and campaign director, Brian Loughnane (2015: 200–201), pointed to another innovation in 2013. According to Loughnane, during the campaign they ‘released the first “targeted sharing” app ever developed in Australia, which used Facebook data to personalise a video—and then ask that person to ask their friends to vote for the Coalition. This targeted sharing app reached 7.5 million Australians on Facebook’. Labor also viewed 2013 as significant. George Wright, then National Secretary and Campaign Director, said that not only had online engagement skyrocketed but digital was now the key campaign fundraiser. ‘Small online donors now contribute more than twice the campaign funds to federal Labor than any individual union or corporate contributor’ (2015: 206). One former Labor party official provided more details. In 2010 we had an email list of 70,000 and we raised around $30,000. In 2013, we had an email list of 150,000 people and we raised a million dollars. By the next election, we want an email list of a million people and to raise 3 million.5

In addition to the exchange of ideas between like-minded parties, what set the 2013 campaign apart from those which came before it was that both major parties relied heavily on the advice of consultants. For this campaign, the Liberal Party hired the US-based advertising agency, IMGE, and Labor drew on the expertise of Matthew McGregor from Blue State Digital. Both parties had consultants embedded into their digital teams during the campaign and while digital operatives from each of the major parties argued that the insights that they provided were not

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necessarily ground-breaking, what they did do is provide a voice at the table to encourage campaign directors to invest additional resources in the online contest. Nonetheless, some current and former digital staffers interviewed were openly critical of the role consultants played. A common criticism made was that international consultants fundamentally did not understand the nature of Australian democracy. US consultants were a particular source of ire, with digital operatives suggesting their insights and strategies were solely designed for GOTV, which has never been the goal of Australian election campaigns. One former digital director of the Liberal Party summed up much of these criticisms: ‘We are obsessed with persuasion in Australia, and their strategies are not sufficiently fine-grained for what we want to achieve’. By 2016, there had been a significant upgrade in the resources and infrastructure the digital teams had at their disposal and this meant that more of the work could be done in-house. While there is a difference between the major parties in this regard—Labor taking more digital functions in-house, the Liberal Party less so—the view from many digital operatives around the country was that by 2016 the digital teams were starting to design campaigns that targeted voters in an increasingly granular way based on individual characteristics. There are several dimensions to this. The first of these is that both major parties started to increase the amount of time and money they spent on paid advertising, and this was, to varying degrees, a product of and influenced by advice from consultants as well as learning from parties internationally. One former digital staffer from Labor suggested that by 2016: We engaged consultants with a focus around targeting and paid advertising as they had done similar paid advertising and data segmenting for private companies that we did not have any real specialty on. We’d done some basic paid advertising up until 2016, but they really helped us segment out the people we wanted to speak to and made sure we were delivering paid advertising on issues that were most relevant to the people we really wanted to speak to.

The second of these relates to the harvesting of data as well as testing becoming much more of a focus of the digital campaigns. Another former digital staffer for Labor said that following the 2015 UK election, operatives from the UK Labour Party came to Australia and advised them about the benefits of investing in online randomised message testing as well as

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in further developing their email harvesting operations. According to this former staffer, UK Labour operatives advised them that one of their more successful strategies was to harvest emails through online questionnaires or quizzes that were not overtly political. They explained that in the UK: UK Labour had a ‘find out which number baby you were on the NHS’ app that they had developed, along with another soft start website that had harvested a lot of emails and a lot of data for them that allowed them to target a lot of people on health issues in the UK. They brought over that experience and we tested a similar platform which could be used on Facebook and we sold it as ‘find out which baby you were on Medicare’.

Interviewees from the Greens also pointed to 2013 and 2016 as significant. While not engaging external consultants or having anywhere the level of resources to hire paid staff, interviewees pointed to both elections as those where the capabilities of paid staff in relation to digital increased significantly. Indeed, interviewees pointed to not only the increase in the number of staff employed in the state-based Greens parties as significant, but the backgrounds of those employed. One digital operative from the Greens said that as a product of this, the party had moved from simply messaging to voters, to try to ‘channel supporters through a user experience in which they feel they are part of something’. Another suggested that changes in their digital campaigns had corresponded with the party becoming increasingly competitive in more House of Representatives seats. They said that ‘they were now trying to target key voters in target seats with messages they would see three or four times during a campaign online’. A third pointed to the fact that the party were no longer reliant on staffers who were employed as media or political advisers for elected representatives to conduct digital campaigns on top of their pre-existing jobs. Instead, they said, the Greens were hiring digital staff with meaningful experience working for advocacy or campaign organisations or who had experience working with technology companies. With this said, interviewees still said the party were not able to synchronise data across different parts of the campaign. Targeting also remained only as fine-grained as platforms or online companies facilitated. In simple terms, while interviewees from each of the parties said that the way data was used to underpin their digital campaigns was increasingly sophisticated, most also admitted challenges remained. Labor interviewees suggested that while attempts were being made to integrate data and

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analytics across different channels—such as field and digital—synchronisation across and between different parts of the campaign was clunky. Indeed, for all Labor’s data and analytics superiority, this was, according to interviewees, not feeding directly into the digital teams as well as it potentially could. Nor was data collected from the digital teams flowing back to other areas of the campaign as seamlessly as some operatives envisaged. Liberal operatives pointed to a different set of problems. Given they were not undertaking the type of data and analytics work of Labor, as explained in Chapter 3, they are heavily reliant on market research insights from CrosbyTextor. In the words of one former digital operative, prior to 2016, our use of digital was rudimentary to say the least, mainly due to a lack of investment and understanding of its potential. But there was also a disconnect between the types of market research we would receive and what we needed to conduct a sophisticated digital campaign. While there is something to be said for that market research approach, for digital we need much more fine-grained information on who we want to be all over their feeds and pages.

Some interviewees were of the view that the research insights the Liberal Party was drawing on were significantly improved for the 2019 campaign. However, the party remained at least partially reliant on targeting at the demographic rather than individual level, except when platforms such as Facebook facilitated this. That the Liberal Party were widely seen to have ‘won’ the online war in 2019 is therefore significant in understanding the capacities of Australian parties to implement data-driven campaigning practices online (Bourke 2019). Indeed Labor in their review of the campaign even admitted that: …across a range of measures Labor’s digital campaign went backwards compared with 2016. Labor’s email lists shrank over the course of the 45th Parliament, Labor raised less money online from fewer donors than in 2016, and the content that was produced was less engaging and made fewer impressions online amongst target voters. Critically, the deterioration in Labor’s digital offering occurred at an election where the Liberal Party dramatically lifted its game.

What exactly ‘winning’ the online war means for winning votes has never been clear. Digital operatives will often point to metrics about

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engagement as a sign of the success of their strategy. Nonetheless, challenges remain for digital staff in Australia and many expressed frustration at the way they and digital were used by the parties. Two particular frustrations permeated many of the conversations with digital operatives; a lack of clarity in regard to what exactly their role is; and, a lack of clarity in regard to how they are integrated with other parts of the campaign. Organisational challenges such as these are not uncommon, but worth elaborating on and this is where we will now turn.

Digital Challenges To take the discussion back to the framework outlined in Chapter 2, it is useful to ask how digital campaigns are organised. The answer to this is that it differs for each party in each campaign cycle. This is the product of how the party is formally organised—along federal or confederal lines— the financial resources of the party, as well as the culture of campaigning within the party (Kefford 2018). While the demands that digital places on parties are only increasing, with colleagues from the UK I have argued elsewhere that parties in Australia and the UK are ill-placed to deal with the pace of changes, nor do they have digital expertise and staff to deal with the changes they confront (Dommett et al. 2020). Labor’s (2019: 78) 2019 post-election review supported these conclusions stating: Labor employs very few digital specialists and often the default position is to define digital as the responsibility for managing some social media accounts and to allocate this to relatively junior staff and officials.

For this reason, parties often turn to external actors. This is not a new phenomenon (Mills 2013, 2014). While there has been a push—especially inside Labor—to bring digital almost entirely in-house, this has not been achieved and the party is still reliant on external consultants to complement their digital campaigns. The Liberal Party, on the other hand, seems to have no intention of bringing digital in-house and seems to favour using consultants, like it did in 2013 when it used IMGE. Since then, the type of consultant they have used has changed, and they have relied on consultants with ties to their longstanding polling and research house, CrosbyTextor (Bourke 2019). Hence, in 2016 and 2019, the party used New Zealand-based agency, Topham Guerin. The Greens, in contrast, had

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very little experience with using consultants on their digital campaigns and interviewees suggested that this was unlikely to change. This should not be taken to mean that digital is not labour intensive, it certainly is. But it clearly does not compare to a field campaign. In a federal campaign, each of the parties often has online campaigning and messaging occurring at the local, state and national level simultaneously. At the electorate level, staffers are often running hyper-localised campaigns,6 the state or territory parties are then layering messaging on top of that around key issues in the state, and you then have the national digital teams, who in the case of the major parties are often working with consultants. Each of these layers of the digital campaign is trying to create content which is engaging to those voters they are trying to reach and the degree of sophistication in the strategies employed varies wildly. The capital costs of digital have also substantially increased for the Australian parties over the last decade. However, it appears more than coincidental that in the 2016 and 2019 campaigns, the major party perceived to have ‘won’ the online battle were the party that empowered their digital teams to create and distribute content without having to undergo additional layers of scrutiny from senior party officials. In 2016, when Labor was perceived to have been victorious, the Liberal campaign, and especially the ability of those involved in digital, was constrained by perceived organisational weaknesses. In 2019, the same was perceived to be true of Labor. In speaking about the 2016 campaign, one former Liberal staffer suggested that the digital campaign was plagued by gridlock. This included: ‘Every social media post having to be printed out, a cover sheet attached to it, and sent off for approval. Sometimes that was taking weeks’. Thus, part of the success of the 2019 campaign appears to be that the digital campaign and consultants working on the campaign were empowered. Likewise, Labor’s review of the 2019 campaign pointed to similar organisational challenges: The digital team was not empowered to lead any of these functions and did not exercise ultimate authority over its work other than in strictly technical areas. A campaign with this culture comes to see digital as a means to amplify the content, priorities and activities of other parts of the campaign, rather than a core obligation to shape online conversations about the election and the Labor Party.

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The organisational tensions that have risen and fallen in the major parties about the role and purpose of the digital teams appears to differ from the experience in the US. According to Baldwin-Philippi (2019): Although data and digital teams often have their hands in both mobilisation and persuasion activities, the two goals are fundamentally different — convincing someone to take an action they are likely to be supportive of, versus convincing or even changing someone’s mind about a candidate or issue. Campaign organisation in the US often reflects this divide, with persuasion-oriented goals typically being the purview of the communications team, and mobilising donations and mobilising GOTV being run by the field and finance teams, respectively. While digital and data teams support all of these efforts and often hold equal power in campaigns, the separation of these efforts is illustrative of their core differences.

Australian campaigns operate differently. Field campaigns are the primary persuasion mechanism for Labor and Greens and at least a piece of the puzzle for the Liberal Party. The role of digital is more ambiguous. There is little need to mobilise voters to turnout and the persuasive capacities of digital are questioned inside and outside campaigns. But this is especially evident in the ranks of senior party officials of the major parties. The clear role that digital plays in US campaigns is therefore not necessarily replicated in Australian campaigns and thus organisational tensions emerge. In the view of many digital staffers I interviewed, these issues could be resolved if campaign directors recognised that digital works best when you focus on turning a channel into a community. In reflecting on how the party’s use of digital has changed in recent years, one digital staffer from the Greens put it this way: ‘there’s been a greater emphasis on recognising that the online space is a communications space, and that it’s no longer just a space in which people are having casual conversations. It’s actually a formal communications channel for the party and we need to create a total online experience for our supporters’. Similarly, a digital staffer for Labor suggested that in trying to reconfigure how the party used digital, they were frequently offered staff with media advisor or journalism backgrounds but the staff they actually wanted were those who had organising experience as ‘they get that it’s a relationship’. How deep these problems run is likely to be contextual and winning solves many of these challenges in the short-term. But, in the long-term, it appears that

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cultural and organisational challenges may remain for the major parties in considering how to empower their digital teams. There is also the question of targeting. All three parties suggested they could target at the individual level because of the functionality that platforms and search engines provided. But there was also a view that a lot of the time the targeting was not this fine-grained. This appears to be a consequence of what was discussed in the previous chapter; data and analytics are not as sophisticated as often assumed and integration challenges remain in using data and analytics across different channels. There also must be serious questions about how useful the CRM systems the Liberal Party and Greens continue to use is for the digital environment. In fact, the granularity of targeting in future campaigns appears to be predicated on the parlous regulatory regime remaining in place. Without access to the online data the parties receive via tracking cookies and what the technology companies allow, it would seem likely that targeting would revert to demographic or segment targeting. Of course, it could be argued that the focus on online targeting misses the point. Namely, that the algorithms on Facebook and elsewhere favour those campaigns that are willing to create provocative content. This content then drives the conversation and ‘wins’ the engagement battle online. This was part of the strategy of the Trump campaign in 2016 (Martinez 2018), and the Liberal campaign in 2019 appeared to take notice. After the 2019 federal election, Ben Guerin, one of the founding directors of Topham Guerin, spoke of the challenges of capturing the attention of social media users (ATA 2019), noting that on Facebook, users spent 1.7 seconds on average on a single piece of content on their phones and around 2.5 on the desktop site. In discussing their strategy for the 2019 election, Guerin, suggested they ‘won’ the digital battle because they had more volume and greater diversity of content, producing 30 posts a day and 250 per week. In his words, ‘you need to win the share of voice and we did that in the marginal seats’. Guerin also suggested that video was king, not just because users spend more time on video content, but because the algorithms favour video content as it maximises the time users spend on it. Using the analogy of ‘water dripping on a stone’ he suggested that you need to hammer the same message day in and day out but use different content to do so, and in doing so people will like it, share it, tag their friends and ‘that’s how we build our audience, that’s how we convert our supporters, that’s how we find people that are on

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the fence and make their minds up for them. It’s as simple as that’ (ATA 2019). While it is hard to disprove Guerin’s argument without access to more data on spend, content and engagement numbers, an alternative theory is that they ‘won’ the online engagement war as the Liberal Party won the disinformation war. Just like Labor did in 2016. This is not to suggest disinformation campaigns were orchestrated by the central campaigns, but both the ‘Mediscare’ campaign in 2016 and the ‘Death Tax’ campaign in 2019 were amplified by party accounts, as well as other actors hoping to damage the brand of their opponents (Carson et al. 2020; Carson and Zion 2020). And, again, rather than the assumed and unsubstantiated dystopic vision of microtargeting that we are often presented with, a better explanation of the role digital plays in Australian elections is that parties use it to increase the salience of issues which favour their side. They hope this affects vote choice in the areas and with the people they think will decide the election (Carson et al. 2020).7

Conclusions In contrast to other advanced democracies, digital has been a secondary focus of the campaigns the parties in Australia conduct. In comparison to the US, for example, where campaigns often spend a quarter of their campaign budgets on their digital operations (Williams and Gulati 2018), or more in the case of the Trump campaigns (Vittert 2019), Australian campaigns spend closer to ten per cent (Australian Labor Party 2019). One of the reasons for this is digital seen by many senior party operatives as less effective at persuading voters than other channels and modes of campaigning. While the scholarly literature comes with caveats, this aligns with the cutting-edge literature on campaign effects. This is significant for a variety of reasons but most importantly is that it bursts the bubble on digital always being the dominant campaigning channel across the democratic world. In Australia, it remains a secondary channel in all three parties examined here. This may change, and the Labor review of the 2019 election suggested that they needed to conduct a ‘digital-first’ campaign in the future (Australian Labor Party 2019). But a better digital campaign will not overcome the other weakness Labor identified in their review such as leadership or making themselves an easy target of scare campaigns by the incumbent.

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The evolution of digital campaigning in Australia cannot be understood simply as a product of technological changes and trends in campaign practices. Digital, like other aspects of the campaigns parties conduct, are a product of both endogenous and exogenous forces and one of the primary drivers of parties devoting increasing attention to digital in Australia is the most straightforward; voters are online so the parties need to be as well. The contradiction is that Australian parties are not sufficiently resourced to deal with the changes digital is likely to have on electoral politics in the decades to come. Ultimately, the parties in Australia, either because of a lack of resources, or a lack of commitment to digital as a channel through which they can achieve their strategic objectives, have not utilised the capacities of digital in the same way that has occurred in other advanced democracies. The institutional architecture—especially compulsory voting—is one explanation for this, and this explains the dominance of field operations for the progressive parties. Moreover, if the Liberal Party have placed more emphasis on digital in recent election cycles, one explanation for this is that their field campaigns are vastly inferior, and this necessitates their focus on digital (and broadcast campaigns). While the sophistication of the digital campaigns run by the Australian parties is increasing, and this is evidenced by the various innovations they have trialled, what role digital is meant to play beyond amplifying messages, mobilising donations and encouraging engagement is unclear. Interviews suggested that there is often disagreement within the parties on this point and how digital ‘fits’. Clearly, one part of digital campaigning that is likely to increase is the need to counter disinformation campaigns. Likewise, rapid response content generation around the gaffes and missteps of political opponents is likely to be something that parties will seek to take advantage of. But this is all based on the regulatory and legislative environment remaining unchanged. While there is no sense that there is a mood for change yet, the data presented in Chapter 7 shows how out of step with community expectations current digital campaign practices are. In terms of the framework set out in Chapter 2, the evidence in this chapter suggests that for each of the parties, digital has been and is likely to remain a capital and labour-intensive endeavour. The granularity of the targeting is also fine-grained. However, this appears to be mainly a product of what technology companies are providing to the parties rather than a product of their own data and analytics operations. Given staffing is

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limited across each of the parties, widespread testing is also not part of the established culture, mainly due to a lack of resources. Given this, I would argue that all three of the parties can be located somewhere between narrowcasting and data-driven practices when it comes to digital. Given what the analysis of the data and analytics programs told us, this is more evidence of why we need to be sceptical of the assumed sophistication of campaigns. It is to the field campaigns that we now turn.

Notes 1. Moreover, Kalla and Broockman (2018: 148) in their meta-analyses of campaign effects suggested that “Our best guess for online and television advertising is also zero, but there is less evidence on these modes”. 2. Albeit, as I note in Chapter 5, some Australian parties are increasingly taking GOTV seriously, especially as numbers of young voters on the roll and numbers of voters turning out to vote has been decreasing over recent election cycles. 3. See also Chen and Walsh (2010). 4. It is important to again emphasise here that the Australian Greens are a confederation of separate state-based Greens parties that come together to contest federal elections in Australia. The state parties are, therefore, independent of one another and not state divisions of the one party as is the case in the major parties in Australia. 5. This interview was conducted before the 2016 federal election. 6. This is especially the case for incumbents, where electorate level staffers are used to conduct digital campaigns. Often with little to no training or much of an idea about what they are doing. One interviewee from the Liberal Party, for example, said that in conducting the local level messaging online for an incumbent MP he “just made it up as he went along”. 7. There is counter evidence which suggests this campaign was not the votemover which political elites and commentators claimed it was (Jackman and Mansillo 2018), but the narrative in the political class is that misinformation and fear campaigns are an ingredient that campaigns need to be more proactive about. 8. The numbers here do not add up to 100% as I have excluded responses besides daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. Thus, the percentages here should be taken as a percentage of the N for each group at the end of the table.

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Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Digital media, ground wars and party organisation: Does stratarchy explain how parties organise election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs 71 (3): 656–673. Kreiss, Daniel. 2012. Taking our country back: The crafting of networked politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreiss, Daniel. 2016. Prototype politics: Technology-intensive campaigning and the data of democracy. New York: Oxford University Press. Kreiss, Daniel, and Shannon C. McGregor. 2018. Technology firms shape political communication: The work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google with campaigns during the 2016 US presidential cycle. Political Communication 35 (2): 155–177. Lapowsky, Ipie. 2016. Here’s how Facebook actually won Trump the Presidency. Wired. https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebook-won-trump-ele ction-not-just-fake-news/. Accessed 9 May 2017. Lapowsky, Ipie. 2018. Viral political ads may not be as persuasive as you think. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/viral-political-ads-not-as-persuasive-asyou-think/. Accessed 12 September 2018. Loughnane, Brian. 2015. The liberal campaign in the 2013 federal election. In Abbott’s Gambit: The 2013 Australian Federal Election, ed. Carol Johnson, John Wanna, and Hsu-Ann Lee, 191–201. Canberra: ANU Press. Martinez, Antonio Garcia. 2018. How Trump conquered Facebook—Without Russian ads. Wired. https://www.wired.com/story/how-trump-conqueredfacebookwithout-russian-ads/. Accessed 9 March 2018. McKelvey, Fenwick, and Jill Piebiak. 2018. Porting the political campaign: The NationBuilder platform and the global flows of political technology. New Media & Society 20 (3): 901–918. Mills, Stephen. 2013. Campaign professionals: Party officials and the professionalisation of Australian political parties. Ph.D. thesis. Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. Mills, Stephen. 2014. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Political parties: Organization and power. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rubinstein, Ira S. 2014. Voter privacy in the age of big data. Wisconsin Law Review: 861–936. Sheppard, Jill. 2015. Online petitions in Australia: Information, opportunity and gender. Australian Journal of Political Science 50 (3): 480–495. Sides, John, Michael Tesler, and Lynn Vavreck. 2018. Identity crisis: The 2016 presidential campaign and the battle for the meaning of America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Vittert, Liberty. 2019. You’d be better off lighting your money on fire than giving it to a politician to spend on TV ads. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/youd-be-better-off-lighting-your-moneyon-fire-than-giving-it-to-a-politician-to-spend-on-tv-ads-117945. Accessed 10 September 2019. Vromen, Ariadne. 2016. Digital citizenship and political engagement: The challenge from online campaigning and advocacy organisations. London: Springer. Vromen, Ariadne. 2018. GetUp! in election 2016. In Double disillusion: The 2016 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Jennifer Curtin, and Juliet Pietsch, 397–419. Canberra: ANU Press. Williams, Christine B., and Girish Jeff Gulati. 2018. Digital advertising expenditures in the 2016 presidential election. Social Science Computer Review 36 (4): 406–421. Wright, George. 2015. The labor party campaign and Aftermath. In Abbott’s Gambit: The 2013 Australian federal election, ed. Carol Johnson, John Wanna, and Hsu-Ann Lee, 203–210. Canberra: ANU Press.

CHAPTER 5

Winning the ‘Ground War’

Volunteer: (knocking on door once… knocking on door twice) Voter: (elderly man walking toward door) Volunteer 2: Oh hello, my name is X and this is Glenn, we are volunteers for the local candidate for the Greens. I’m part of a team this afternoon chatting with locals about the election and what’s important to them. Voter: What? Volunteer 2: I’m a volunteer from the Greens. Voter: What? Volunteer 2: We are volunteers from the Greens Voter: Oh, I see, great Volunteer 2: Perfect, well we are out talking to locals about the issues that residents are worried about in the area, are there any issues or concerns that you are especially worried about at present? Voter: My mower actually doesn’t work at present Volunteer 2: Sorry to hear that, but are there any issues you are especially worried about that we could talk to you about Voter: Well, I’m not sure you will be able to help me without the mower Me and volunteer 2: Sorry, to be clear we are from the Greens the political party. Voter: What? Volunteer: We are from the Greens, the political party, we are here to talk about the election. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_5

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Voter: oh, sorry, I thought you were Green volunteers who mowed people’s lawns… After leaving elderly voter a flyer, the volunteer I was with said to me, “See, that is how disconnected the parties are, this dude thought it was more likely that we were part of some volunteer army to mow people’s lawns than volunteers from a political party”.

For the thousands of Australians who are members of political parties, have previously been a member or have volunteered on an election campaign, interactions like the one above may be familiar to them. For most Australian’s, however, the above is likely to be completely foreign. Parties are divorced from the reality of their everyday lives, so when someone from a political party knocks on their door or calls them and wants to talk to them about an election and the issues they care about, many voters are shocked; ‘what, really, you are here to talk to me about politics?’. The ‘ground war’ or field campaign may seem like an antiquated way to campaign in the twenty-first century but it is viewed by many operatives as the critical element of a campaign in Australia. The reason for this is simple—the evidence suggests it is the most effective way to mobilise and persuade voters (Kalla and Broockman 2018, 2020). Belief in the power of the field campaign to deliver certainly varies within and across parties, and even in the Australian parties that have completely embraced field campaigns—Labor and the Greens—some holdouts remain.1 Nonetheless, when we are talking about the field campaigns conducted by Australian parties, we are talking about a general set of practices which are based on direct voter contact. In the words of Nielsen (2012), this is ‘personalised political communication’. These campaigns we are told are data-driven, sophisticated and targeted. But are they really? The answer to this, disappointingly, for those who love certainty, is both yes and no. Some Australian parties target sub-populations and voters at the individual level in their field campaigns. As explained in Chapter 3, these parties use data and analytics to predict how persuadable voters are to their messaging. The sophistication of most campaigns, however, is far more limited. Some party officials and organisers will tell you that their field campaigns are data-driven, targeted and sophisticated, but they often are nothing of the sort. Instead, their campaigns are a form of voter outreach with an additional layer of community organising in target seats (Greens), or narrowcasting in seats or areas considered important, with voters selected for contact based on broad demographic profiles based on

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insights from market research techniques (Liberal Party). Testing is not common, and targeting is either non-existent or not fine-grained. This chapter will chart the rise of field campaigns in Australia, including discussing the figures which suggest direct voter contact has significantly increased for each of the parties. It will then provide a fine-grained account of the way field campaigns are organised, including reflecting on the role that non-member supporters play in these campaigns. It will conclude by discussing the efficacy of these campaigns for political parties hoping to persuade voters via the field campaign and reflect on what this says about the theoretical framework of campaign practices outlined in Chapter 2.

Members, Supporters and Australian Parties Walking through suburban streets for hours on end with a clipboard and flyers or sitting in an office calling voters on their phones does not sound like the height of campaign sophistication in the 2020s. In fact, it seems quaint in an era when the coverage of elections is dominated by online political communication. Yet Australian field campaigns have grown exponentially in recent years and are now an essential part of the campaigns all three parties covered conduct. But it also remains a relative novelty for voters outside the capital cities to have a party member or volunteer knock on their door or call them and to try to engage with them. There are good reasons for this. Field campaigns rely on parties having sufficient volunteers—members and non-member supporters—that they can mobilise and draw upon to conduct these campaigns. These volunteers are mobilised by paid organisers. For regional areas and the smaller states this can be problematic to produce at any sort of scale given the geographic and demographic challenges organisers would face in these areas. The odd field campaign may be possible,2 and some of these have been conducted by groups and candidates beyond those examined in this book.3 But these are outliers. Interviews conducted with candidates outside the capital cities reinforced this. I asked 21 candidates and organisers in regional areas how many volunteers they could mobilise to do direct voter contact work, and the most these interviewees reported having was ‘about 10’. The differences with what was evident in target seats in metropolitan areas is staggering, with a number of these seats having over 500 volunteers and there were

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some examples where this number exceeded 1000 according to interviewees. But this is just one of the findings about field campaigns in Australia in this chapter.4 The evidence which will be presented about field campaigning in Australia upends two dominant narratives about parties and campaigning. One is about Australian parties all running cutting-edge, data-driven campaigns, which I have already shown in the previous chapters to be demonstrably false (Kefford 2018). The other is more provocative; parties have tiny, shrinking supporter bases and they are unable to attract anyone but a small, self-serving clique from participating in their activities. Neither of these accounts describes what is going on in Australia. The latter argument, which is routinely wheeled out by commentators and political scientists alike, contradicts several data sources. One of these is the Australian Election Study (AES) which asks respondents whether they have engaged in party-related campaigning during election campaigns. Data from the AES suggests about ten per cent of respondents have been involved in some way in the recent election campaigns the parties have conducted. While one may be sceptical of how representative that data is, additional data from the Australian Co-operative Election Study collected in 2019 provides support for the AES data. Across a nationally representative sample of 7330 respondents, again almost 10 per cent said they had volunteered their time for campaign activities such as handing out leaflets, doorknocking or letterboxing during the 2019 campaign (see Table 5.1), all parts of the orthodox field campaign parties conduct. Moreover, additional studies from Gauja and Jackson (2016) and Gauja and Grömping (2020), suggest that the numbers of Labor and Green partisans who said they participated in high-intensity activities such as field campaigning activities was even higher. The evidence I collected on field campaigns also supports these conclusions and, if anything, suggests the number of non-member supporters the parties are mobilising to participate in their campaigns is increasing. These numbers raise significant questions about our understanding of parties and campaigning in Australia, including the number of volunteers that parties have at their disposal.5 In particular, I argue there is good reason to think that, by focussing solely on member numbers, a significant story about Australian democracy continues to be ignored (Gauja 2015). This is the story of the non-member supporters who turn out in sizable numbers to do the ‘donkey work’ that field campaigns depend on

Y N Y N Total

Go to any political meetings or rallies

Contribute money to a political party or election candidate

Y N

8.9 91.1

F

LNP

8.9 9.9 91.1 90.1

Lib

9.4 90.6

Lab

10.4 89.6

Green

10.5 7.2 7.0 6.9 9.2 13.5 89.5 92.8 93.0 93.1 90.8 86.5 9.1 6.0 6.6 7.5 7.1 8.9 90.9 94.0 93.4 92.5 92.9 91.1 3656 3674 1574 467 1574 652

10.7 89.3

M

Campaign participation Australian federal election 2019 (Cameron and McAllister 2019)

Volunteer for campaign activities, such as handing out leaflets, doorknocking or letterboxing

Table 5.1

4.3 95.7 4.3 95.7 437

5.9 94.1

One nation

3.3 96.7 4.1 95.9 825

3.6 96.4

Other

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(Webb et al. 2017). There are layers to this story, but one is certainly that thousands of Australians who are not members of political parties engage in the high-intensity activities of campaigning which are often perceived to be the domain of the strong partisans and party members. And, perhaps more interestingly, they then do not join the organisation that they have poured hours into supporting. That story by itself is one that needs telling. One of the key party officials involved in the development of the field campaigns in Labor, suggested that the number of volunteers to members had remained fairly consistent; 65 per cent of those involved in their field campaigns were non-member supporters .6 Other interviewees quoted different figures but almost all of these were above 40 per cent, with the lowest being 30 per cent for Labor. Interviewees from the Liberal Party provided figures ranging from 25 to 50 per cent, but most suggested it was 30–40 per cent of those involved in these campaigns are non-members. For the Greens, the makeup of those involved in the field campaigns differed based on whether it was a target seat or not.7 Interviewees suggested that over half of those involved in their field campaigns in target seats were non-members, with some suggesting this went as high as 70 per cent in some instances. In non-target seats, there was often very little field campaigning conducted, but those involved were generally members. Data was also collected on the number of members engaged in field campaigns as opposed to non-member supporters in 33 electorates in the 2019 federal election.8 While the electorates cannot be taken as a representative sample of all electorates or campaigns, they included 13 electorates outside major metropolitan areas, and a relatively even mix of electorates which were marginal or safe seats (14 v 19).9 In total, where a substantial campaign was taking place10 —and in many electorates, especially safe seats in regional areas, there was not—nonmembers outnumbered members in the overwhelming majority of these seats (18-8). Of course, this all makes sense when the data on the number of voters contacted during a campaign is examined. According to the AES, the number of voters contacted by a political party during the election campaign has almost doubled since 2007 (see Fig. 5.1 and Table 5.2). This is a product of two things. Parties becoming more efficient at direct voter contact. And, significantly, parties being able to mobilise non-member

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70 60 50 40 30 20 10 0 2001

2004

2007

2010

2013

2016

2019

Contacted by candidate or poliƟcal party

Fig. 5.1 Contact by a political party during the election campaign (Source Australian election study)

Table 5.2 2019 Australian federal election field campaigns

Organisation/year Labor 2019 Labor 2016 Greens 2019 Greens 2016

Campaign volunteers 25,000 16,200 12,000 7000

Individual voter contacts 2.1 million 1.6 million 410,000 240,000

Source Mills (2020), O’Neill (2020), ALP (2019), interviews The Greens numbers were pieced together through data offered by separate state party officials. As they were not compiled at the national level, there is a reason to be cautious about these in contrast to those of Labor

supporters at significant scale to do the type of high-intensity campaign activity that members cannot deliver on their own. Unfortunately, the Liberal Party was unwilling to disclose any comparable voter contact data for recent federal elections and many interviewees said they simply did not know.11 Nonetheless, interviews with current and former Liberal party officials suggests that field campaigns are viewed as increasingly important and interviewees spoke of the ways they had

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tried to mobilise their non-member supporters over the last decade and how they viewed a critical part of their jobs in the future was to produce meaningful field campaigns (discussed in more detail below). What, then, can we learn from these figures about political parties and how they are responding to changes in the macro-political environment? Understandably, there is concern about the membership of political parties, especially given the central role they play in our democracy as a linkage institution, but parties have long been aware of changing membership dynamics. Many interviewees openly accepted that very few of the non-members involved in the field campaign would make the transition from non-member to member. In discussing changing modes of citizen participation, one former Labor campaign director put it this way: Our membership numbers12 oscillate between two broad figures depending on whether we are in government or not and that hasn’t really changed much over the last 30 years. So traditional memberships are not really how people are engaging with politics anymore, so that is suggestive of broader changes…Our structures are based on a 19th century model of how miners organised themselves in the Welsh coal pits. You go to a meeting to elect someone who goes to another meeting to elect someone who goes to another meeting to elect someone else. That is not how people want to engage anymore.

In terms of how this played out on the ground, both campaigns that I was involved in were very clear about how they perceived the member v non-member dichotomy. It was viewed as an irrelevance. Organisers and leaders of the field campaigns I interviewed backed this up. One Labor organiser, for example, said ‘I don’t care whether someone is a supporter or an actual member. This makes no difference in terms of what campaign volunteers do’. Liberal party officials said it makes no difference to them whether the person doorknocking or making phone calls is a member. A Greens organiser, in explaining the overarching model they use, put it this way: Our model is simple, our small number of paid organisers are paid to activate and mobilise supporters on our lists to participate in our campaigns. Once they are active, we train them, ask them to take on leadership roles and then try to get them to replicate the model.

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While I think it is certainly true that the parties would prefer nonmembers became members once activated, the reality is that this plays little part in how those involved in a field campaign are asked to interact with the campaign, the organisers, the local members or other volunteers. Indeed, when I spoke to members and non-member supporters, neither thought there was a need to be a member to participate in these campaigns. For example, one Labor supporter, when asked about the member-supporter distinctions, said, ‘I never felt that being a volunteer rather than a member mattered, it was never raised’. A supporter who worked on a different field campaign in Central Queensland similarly said, ‘While there was a bit of stick about not being a member and pressure to join, we were never treated differently by X and Y (campaign staff) during the campaign’. Greens supporters I spoke to expressed similar views and said that, if anything, they were surprised by how little emphasis was placed on whether you were a member. One said, having not been involved in a field campaign previously, they were ‘waiting for the moment when organisers broke the group into members and non-members for training or whatever, but it never happened. I still don’t know who was or wasn’t a member on that campaign’. These views were consistent with my experience. Both campaigns were very open to non-members taking on more and more responsibility.13 This is part of the broader culture that these campaigns are trying to create, which they do so extremely successfully. There are certainly some non-members who transition to membership and become the strong partisans parties are often looking for, and this was the trajectory of a number of organisers I spoke to (especially in the Greens), but they remained in the minority. It was more common that organisers and electorate level campaign managers came through the ranks of the youth wings of the parties.

How Do the Field Campaigns Operate? For those who have participated in field campaigns, this description may seem trite, but the actual operation of them is important to clarify. In simple terms, those involved in direct voter contact were, if going doorknocking, usually working in pairs. If phonebanking, they were part of a team calling voters. For the doorknocking operations, each pair were provided with an area to doorknock. The size of these areas was usually around a quarter or half of one SA1, that usually contains between 200

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and 800 households.14 Depending on the day and time that the doorknocking operation takes place, this usually meant that each pair would knock on somewhere between 60 and 120 doors and it is common that you would have a conversation with voters on 20–30 per cent of the doors you knocked on.15 On weekends, this often increased to closer to 50 per cent. But even with these numbers, many of these conversations were not ‘meaningful’. In other words, a conversation where the volunteer spoke to a voter about the election, the issues they cared about and which the volunteer used party messaging and scripts to attempt to persuade the voter. Phonebanking was a different experience. The conversation rate on phone calls was much lower than on the doors, but unsurprisingly it was also easier to increase the number of attempted contacts and to speak to voters as phonebanking could occur at night. However, despite the organisational advantages that phonebanking may offer, a clear problem that was widely discussed in these campaigns was that many voters—including myself—simply do not pick up phone calls from people or numbers they do not know. Indeed, this is part of the reason why we have seen a rise in peer to peer and text-based voter contact, as you are much more likely to speak to your friends or even acquaintances if they call or text you than a complete stranger from a campaign.16 On both Labor and Green campaigns, the structure and organisation of these campaigns were similar, if implemented unevenly. When a doorknock or phonebank was organised, best practice was displayed when the group would come together and the organisers or campaign managers would speak to key themes the group should focus on and how this was linked to the scripts.17 Even more importantly, there would be a short training session with fellow volunteers and organisers about the ‘art’ of direct voter contact, walking through scripts and key messaging. This was not all that common, however, and was also resisted by some volunteers. Similarly, best practice was on display when the group would debrief after voter contact sessions. Organisers would collate statistics on contact and a discussion was had about scripts, messaging and key themes. While the content of these conversations largely replicated what volunteers noted down to be entered into the databases or entered it themselves via mobile apps, these debrief session were about more than dissecting the tea leaves. They were a way for volunteers to come together and build a sense of camaraderie and shared purpose.

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In terms of targeting and segmenting voters, the lists given to members and volunteers to doorknock are not segmented. In any SA1 or area you are asked to doorknock, there may be some addresses that have been marked off as not worth knocking on but, for the most part, the goal is to engage with as many voters as possible and to have meaningful conversations with voters about the values they hold and their concerns for the community they reside in.18 Thus, while volunteers are armed with lists of who they will be speaking to and who should reside at each address, doorknocking is not targeted at the individual level in terms of who you are sent to speak to. However, there are often distinct messages that volunteers and members are meant to deliver to voters who are seen to be especially significant for the campaign. As will be shown in the next chapter, one example of this in 2019 was Labor attempting to message to One Nation voters about economic policy. Targeting is far easier via phonebanking than doorknocking and, naturally enough, this is what occurs. Phonebanking was, primarily, about contacting target groups such as perceived persuadable voters in key areas or seats—often not the one you were directly working in. For Labor, these voters were being targeted based on individual characteristics produced from the data and analytics work discussed in Chapter 3. This is not the case in the Greens, and the goal is mainly to engage with as many voters as possible in target seats or areas. Though voter contact is the primary goal of the field campaign, the secondary goal is data collection. While many conversations are recorded as ‘non-meaningful’, or however the party describes those where the voter was unwilling or unable to engage on the issues that mattered to them, these conversations are not a waste of time as may be assumed. The reason for this is that whatever information a voter discloses at the door can be useful in future campaigns. If a voter reveals complete disinterest in the political process, that voter can be taken off the list and resources are not wasted in future field campaigns. Alternatively, if a voter discloses that they are a strong partisan for one party, this is also useful information and can inform targeting strategies in current and future campaigns. As one data operative suggested, ‘All information is useful, some information is just more useful than others’.19 While the field campaigns are often associated with the progressive parties in Australia, the Liberal Party also conducts them. However, the scale and modes of campaigning are different to that of the progressive parties. This is sometimes a reflection of the culture and age of

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the members of the state divisions of the party. Numerous interviewees from the Liberal Party pointed to this challenge, their active members and supporters are generally older. This has an impact on the capacities of the party. Those involved in campaign organisation suggested that, if they were able to, they certainly would conduct larger field campaigns than they have. Interviewees also suggested the scale of the Liberal field campaigns are increasing and this was especially true in the more populous states of New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. Despite the size of the Liberal Party’s field campaigns being smaller, their capacity to campaign effectively should not be underestimated. Mills (2014a) has previously pointed to the professionalism of the Liberal Party machine, and this was evident in how they have attempted to respond to the field campaign operations of the progressive parties. One example of this comes from New South Wales. One former campaign director said that after 2013, there was a sense that Labor were placing more emphasis on field so they established: A dedicated training team in which we trained 2000 volunteers and activists through a one and a half day course focusing on how to campaign, how to speak to voters, how to engage properly…So the training was critical and it enthused a lot of people. What surprised me was many of those who did the program weren’t party members, but were activists and supporters who wanted to help at election time and to actually learn how to do it much better.

In talking about the way field campaigns were conducted by the Liberal Party, interviewees said that, given the demographics of their supporters, phonebanking was the dominant mode of field campaigning. The doorknocking operations they did undertake were delivered primarily by youth wing members and party members at the local level, with non-member supporters providing additional support. Like with the progressive parties, some interviewees expressed surprise at how many non-member supporters they could draw on. And, like with Labor and the Greens, interviewees said that many of these supporters did not necessarily want to be party members. One former state campaign director, when analysing who helped out on election day in 2013 and 2016, said that their data suggested that approximately 50 per cent of those involved on election day were not party members.20 Another said that they thought that ‘about ten per cent’ of these people end up becoming members. Like

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with their digital campaigns, the targeting the Liberal Party uses for their field campaigns is heavily reliant on market research. The effect of this is that targeting is primarily conducted at the demographic and geographic level. For example, female voters aged between 30 and 40 who reside in outer metropolitan areas. As with the discussion of online campaigning, part of the reason the Liberal Party does not engage in what I describe as data-driven campaign practices in my framework is they do not have the CRM in place to do it. The CRM system that Labor uses was built and designed specifically for these purposes. In terms of efficiently dealing with data and segmenting lists for targeting or voter contact, it provides enormous advantages allowing Labor to feed insights from the data and analytics operation into the field campaign seamlessly. And vice versa. NationBuilder, which the Greens use and is highly regarded, also fails to provide the bespoke functionality that Australian campaigning requires. The reliance of the Liberal Party on the archaic Feedback system is a source of tension within the party, as is the inability to agree on a CRM that the party could use across the country. The result of this is that they simply do not have a system that has the integrative functionality of Labor’s Campaign Central at present.

Conversations, Stories, Persuasion Given field campaigns involve volunteers having conversations with voters, it is worth unpacking the theories and template models of what these conversations should look like. For both Labor and the Greens, the conversations they have with voters draw on theories of change common in organising and social movement politics (Vromen 2016). And the seminal figure for many campaigners is Marshall Ganz, but the historical arc is much bigger than just Ganz. Discussing Labor field campaigns in Victoria, Mills (2014b) wrote: As the Victorian Liberals begin the dispiriting task of working out why they lost last month’s winnable election campaign, they could do worse than to ferret out a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals…written just before Alinsky’s death in 1972, it stands as the foundation text of what has become known as “community organising” – building the capacity of marginalised communities to take collective action to improve their living conditions. Unexpectedly, Alinsky has also become a guiding influence in

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electoral campaign management, as political parties and candidates adapt the principles of community organising to the electoral contest. For this reason, it is possible to trace a direct line of descent from Alinsky, via community organising, to US president Barack Obama, and from there to the electoral success of the newly minted Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews.

The Alinsky-Ganz link to Australian campaign practices is not abstract. These theories have been embedded in Australian campaign practice. Some of the drivers of this include: personnel moving between movement, trade union and party campaign roles; significant numbers of Labor and Green operatives completing Ganz’s ‘Leadership, Organising and Change’ course at Harvard; frequent and ongoing conversations between practitioners from Australian movement and union organisations and key scholars working in this area, often facilitated via organisations such as Australian Progress; and, importantly, a large number of Australian campaigners spending time in the US observing and volunteering on various Democratic, movement and union campaigns. Via a process of osmosis, these theories and practices have gelled with pre-existing practices and tendencies to create the current direct voter contact model of Labor and the Greens. For both parties, there are other causes, and path dependency seems to be significant in the decisions that are taken. One former Labor campaign director, for instance, was firmly of the view that the way the party organises their field campaigns needs to be understood as part of a much deeper story. In their view, while this approach became ‘trendy’ after Obama, from the 1990s unions were already re-thinking how they organised because of the changing industrial relations landscape. Hence, they looked to the US for ideas because it had a: completely decentralised industrial relations system but had very welldeveloped tactics and systems around organising in an environment which was hostile. Most of those tactics and strategies were based around systematic and highly informed direct contact with people on issues which had been identified as important to those people. And one of the things that the union movement did in 1994 was start this program called ‘Organising Works’ which trained organisers in these techniques. Bill Shorten was in that program in 1994…So this approach to politics is ingrained in a lot of our people from a long way back. So, Obama made it sexy, but a lot of our people knew exactly what they were talking about.

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These histories are inevitably complex and personal for many involved, shaped by their own experiences of success and failure and the traditions and cultures they were trained in. One interviewee from the Greens, for example, suggested that while there were a number of drivers for why the field campaigns were so central to how the Greens ‘do’ electoral politics, one motivating factor was that field aligned with the ‘party’s self-mythologising that we are a party of activists’. Despite these divergent drivers, the template of what a persuasive conversation should look like for each party is largely similar. I say template as anyone who has been involved in a field campaign will tell you that volunteers deviate from the scripts and practices in ways that are unimaginable and probably terrifying to organisers and campaign managers.21 These theorised templates of persuasive conversations, at their core, are about establishing a relationship between the volunteer and the voter. This is achieved by identifying the issues that are perceived to be salient for that voter and connecting with them authentically on those issues (McKenna and Han 2014). This connection was best invoked by drawing on storytelling practices and, especially, the ‘story of self’.22 While many interviewees, especially from the Greens, did not talk explicitly about ‘story of self’ narratives, most spoke of the need to connect on shared experience or on the values that matter to the community. Yet, while the broad brushstrokes of the conversations are meant to be similar, the actual mechanisms used to engage and persuade voters remain distinct. The Greens model was effectively one in which they were ‘community organising’—deriving from advocacy organisations, this approach is to ask people what issues they care about and then to organise around those issues rather than trying to persuade voters with messaging (see Gauja 2017: 67–68; Schutz and Sandy 2011). The Greens model in target seats—especially in Queensland—has been to doorknock for months before the election, to find the issues which residents were concerned about and then, connect those local issues to the Greens overarching policies. For example, a key issue the Queensland Greens identified in their target seat of Griffith in 2019 was over-development. This then became a key theme of the messaging during the campaign. The Greens approach to campaigning is only possible because of their formal organisational structure. In particular, their fusion of voter concerns to the mast of their overarching strategy is feasible because they are a confederation of state-based parties, which are diverse (Jackson 2011; Gauja and Jackson 2016); and the state-based parties are not afraid

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to contradict messaging or strategy of the other state-based parties or the Australian Greens parliamentary leadership. This is certainly true of the Queensland Greens. The decentralised nature of the party encourages these differences (Kefford 2018), but these differences were not organisational or bureaucratic in the minds of many involved, they were ideological. There was a widespread perception in the Queensland Greens, for example, that other state Greens parties, and by extension the national parliamentary leadership, were moving the party away from the radical tendencies of the party, which they perceived to be its strength.23 The Labor campaigns also draw on community organising principles and practices. Volunteers ask voters the issues they are interested in, but the ‘storytelling’ approach to persuasion, emerging out of the work of Ganz, was more explicitly embedded in Labor’s field campaign practices. Beyond my own experiences and interview data, a useful template of what these conversations are theoretically meant to look like was made public as a result of the investigation by the Victorian Ombudsman into the ‘Red Shirts’ scandal in Victoria (Mills 2018).24 As Image 5.1 shows, the party proposes that the conversations between volunteers and voters is predicated on a meaningful connection based on a shared set of values. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Labor’s issue ownership on education and health (Bélanger and Meguid 2008), these were common areas for volunteers to use to build a sense of shared values with voters. Indeed, while there are some differences in the training that volunteers received in different states, this encapsulates the way that storytelling and the ‘story of self’ are embedded in Labor field campaign practices.

Do Field Campaigns Work? Given the resources and personnel invested in these field campaigns, whether they are effective at persuading voters is a natural concern of many. Persuading voters on the door or via the phones may be possible, indeed it may already be happening in significant numbers, but here is the rub: there are no academic studies which have measured the effect of party-based field campaign effects in Australia.25 While there is a significant literature in the US (Bedolla and Michelson 2012; Green and Gerber 2015; Kalla and Broockman 2018), and a burgeoning one in Western Europe (Pons 2018; Cantoni and Pons 2016; Foos 2018; Bhatti et al. 2019), numerous challenges exist in applying insights from these studies

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Image 5.1 Persuasive conversation training document from Victorian Labor (Victorian Ombudsman 2018)

to the Australian context. For one, very few of these studies can empirically distinguish between mobilisation and persuasion effects. For another, most ignore persuasion, as it is extremely challenging to measure empirically in contrast with mobilisation effects in a system that uses voluntary voting. Nonetheless, interview data with party elites suggest multiple internal analyses have been conducted on the effect of these campaigns. For example, according to Labor interviewees, there have now been multiple internal field experiments conducted. According to interviewees, the results suggest the effect of a fully operational and sufficiently wellresourced field campaign in an Australian federal division was between 1.2 and 1.6 per cent of the two-party preferred vote.26 This is relatively

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consistent with the international scholarship which suggests that the size of any effect would be small and that for effects to be significant, the party needed to invest heavily in identifying persuasion targets (Kalla and Broockman 2018; Pons 2018). There have also been experiments conducted to explore whether it was possible to mobilise voters to turnout. Given less than 92 per cent of those registered to vote actually did so in 2019, and there are significant numbers not registered to vote (AEC 2019), mobilising turnout may need to be factored into the goals of campaigns in the future. The scholarly evidence also suggests turnout effects are easier to produce and generally larger than persuasion effects (Enos and Fowler 2018). Hence, they are intriguing for Australian parties. Labor’s experimentation in this area is, therefore, especially noteworthy. One of these experiments happened in 2015 when a by-election was held for the House of Representatives seat of Canning in Western Australia. Working with United Voice,27 Labor designed a turnout experiment to take place on election day. As one Labor data operative explained: We decided to run an experiment in the most densely populated, most Labor part of the electorate. Our volunteers knocked on doors on election day and said, “Hey, there’s a by-election on. Go out and vote.” And they only did it to people who were likely to be Labor voters…So we drew up a universe, half of them got a doorknock on the day from United Voice, half of them got nothing and then after the election we checked the turnout – the list of people that turned out to see what effect that had and we thought, “Look, it’s compulsory voting, right? People are going to turn out regardless.” Among households that we attempted to doorknock – so this includes people who were not home and we had no effect on – the turnout was 4.5 per cent higher for those households than the half we didn’t try to contact.

The significance of experiments such as this for future field campaign practices cannot be underestimated, especially if turnout continues to decline. But it has already changed the way some volunteers are used on election day, especially during by-elections. Indeed, it was suggested by some interviewees that this strategy has increased Labor’s two-party preferred vote in by-elections by up to half of a per cent since this time. Whether this is true or not is impossible to gauge, but it does align with the broader international literature and given the trajectory of turnout, this strategy is likely to become increasingly prominent.

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Conclusion The ‘ground war’ is an essential component of the contemporary campaigns that political parties conduct. This is unlikely to change anytime soon. Indeed, even now—in the middle of a pandemic—field will remain important. Parties will just pivot to phonebanking over doorknocking. Field campaigns are significant, not simply because the evidence suggests they are the most effective method to persuade voters, but because of what they reveal about parties and their supporters. The field campaigns the parties have conducted since 2013 tell us there are significant numbers of party supporters who are willing to be actively involved in high-intensity partisan activity. Many of these supporters will turn up and do the ‘donkey work’ but are not interested in being party members (Webb et al. 2017). Knowing more about this group—demographically and attitudinally—is a task that scholars of parties and campaigns need to set themselves. While some of this work has been undertaken in the UK (Bale et al. 2019), and there is emerging research on this in Australia (Gauja and Grömping 2020), much more is required. The changing character of party membership and the significant roles that non-member supporters are playing is a significant phenomenon, and one still underappreciated by scholars interested in party organisation, let alone Australian democracy. In terms of the organisation and structure of these campaigns, as this chapter has detailed, they are theoretically meant to be underpinned by two distinct forces: data and analytics on the one hand and organisational theories of change on the other. How sophisticated the application and integration of these are in the field campaigns, varies significantly. I argue that the Greens field campaigns are not consistent with the practices I associate with data-driven campaigns. Instead, they are engaging in a form of community organising. The Labor campaigns most resemble data-driven campaign practices, while the Liberal Party campaigns are best understood as narrowcasting. Ultimately, all parties need to make strategic decisions about how the field campaign aligns with their overarching goals, strategies as well as what resources they have available to them to achieve these objectives. However, what is evident from interviews is that all three Australian parties viewed field campaigns as serving multiple purposes. They wanted to win elections, and the view is these campaigns can help them achieve this objective. But interviewees from all three parties also spoke about

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field campaigns being a way for the parties to engage with their local communities. Some operatives emphasised this more than others, but the overwhelming majority recognised that there was a perception that parties needed to do more of this than they currently do, and this is certainly borne out in the data in Chapter 7 which considers what Australian voters think about these and other related practices.

Notes 1. As an example of this, one high-profile Labor Senator said to me in an interview that they wanted to disband the field campaign operation as it was a distraction and a waste of resources. 2. Parties can of course phonebank into these areas and this is what happens if the seat or particular voters in the area are considered central to the campaign strategy, but the lack of a ‘on-the-ground’ presence can be problematic. 3. There have been some notable examples of campaigns conducted by Independents in recent years in Australia which have used field campaigns as an important part of their overall campaigns. One example of this is campaigns conducted by Cathy McGowan in the seat of Indi (Hendriks 2017). 4. Of course, parties can partially overcome this by phonebanking into target seats or voters from the major metropolitan areas, and this is what the major parties certainly do. Nonetheless, these campaigns are not just about the contact it is also about having a presence on the ground. 5. I remain sceptical about these figures and the representativeness of the underlying samples. My view is that the politically active are likely to be over-represented. Nonetheless, taken as individual pieces of evidence, they suggest something is going on beneath the surface of Australian democracy. 6. An interesting sidenote to these considerations is the ‘Red Shirts’ Scandal in Victoria which is the state which drove much of the field campaign revolution within Labor. The payment of organisers from the public purse, against the rules was a major scandal and as Mills (2018) noted: ‘embarrassing for Labor and expensive as well, given it has had to repay the $388,000 in public funds it misused. It also creates the suspicion that Labor’s adoption of Obama-inspired fieldwork, with its democratising overtones of volunteerism, grassroots engagement and door-to-door voter persuasion, is an improbable and unaffordable fiction’. 7. The Greens have historically performed best in the Senate as it uses a form of proportional representation but are now trying to move into the House

5

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9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

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and to increase their representation from their single representative, Adam Bandt, who has held the seat of Melbourne since 2010. I do not name the electorates here as it would likely reveal who I spoke to and thus would breach the ethical guidelines that this research was conducted under. Marginal is taken here as the margin at the last election being less than 5 per cent on the two-party preferred measure. In a number of electorates, there were less than 20 members and supporters actively involved in the local campaign. These were all seats where the party had little chance of winning and in many cases, interviewees indicated that no voter contact was undertaken at all, except for interactions on polling booths. I was, however, provided with some data on some sub-national campaigns. One interviewee said that in the most recent state campaign, they contacted 500,000 voters in the final two weeks of the campaign, primarily via phonebanking. They suggested that the scale of their field campaigns had expanded significantly over recent election cycles and this was likely to increase. These comments come from an interview in 2015 and many other operatives have suggested that since then, things have changed and membership numbers have started to increase. Indeed, by the end of the campaign I was asked to: (a) join both parties; (b) be a booth captain on election day; and (c) undertake organiser training to work on future campaigns. I think the fact this was asked of me shows how committed the organisers on these campaigns were to implementing the model and ‘activating’ those who were active in the campaign. As I discuss in Chapter 3, an SA1 is a geographic area as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics that usually contains somewhere between 200 and 800 households. As I developed more and more experience doorknocking, I was often sent out by myself and by the end of the campaign was given entire SA1’s to see how much I could complete. The amount of doors I knocked on and numbers of conversations I had varied greatly across the campaign, and was affected by the day and time, as well as the general area I was working in. At the start of the campaign, I would have knocked on less than 40 doors and had around 10 conversations. By the end, this was closer to 100 and I was having 30 conversations with voters on each individual doorknock. As part of the survey data I collected for this project, I asked respondents about whom they would prefer to receive campaign materials from and what mode this material would come from. Unsurprisingly, friends or relatives was preferred over party volunteers or people who live in

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19.

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24. 25.

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my neighbourhood. However, texting was preferred over phone calls or people knocking on my door as a first point of contact for receiving campaign material. See the Research Appendix for an example of a doorknock run-sheet. Of course, in many other countries, the data that parties holds is likely to distinguish between registered and unregistered voters and those who do and don’t vote, data which is often used to target those conversations. Initially, myself and many other new volunteers I spoke to, were uncomfortable being given lists of voters that contained personal details on each of these voters that we were being sent out to speak to. However, this soon passes, especially once you realise this information was acquired largely from sources such as the AEC and the voter themselves. Moreover, not a single voter I spoke to either in-person or over the phone asked how I had their information or what other information the party possessed about them. In no way does this mean that campaigns do enough to protect the data and privacy of voters, however, there is certainly a level of voter passivity when it comes to who possessed data on them. Of course, it should be noted, that these are city-centric perspectives and in regional Australia the parties rely on the small number of members and field campaigns are almost non-existent. While discussed elsewhere, this is why trying to control and centralise authority over a field campaign is challenging. Enos and Hersh (2015) speak about these challenges as a principal-agent problem. For more on the ‘story of self’ see Working Narratives (n.d.). For a much larger discussion of the influence of Ganz and the ‘story of self’ on campaign practices in Australia and the US see Alexander (2010), McKenna and Han (2014) and Vromen (2016). Ironically, very little of the electoral politics the Queensland Greens engaged in was ‘radical’ and tensions within the party between the ‘electoralists’ and the ‘radicals’ have been percolating for some time. As Note 5 suggests, the ‘Red Shirts’ Scandal effectively involved Labor using the public purse to pay organisers for field campaigning purposes. However, an interesting experiment was conducted by the ACTU with researchers in 2013. The goal of this was to minimise the conservative vote. The results supported studies internationally, including that direct voter contact was the most effective mechanism for changing voting behaviour (Lam and Peyton 2013). Some interviewees said it was “around 1.5 per cent”, so I have given the range that a number of interviews provided. United Voice was a large Australian trade union, it has now merged with another union and this union is known as the United Workers Union.

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References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2010. The performance of politics: Obama’s victory and the democratic struggle for power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ALP. 2019. Review of Labor’s 2019 federal election campaign. https://alp.org. au/media/2043/alp-campaign-review-2019.pdf. Accessed 7 Nov 2019. Australian Electoral Commission. 2019. First preferences by party. https://res ults.aec.gov.au/24310/Website/HouseStateFirstPrefsByParty-24310-NAT. htm. Accessed 8 Dec 2019. Bale, Tim, Paul Webb, and Monica Poletti. 2019. Footsoldiers: Political party membership in the 21st century. Abingdon: Routledge. Bedolla, Lisa Garcia, and Melissa R. Michelson. 2012. Mobilizing inclusion: Transforming the electorate through get-out-the-vote campaigns. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bélanger, Éric, and Bonnie M. Meguid. 2008. Issue salience, issue ownership, and issue-based vote choice. Electoral Studies 27 (3): 477–491. Bhatti, Yosef, Jens Olav Dahlgaard, Jonas Hedegaard Hansen, and Kasper M. Hansen. 2019. Is door-to-door canvassing effective in Europe? Evidence from a meta-study across six European countries. British Journal of Political Science 49 (1): 279–290. Cameron, Sarah, and Ian McAllister. 2019. The 2019 Australian federal election: Results from the Australian election study. https://australianelectionstudy. org/wp-content/uploads/The-2019-Australian-Federal-Election-Resultsfrom-the-Australian-Election-Study.pdf. Accessed 9 Feb 2020. Cantoni, Enrico, and Vincent Pons. 2016. Do interactions with candidates increase voter support and participation? Experimental evidence from Italy. Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item. aspx?num=50427. Accessed 10 May 2018. Enos, Ryan D., and Anthony Fowler. 2018. Aggregate effects of large-scale campaigns on voter turnout. Political Science Research and Methods 6 (4): 733–751. Enos, Ryan D., and Eitan D. Hersh. 2015. Party activists as campaign advertisers: The ground campaign as a principal-agent problem. American Political Science Review 109 (2): 252–278. Foos, Florian. 2018. The parliamentary candidate as persuader: Evidence from randomized candidate–voter interactions (working paper). www.florianfoos. net/resources/Candidate_as_persuader_Foos.pdf. Accessed 23 Sept 2019. Gauja, Anika. 2015. The construction of party membership. European Journal of Political Research 54 (2): 232–248. Gauja, Anika. 2017. Party reform: The causes, challenges, and consequences of organizational change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Gauja, Anika, and Max Grömping. 2020. Australian Labor as a federal organisation: State uniformity or distinctiveness? Australian Journal of Politics & History 66 (1): 35–49. Gauja, Anika, and Stewart Jackson. 2016. Australian Greens party members and supporters: Their profiles and activities. Environmental Politics 25 (2): 359– 379. Green, Donald P., and Alan S. Gerber. 2015. Get out the vote: How to increase voter turnout. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Hendriks, Carolyn M. 2017. Citizen-led democratic reform: Innovations in Indi. Australian Journal of Political Science 52 (4): 481–499. Jackson, Stewart. 2011. The Australian Greens: Between movement and electoral professional party. PhD Thesis, University of Sydney. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2018. The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments. American Political Science Review 112 (1): 148–166. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2020. Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: Evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review 114 (2): 410–425. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Digital media, ground wars and party organisation: Does Stratarchy explain how parties organise election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs 71 (3): 656–673. Lam, Patrick, and Kyle Peyton. 2013. Voter persuasion in compulsory electorates: Evidence from a field experiment in Australia. https://projects.iq. harvard.edu/files/applied_stats/files/ausexp_1.pdf. Accessed 15 Aug 2017. McKenna, Elizabeth, and Hahrie Han. 2014. Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 million volunteers transformed campaigning in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Mills, Stephen. 2014a. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Mills, Stephen. 2014b. Rules for radicals comes to carrum. Inside Story. https:// goo.gl/VB9iR8. Accessed 10 Nov 2014. Mills, Stephen. 2018. Dirty deeds, done for considerable amounts of money. Inside Story. https://insidestory.org.au/dirty-deeds-done-for-a-considerableamount-of-money/. Accessed 24 Mar 2018. Mills, Stephen. 2020. Campaign communications. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Simms, and Marian Sawer. Canberra: ANU Press. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. O’Neill, Abraham. 2020. The Australian Greens must democratize their party structures. Jacobin. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/05/australian-gre ens-adam-bandt-green-new-deal. Accessed 5 May 2020.

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Pons, Vincent. 2018. Will a five-minute discussion change your mind? A countrywide experiment on voter choice in France. American Economic Review 108 (6): 1322–1363. Schutz, Aaron, and Marie Sandy. 2011. Collective action for social change: An introduction to community organizing. London: Springer. Victorian Ombudsman. 2018. Investigation of a matter referred from the Legislative Council on 25 November 2015. Parliament of Victoria. https:// www.parliament.vic.gov.au/file_uploads/Ombudsman-Investigation_of_a_ matter_referred_from_the_Legislative_Council_on_25_November_2015_Lsj 7bW2z.pdf. Accessed 30 Mar 2018. Vromen, Ariadne. 2016. Digital citizenship and political engagement: The challenge from online campaigning and advocacy organisations. London: Springer. Webb, Paul, Monica Poletti, and Tim Bale. 2017. So who really does the donkey work in ‘multi-speed membership parties’? Comparing the election campaign activity of party members and party supporters. Electoral Studies 46: 64–74. Working Narratives. n.d. What is public narrative and how can we use it? https:// workingnarratives.org/article/public-narrative/. Accessed 6 June 2019.

CHAPTER 6

Data-Driven Campaigning: A Case Study from the Ground

What exactly does data-driven campaigning look like on the ground? And, what do those involved in data-driven campaigning on the ground think about it? This chapter will provide answers to these questions. A ‘typical’ case study of a data-driven campaign in Australia is used (Gerring 2007). By doing so, this chapter seeks to unpack the way data and analytics are used to target voters on the ground, as well as to show the way this is executed through a field campaign. Given what has been described in the previous chapters about Australian campaign practices, I use a case study of the only Australian party engaged in what I describe as data-driven campaign practices, the Labor Party. Detailing Labor’s campaigning efforts in the state of Queensland during the 2019 federal election, this case study demonstrates some of the challenges that parties conducting data-driven campaigns face, no matter the amount of data they have or the abilities of their data and analytics teams. Given the dearth of fine-grained qualitative case studies which describe what datadriven campaigns look like on the ground, this case study will be a timely addition to the nascent literature. This chapter is set up the following way. I begin by setting out the context for this case study, including the nature of the contest, the expectations, and the focus of the data-driven campaign. In particular, I talk about the challenges for Labor in the state of Queensland, and the context © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_6

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in which the campaign was fought. I move on to talk about the target of the data-driven campaign, the populist radical right, including what the scholarship tells us about these voters. I then describe in detail what the data and analytics that the Labor Party used said about these voters, including what message testing suggested was likely to be effective in persuading these voters. I point to what interviewees on the ground, including volunteers and organisers, made of the campaign, including their perceptions of engaging with the target voters. As I show, the perceptions on the ground, were that the campaign failed. I conclude by discussing what this case study tells us about data-driven campaign practices and the challenges for parties attempting to utilise such practices.

The Campaign As explained in detail in Chapter 3, parties in Australia and internationally collect data on voters in a variety of ways. They do this online using a number of different strategies such as tracking cookies or getting voters to sign up to petitions and email lists, but they also do so offline when they interact with voters via their canvassing operations (also discussed in Chapter 5). This data is then commonly combined with data they obtain from publicly available information and voters themselves. When it comes to targeting, the most important data is that which comes from voters. In Australia, this is often collected via robopolls.1 This data is used to build a model of the electorate so that the campaign strategy can be mapped out, potentially persuadable voters identified, and strengths and weaknesses considered. The 2019 federal election, which Labor was expected to win, presented a familiar yet complicated set of challenges for the party from a strategy and messaging perspective. These challenges, which are similar to those shared by many centre-left parties across the globe, can be encapsulated into the following question: How does a political party, like Labor, build an electoral coalition large enough to win seats in wealthy areas of inner-city Sydney and Melbourne, as well as appealing to voters in the suburbs of Brisbane, central Queensland, northern Tasmania, and the outer suburbs of Perth?2 These differences are not just geographic, they are demographic and attitudinal. This is no mean feat and requires tough decisions to be made about resource allocation and who the party should focus their energies on in the campaign. Queensland is an especially challenging state for Labor at the federal level. While the party has dominated state politics for the last three

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decades, the results for the party at the federal level are the worst in the country by some margin (Barber 2017; AEC 2019). There are several reasons for this. One is that the state is highly decentralised and the interests of the different regions can present frustrating contradictions. This is explained by a combination of material, demographic and attitudinal factors.3 The primary employment industry in the regions are mining, agriculture and tourism. The interests and objectives of each industry are a frequent source of tension with the other industries, as well as creating tensions that can be exploited relatively easily in a federation like Australia. Party entrepreneurs can make ‘hay’ by playing state and federal governments off one another and they can take advantage of inconsistent messaging by different layers of the major parties. For example, state parties may say one thing and then the federal parliamentary party may say something altogether different. These party entrepreneurs can also use friction between the major parties to their advantage. When it comes to Queensland, these tensions within and across the major parties are usually bubbling away, just beneath the surface. The media is another important factor in making Queensland so challenging for Labor. Unlike other states which are more centralised— Victoria being one example—which have two or perhaps three media markets, Queensland has seven or eight distinct media markets that parties need to penetrate. But the rub is that while there are more media markets, they are all dominated by one media organisation: News Ltd, which controls the only statewide daily paper—the Courier Mail—and almost every single regional paper across the state (Warren 2019; Blaine 2019). Former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, a vehement critic of News Ltd, has argued that their attempts to polarise debates on climate change are especially telling in Queensland because climate and extraction politics come head-to-head in regional Queensland (cited in Blaine 2019). Another factor which presents challenges for Labor in Queensland is that state and federal elections are true multi-party contests. There are often four or five parties that have enough resources and a profile to contest elections in a meaningful way in the state. This includes: Labor, the LNP,4 the Queensland Greens, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Katter’s Australia Party. There has also been the presence of Clive Palmer’s parties, the Palmer United Party and then the United Australia Party (Kefford and McDonnell 2016; Kefford 2020), at various junctures. But it is not just the number of competitors which is a challenge, it is the issue positions and preferences of these parties which shape electoral

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competition in the state. This is especially significant given preferences are important in deciding so many seats. Political scientists like to talk about ‘centre-periphery cleavages’ (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), and this explains a great deal about electoral politics in Queensland. To quote former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, ‘One thing that unites all Queenslanders is a general fuck you towards people from the south’ (cited in Blaine 2019).5 This sunny disposition is not directed solely at Canberra. For those that live in the regions, it is also directed at Brisbane, the state capital. The challenges for Labor have been further exacerbated by the emergence of the Greens as a competitive electoral force in inner-city Brisbane. Building from local government success, the party broke through, winning the seat of Maiwar in the state legislature in 2017 and have run increasingly competitive campaigns in inner-city seats at the state and federal level, in addition to maintaining their presence in the Senate. The growth and presence of the Greens in inner-city Brisbane, affects how resources are used, but it also wedges Labor on some of the issues the right-wing minor parties are fixated on. These challenges are not unique, but it does illustrate the challenges for centre-left parties and their disparate base. The party is attempting to appeal to those who want strong action on climate change, as well as those who may or may not want action on climate change, but perceive the employment opportunities the extraction industries provide, as materially important to them.6 This climate change-extraction industry nexus is not an abstract phenomenon. It has paralysed Australian politics for over a decade. During the campaign, Adani Mining’s Carmichael coal mine in the Galilee Basin of Central Queensland7 became a lightning rod for this divide. On the one side, stood those who supported increased action to mitigate the effects of climate change and on the other, those who supported the opening up of new coal mines (McKenzie et al. 2017).8 At the federal level, the issue of Adani split both elected representatives and supporters of Labor and the Coalition (Coorey and Ludlow 2016). The difference, however, was that the federal Coalition—made up of the Liberal Party and the Nationals—could wage a phony war among themselves. The central Queensland representatives who are formally members of the merged LNP, all sat in the Nationals party room.9 This allowed them to claim that they were fighting for local jobs and supported the opening up of

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new coal mines, while their colleagues from the same party sat with the Liberals in Canberra and could talk about mitigating climate change. Adani was more problematic for Labor, especially as the state Labor government had said it supported the project provided a range of environmental and economic conditions were met. Labor’s challenge was to build a coherent and convincing strategy to maintain parts of its electoral coalition who were likely to be educated, white-collar and who resided in the cities with those traditional working-class voters in the outer metropolitan and regional areas. One component of this strategy developed over multiple electoral cycles and which this campaign drew insights from,10 involved targeting a sub-set of voters who were viewed as potentially persuadable and were perceived to share some policy preferences with Labor. The key target group were voters who had previously indicated support for Australia’s populist radical right party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.

Confronting the Populist Radical Right The rise of the populist radical right has been one of the defining stories of the past few years. From Washington to Westminster and beyond, the radical right has made an indelible influence on liberal democratic politics. Australia is no different (Kefford and Ratcliff 2018). One Nation and Pauline Hanson’s re-emergence in 2016 has shaped political discourse and the legislative agenda since this time. The level of media attention One Nation and Hanson receive is clearly disproportionate to the influence that they wield, yet there is little doubt that their presence changes the nature of electoral competition between and with the major parties. While there is debate about the primary drivers of support for parties such as One Nation, significant evidence is now suggesting it is cultural, not economic (Mols and Jetten 2016, 2017). Some scholars have even suggested that what we are seeing is a reaction to the post-materialism of the previous three decades (Norris and Inglehart 2018). Indeed, one key demographic factor identified in the split between those who tended to support parties and candidates such as Le Pen, Wilders, Trump and probably Hanson too, and those who do not is not income, it is education (Inglehart and Norris 2016). This is especially important and problematic for centre-left parties who have a base that is split between the highly educated and the working class, as is the case for Labor.

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Labor attempted to respond to the One Nation threat by segmenting their voters and targeting parts of One Nation’s voting bloc who were perceived to share some of the same policy preferences. These targeted messages were not, however, being delivered through some digital platform. Instead, Labor used their massive field campaign capabilities as the delivery mechanism. This was as Nielsen (2012) described, ‘personalised political communication’. These targeted messages also complemented the party’s larger advertising strategy, thereby layering their key messages across multiple channels such as digital and television. While the primary goal was to persuade potential One Nation voters to support Labor, it was also an attempt to influence the preferences of these voters so that Labor could combat the preference flows to the Coalition, which can be telling in Australian House of Representatives contests given the use of the Alternative Vote electoral system.11 Part of the overarching tactics and messaging of Labor between 2016 and 2019—once One Nation returned to the federal parliament—was to relentlessly message that a vote for One Nation is the same as voting for the Coalition. While there is truth to the argument that One Nation votes with the government in parliament most of the time (Beaumont and Ghazarian 2018), this strategy was first and foremost about signalling to undecided voters and traditional Labor voters who detest the Coalition but were flirting with the idea of supporting One Nation that this was a wasted vote. For example, one message that frequently emerged from Labor and trade union social media accounts was a variation of the following, ‘Who is Pauline Hanson really working for? Answer: Malcolm Turnbull and his multinational mates. Every. Single. Time’ (QLD Labor 2018).12 Another example came from the twitter account of Labor Senator for Queensland, Murray Watt, ‘Votes with Turnbull 90% of the time, preferences him in tight by-elections. Hanson proves again she’s just another vote for the LNP’ (Watt 2018). Labor’s messaging was aided by conservative parties at the state and federal level playing ‘footsie’ with One Nation over preferences and potential coalition deals (Beech 2019). But the message that Hanson and the LNP were one and the same was a key talking point at doorstops, in interviews and a key theme emerging from party and trade union social media accounts (Beaumont and Ghazarian 2018). This messaging in the media, both social and broadcast, was also designed to complement the overarching theme the Labor Party focussed on for much of the parliamentary term; rising economic inequality under

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the Coalition. Labor’s strategy in Queensland in regard to One Nation, put simply, was to use the 1–2 punch of these messages and to layer them across multiple channels. The goal of this was to sandbag their own primary as well as to attempt to persuade undecided voters—including potential and previous One Nation voters—that only the Labor Party would be able to reduce inequality and deliver more services, a message that testing suggested would be positively received by these voters.

Red One Nation, Blue One Nation Underpinning this macro-level strategy and messaging was microtargeting via the field campaign. What Labor recognised is that, despite what is often reported, One Nation voters are not all the same. Some invariably fit the popular caricature of the party, but like all political parties that have been at least moderately successful, their support base is made up of a coalition of voters. In the view of Labor, One Nation’s voters were more likely to be socially conservative, but their views on economic policy were more varied. Some favoured strong government intervention, a sizable welfare state and government investment in services, while others were economically conservative. Party insiders had been referring to these two groups, segmented along economic lines, for a few years as ‘Red One Nation’ and ‘Blue One Nation’.13 One Nation voters were therefore segmented into one of two buckets and resourcing decisions were made based on which bucket these voters were segmented into: ‘Blue One Nation’ - socially and economically conservative voters who were viewed as unpersuadable. These voters were perceived to be more likely to preference the Coalition above Labor. Resources were diverted away from these voters as much as possible. ‘Red One Nation’ - perceived to be persuadable and to share some policy preferences with Labor. These voters were perceived to oppose privatisation of government services and supported increasing investment in local services, including health and education. These voters were targeted via phonebanking and doorknocking with canvassers given specific scripts when interacting with them.

In discussing how they modelled and segmented these voters, data and analytics operatives suggested they had drawn on what they considered

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classic political science concepts. One interviewee, for example, said that they tried to think about these voters in terms of where they sat on an ‘economic left/right axis and a social authoritarian versus libertarian axis. I think we identified that, we called them the authoritarian left, that this was the same group as Red One Nation’. Another suggested that different layers of the party were working together on these voters. They said the national campaign team had a model they were using and then the state party also had their own models. But across the country and the different layers of the party, the same process was occurring. One Nation voters were cordoned off and modelled separately from other persuasion targets as they were perceived to be different demographically and attitudinally to other voters. What Labor was aiming to achieve in Queensland was exactly what a data and analytics driven campaign in Australia should theoretically consist of: it targeted voters at the individual rather than the demographic level based on a set of policy preferences which were meant to be cross-cutting; the party had tested whether this group of voters were more likely to be persuadable to the core campaign messages; messaging and scripts were tailored to use with these voters compared with other voters; the messaging and overarching strategy were integrated with other communication channels with the goal to persuade voters; and, finally, the strategy baked in the second-order effects of preferencing which is critical in Australian elections. However, despite the sophistication of the data and analytics operation, those on the ground suggested the campaign was not effective. In talking to members, supporters and organisers from across Queensland who worked on the field campaign, almost universally the voter files were viewed as unreliable with members often describing them as a ‘joke’. Others said they ignored them entirely. And, even a serving MP, who had experience working on campaigns, viewed them as ‘a rough guide that I don’t spend too much time thinking about’. Speaking specifically about the supporter and persuadability scores, discussed in more detail in Chapter 3, one field organiser said, ‘The persuadability scores are pretty much dogshit’. When campaigners were phonebanking ‘Red One Nation’ voters, members and supporters I spoke to said that supposed Red One Nation voters frequently were: not One Nation voters; did not want to admit they were One Nation voters; or, if they were, they were not only not persuadable, they were openly antagonistic to the intrusion and the

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message. Some examples of the interview data with these members and volunteers is as follows: When I was trying to call One Nation voters, probably 1 in 10 were who they were meant to be Leaving aside the fact that so many were not actually One Nation voters, I’m not sure what the persuadability scores were based on as I didn’t speak to a whole lot of people who were willing to talk to me once they knew I was from Labor The voter files are useless I just ignored the scripts and tried to get them talking about what they thought were the problems in their community.

I spoke to twenty-seven campaigners across eleven Queensland electorates, from suburban Brisbane seats to those in the far north of the state and the view was largely the same. From the perspective of those on the ground, any attempt to target One Nation voters simply did not work. While it is difficult to disentangle whether these issues were related to the data used to build the model, larger issues with the campaign which overwhelmed attempts to persuade these voters, the cohort of those interviewed or something else altogether, in the view of campaigners on the ground spoken to, the strategy made little sense to them and was ineffective. While this aspect of the strategy cannot be isolated out from what else was going on in the campaign, the macro-level results do not read well for Labor in Queensland. Their vote sunk to 26.6 per cent of first preferences in the state, while the statewide One Nation vote of 8.86 per cent, increased by 3.34 per cent (AEC 2019). This is partially explained by One Nation contesting more seats than in 2016 (Kefford 2018), but in each of the seats where One Nation won more than ten per cent of first preferences in the state, first preferences for the Labor Party went down in every one of these electorates. We certainly need to be cautious about reading too much into those results, especially as we do not know how individuals who were targeted responded and whether this affected their

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vote. But, given this data, a reasonable working hypothesis could be that the campaign was ineffective. This case certainly raises many questions about data-driven campaigning, including when and where data-driven approaches are likely to be most effective. One of these relates to the populist radical right, which One Nation are a classic case study of in the international literature. As a political scientist who knew the scholarly literature on the populist radical right, I was surprised at the strategy given the international evidence suggests these voters do not find economic appeals convincing and that socio-cultural issues, such as immigration, were more salient for them. I was, however, also mindful of the fact that on these issues, Labor and One Nation’s positions were incongruent. Despite what many critics claim, Labor is a vehement defender of multiculturalism, and supports Australia accepting significant numbers of migrants and refugees in a non-discriminatory manner.14 This approach to immigration is anathema to many One Nation voters and certainly to One Nation party elites, who have maintained the nativist, anti-immigration rhetoric the party has become famous for. When quizzed on why this was the strategy, given that it runs counter to the conventional wisdom in political science on which issues are highly salient for these voters, one data operative suggested: I guess the issue for Labor is that’s actually the point of incongruence with One Nation voters. There’s more congruence on economic issues between One Nation and Labor than there is on social issues, so it’s difficult for us to campaign to those people on social issues because we might actually have some fundamental disagreements.

This is evidently correct, but the question has to be asked: would it not have been better to use these resources on persuading other minor party voters or weak partisans of their primary competitor, the LNP? A second question is whether it is useful for parties engaged in a datadriven persuasion campaigns to respond to information from the ground that the campaign was not hitting the mark. In speaking to data and analytics operatives from a range of parties and third-party campaigners, it is apparent there are a range of views on this. Some were of the view that whatever data you have, you try to feed that back into see whether the model was holding up, and if problems were evident, you refine it. Another view was that those on the ground, while well-intentioned, were

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not well positioned to determine the efficacy of the campaign because of information asymmetries. In particular, given the secretive nature of campaigning, most volunteers have little idea why certain voters are deemed to be persuadable or why they are being targeted. There is no easy answer for campaigns in this regard. The reality is that changing field campaign messaging or strategy mid-campaign is akin to turning an oil tanker. The danger for field campaigns focussed on targeting and persuasion campaigns, then, is that the campaign is inflexible and locked into set strategies. A third question relates to the efficacy of data-driven persuasion campaigns in a country which: uses compulsory voting; has multi-party electoral contests; and, these electoral contests are decided at the federal level with a complicated mixed electoral system.15 Data and analytics operatives were under no illusions that the fundamentals of Australian democracy, and especially the need to focus on persuasion, means the task is much more difficult than if they were asked to undertake mobilisation campaigns. In particular, they acknowledged that persuasion modelling and scores were far more difficult to build—which the international literature has also previously noted (Nickerson and Rogers 2014)—than supporter scores with one suggesting that: What we do find is that persuadability is a lot harder to measure than if you’re trying to find Labor voters or you’re trying to find Liberal voters or something like that – something that’s more tangible, something that’s less nebulous than persuadability, those tend to be a lot easier to model and the model tends to get them right more.

Another acknowledged that the models work best when we are operating in a fairly stable environment, us and the Libs, but as soon as you push it out to try to deal with all the right-wing minor parties, especially in Queensland, things become more challenging…too much volatility messes with our capacity to predict voting behaviour.

But the view consistently expressed was that despite these challenges, the efficiencies generated from campaigning this way, make it worthwhile. There certainly was a concerted attempt to build a bespoke and more complex model that tried to understand these voters and which included both the central party apparatus and state party apparatus being involved

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in adding voters ‘into these different buckets, like Red One Nation and Blue One Nation’, and that this process was different than for all other voters across the country because ‘Queensland is more fluid, more multipolar and multi-party than other states’. But when you are targeting the voters of a party that receives between five and twenty per cent of first preferences in a single state and mixed results elsewhere, as is the case with One Nation, the challenge of successfully targeting and persuading these voters is significant. Clearly, Labor did not just make the decision to target these voters out of thin air, and interviewees said ‘in our online testing, the authoritarian left group seemed to actually be moved by some of our ads probably better than other groups’. But this again raises questions about how the campaign understood these voters. There is also a parallel with the Hilary Clinton presidential campaign in 2016. In discussing why the messaging of the Clinton campaign failed to hit the mark with working-class voters, former data scientist for the Democratic Party, David Shor (cited in Levitz 2020), said that the problem was: that the Clinton campaign hired pollsters to test a bunch of different messages, and for boring mechanical reasons, working-class people with low levels of social trust were much less likely to answer those phone polls than college-educated professionals. And as a result, all of this cosmopolitan, socially liberal messaging did really well in their phone polls, even though it ultimately cost her a lot of votes.

While we will never know the answer, one question is whether the data being collected and the testing being done was not of a high enough quality. One high-ranking Labor operative suggested that while they believe that these campaign practices are advantageous, they are relatively new for the party and: We are still fairly unsophisticated in our application of it. We basically do scale survey work for really cheap and use crude technology like robopolls.

As noted in Chapter 3, there certainly are internal actors who are of the view that the data collection for federal campaigns is less rich and of a smaller scale than for sub-national campaigns. A fourth question relates to path dependency. Labor’s data and analytics operation far surpasses that of the other Australian parties, as

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shown in the previous chapters. But would Labor be running data-driven persuasion campaigns like the one described here if they had not invested so heavily in their bespoke CRM system, Campaign Central?16 Again, there is no way of knowing for sure, but the incentive to use the CRM for the purposes it was designed has certainly played a role. And, a number of interviewees were of the view that the investment in Campaign Central had shaped views about what was possible, and how a party such as Labor should campaign. As I discussed in Chapter 2, there is good reason to think that as a party embraces more intensive data-driven practices and moves closer to the bullseye of my framework that it becomes like a vortex. One consequence of choosing to campaign in this way is that it is inflexible. Another is that it affects party organisation. Clearly data-driven campaigning can never be a substitute for a set of policies and messaging that resonates with enough of the right people in the right areas. Some of the most experienced and professional operatives I spoke to would often say variations of the following, ‘data and modelling is just another tool in the toolbox’. Or ‘the data and analytics operations are one bit of the operational puzzle which can give you a bit of an edge when it’s close’. This case study certainly supports those views, but it also adds weight to the ‘sceptical account’ of data-driven campaigning practices (Baldwin-Philippi 2017; Dommett 2019; Baldwin-Philippi 2019, 2020). Yet this case study also adds something original to the scholarly literature. Most accounts of data-driven campaign practices deal with highly polarised two-party polities such as the US, or those which use the Single Member Plurality electoral system such as the UK. Some degree of scepticism about the efficacy of data-driven persuasion campaigning in countries which have multi-party election contests and/or use preferential or proportional electoral systems seems necessary. This seems to be exacerbated, like in this case, where the targets identified for persuasion messaging are voters who have either de-aligned from the major parties (or were never aligned), and indicate that they support minor parties. This is not to say these campaigns cannot persuade these voters and their messaging is not effective, but do any marginal gains made by focussing on these voters, outweigh the significant resources expended? An interesting counter-factual is to consider whether these practices would have worked better if the party offered an alternative set of policies. For example, if Labor’s policies did not include changes to negative gearing and franking credits,17 would this have made a difference to

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how these voters perceived Labor?18 Or, what if Bill Shorten was not the leader, would this have helped in trying to persuade these voters to support Labor or to preference them over the Coalition? While we cannot know for sure, given all we do know about these voters internationally, we would have to infer that the answer is, no. Perhaps if the party were more explicitly pro-coal that may have helped with these voters, not in terms of perceived material benefits, but there is certainly an argument that could be made that many voters in regional Queensland view any opposition to coal-mining as an opposition to their identities.19 But these hypotheticals are just that. And, they neither simplify the strategic choices a party like Labor needs to make or clarify whether a strategy focussing on minor party voters in this way is useful or not. Any generalisations from this specific case to data-driven campaigning at large needs to come with significant caveats. However, it is curious that, for many undertaking grassroots campaigning for Labor, there is a disconnect between party elites and those on the ground in regard to what the models are used for, what they are based on, and how they help the party achieve its objectives. Some of this is to be expected as campaigns need to ensure some of their strategy and data are not made public. But there are lessons here for party organisation and intra-party communication. In considering what lessons can be taken from this case study, one data and analytics operative provided a comparative perspective, linking what many see as a problem with the models to what happened to the Clinton campaign in 2016. It reminds me of the Hillary problem, volunteers got sent to knock on doors in Pennsylvania or wherever and were finding that the people who should have been weak Democrats were actually strong for Trump. This is always a risk and I often wonder whether people misunderstand or give the model too much weight or think the model is magic. I always say the actual universe of people that are persuadable is about 15 per cent…If 15 per cent are persuadable and you have a really, really good model that finds persuadable people at a rate twice of chance, which is a really good model, 30 per cent of your universe is persuadable, which means 70 per cent is not and given you’re trying to find a fairly small and fairly nebulous part of the universe, you’re always going to see a bunch of people who are not persuadable…how much of that is the model misfiring and how much of that is that you’re always going to hit some people that look like persuadable voters but aren’t because the model can’t read minds?

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Another spoke of the need for data-driven persuasion campaigns to empower members and supporters and bring them into the conversation, suggesting that they cannot solely be the domain of the data and analytics teams. In their view, campaigns needed to do a better job of communicating what they were trying to achieve to members and supporters so that people on the ground felt part of the broader strategy. The entire campaign have to buy into what we are trying to do with the model because a model that’s not used has zero power. If the scores and lists are just sitting there and people on the ground have decided, “Look, this isn’t working. Let’s just go back to knocking on every door or calling everyone we can in suburbs that we reckon are swing suburbs”, then you haven’t achieved anything and you’re not getting that efficiency. So as a practitioner, we need to find a way to make it work.

There is certainly something to be said for these arguments. But how you do this given the principal-agent problem that campaigns such as this face is open for debate (Enos and Hersh 2015).

Conclusion According to Baldwin-Philippi (2019), The myths of data-driven campaigning are deeply tied to the field’s literature on the democratic implications of microtargeting…Increasingly, these fears are being revealed to be just that — concerns of theoretical impact rather than actual impact…Coupled with the knowledge that campaigns often do not execute analytic-based campaigning tactics as fully or rigorously as possible, the concern that we are being driven away from democracy by data is overstated.

The case study provides strong support for Baldwin-Philippi’s argument. This case demonstrates the characteristics expected of a data-driven campaign—data and analytics underpinning a targeted campaign in which the central messaging had been tested. Moreover, it was a campaign designed to persuade voters and did so while clearly baking in the institutional conditions the campaign was fought in, such as the electoral system. Put simply, this campaign is exactly what a data-driven campaign is theorised to look like.

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This case study is also instructive for a range of reasons. It is one of very few case studies which explores what data-driven campaign practices look like for those who participate in these campaigns, on the ground, rather than what it looks like to party elites. This is significant as there certainly is a sense that how those on the ground perceive these activities is vastly different from those doing data and analytics work. It also demonstrates that while sophisticated data-driven campaigns based on data and analytics are organisationally feasible, there is good reason to remain sceptical about their efficacy. This seems to be particularly relevant, like in this case, when campaigns are conducted in multi-party election contests, with significant volatility and which use preferential or proportional electoral systems. This does not mean that parties should not invest in this type of campaigning, especially if it complements their strategic advantages elsewhere, such as the numbers of members and supporters they can draw on to conduct direct voter contact operations. But the perception that these campaigns are game-changing, appears misguided. Moreover, this narrative also overlooks the possibility that, rather than being a vote-winner, these campaigns may potentially backfire and produce negative effects, and there is some evidence for this (Arceneaux and Kolodny 2009; Nicholson 2012; Bailey et al. 2016). Clearly one factor which complicates the evidence compiled ‘on the ground’ is that without systematically measuring campaign effects, there is little capacity to distinguish between ‘signal’ and ‘noise’. Hence, we do not know whether the campaign worked better than how those on the ground perceived it or what the electorate and statewide results tell us. However, what data could party elites collect to systematically validate their strategy post hoc which would not succumb to the ecological fallacy? In the absence of Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) and further field experiments—which need to be embedded into the actual campaign in real time—these effects are not measurable. The other question is one mentioned elsewhere in this book. The biases and perceptions of the data analyst can become embedded in their modelling and, as a result this becomes the lens through which parties using these practices perceive the political contest. This is not to say that data analysts have an especially distorted or perverse view of the world. Rather, it points to a significant challenge that data-driven campaigns need to confront. Data-analysts possess significant agency in these campaigns, and any embedded biases, prejudices or mistakes can

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affect the shape of the campaign. This is a weakness of these practices— as opposed to the weaknesses that were evident in the previous era of market research, such as the reliance on aggregate level data to draw inferences about individuals. There is no perfect solution in this regard, but data-driven campaigning does not inject unparalleled objectivity into these campaigns, as is often assumed. A final point to be made is that this case study, and the discussion in the previous chapter, points to a subtle but significant change in the shape of electoral politics in Australia. The use of data and analytics is contributing to a shift from marginal seats, to a focus on persuadable voters. This may not be a complete transformation, and marginal seats are obviously important and the starting point for many discussions. But parties start with a strategy, map that strategy out to see whether there are enough persuadable voters in enough winnable seats, and this affects resource allocation. Given de-alignment is increasing in Australia and elections are likely to be increasingly volatile, the search for persuadable voters seems like it will drive campaign practices for the foreseeable future.

Notes 1. Robo-polling is a form of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) automated telephone polling. 2. It is not hard to imagine how this challenge plays out in similar ways for the UK Labor Party, the Democratic Party or any other centre-left party. These challenges and a range of others are canvassed in Manwaring and Kennedy (2017). 3. Ratcliff et al. (2020) talk in detail about the attitudinal aspects of the campaign and how it shaped voting behaviour. 4. The LNP is the Liberal National Party. At the federal level and the other Australian states, these are two separate parties that generally are in a formal coalition with one another. In the Commonwealth parliament, LNP members and senators choose whether they want to sit in the Liberal or National party rooms. 5. There has long been attempts to explain and understand why Queensland appears to behave politically different to the other states. See Scott et al. (1986) and Moon and Sharman (2003) for some of these debates. 6. To be clear, I am not saying that renewables would not provide similar opportunities, I am merely illustrating the way the debates are framed in Queensland as an either/or and how this affects the nature of electoral competition.

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7. The Adani issue was complicated further by an Anti-Adani’ convoy that arrived in Central Queensland from the southern states which was not received well by locals (Colvin 2020). 8. Of course, many voters and elected officials hold positions which are more nuanced, but this binary representation of the issue has become part of the discourse of Australian politics. 9. In particular, three Queensland LNP members who sit in the Nationals party room in Canberra are significant here: Michelle Landry, Matthew Canavan and George Christensen and both Landry and Christensen’s seats were viewed as vulnerable in 2019. It is also worth re-iterating that this is complicated by the fact that the Liberal and National parties merged into a single entity at the state level in Queensland. So while all Queensland members of the Coalition represent the LNP, they choose which of the two party rooms they sit in when these parties meet separately in Canberra. 10. While multi-faceted, one aspect of this that interviewees spoke of was legacy effects of the Labor winning the state election in 2015. In particular, defeating the first-term Campbell Newman LNP government, and that this strategy was perceived to work. But the context here could not be more stark. The cuts that the Newman government made were so pronounced, so egregious and viewed as so harsh, that across the political spectrum they were roundly condemned. The eventual 14,000 jobs lost in the public sector, led to an enormous community campaign, with marches on parliament and, arguably, similar to the 2007 federal election, the response was led by the union movement and not the parliamentary Labor Party, who were in any event decimated as a parliamentary force following the 2012 state election. 11. Ironically, as Labor’s review of the election suggested, the preferences of One Nation were significant in the Coalition winning the seats of Braddon in Tasmania and Longman in Queensland Australian Labor Party (2019). 12. Malcolm Turnbull was the prime minister and leader of the Liberal Party at the time. 13. It is important to note for international audiences that unlike in some other countries, in Australia red is often associated with progressive politics and blue conservative politics. Hence the red and blue names here. 14. This in no way excuses them for offshore detention policies. But these issues while related are separate. 15. An interesting question is whether, given the institutional setup, that data-driven persuasion campaigns work better at the sub-national level in Australian state campaigns. 16. There is also the investment in training personnel and the collection of data which cannot be underestimated.

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17. In simple terms, negative gearing is a way for property investors to reduce the amount of tax they need to pay on their income and franking credits are related to the dividends paid on Australian shares that can be used by investors to not only reduce the amount of tax they paid on income, they could even receive a refund from the Australian Tax Office even though they potentially paid no tax. Both are widely used by retirees in Australia, though their use is concentrated primarily to the wealthiest Australians. 18. Evidence from the Cooperative Australian Election Survey suggests that more voters who supported minor parties and independents opposed negative gearing than supported it Ratcliff et al. (2020). 19. Of course, it could also be argued that taking this position would also lead to declining support in the white collar, inner city seats that they also need to do well in. Hence, the bind that Labor finds itself in.

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Beech, Alexandra. 2019. Former WA premier warns coalition against preference deal with one nation. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-21/ one-nation-liberals-nationals-preferences-election/10922566. Accessed 23 Mar 2019. Blaine, Lech. 2019. How good’s Queensland? The Monthly. https://www. themonthly.com.au/issue/2019/november/1572526800/lech-blaine/howgood-queensland#mtr. Accessed 15 Nov 2019. Colvin, R.M. 2020. Social identity in the energy transition: An analysis of the “Stop Adani Convoy” to explore social-political conflict in Australia. Energy Research & Social Science 66: 101492. Coorey, Phillip, and Mark Ludlow. 2016. Parties split over Adani loan proposal. AFR. https://www.afr.com/politics/parties-split-over-adani-loanproposal-20161205-gt3va4. Accessed 7 Mar 2018. Dommett, Katharine. 2019. Data-driven political campaigns in practice: Understanding and regulating diverse data-driven campaigns. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Enos, Ryan D., and Eitan D. Hersh. 2015. Party activists as campaign advertisers: The ground campaign as a principal-agent problem. American Political Science Review 109 (2): 252–278. Gerring, John. 2007. Case study research: Principles and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2016. Trump, Brexit, and the rise of populism: Economic have-nots and cultural backlash. HKS Working Paper No. RWP16-026. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Minor parties’ campaigns. In Double dissolution: The 2016 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Peter Chen, Jennifer Curtin, and Juliet Pietsch, 335–357. Canberra, NSW: ANU Press. Kefford, Glenn. 2020. The minor parties. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer, and Marian Simms, 343–355. Canberra, NSW: ANU Press. Kefford, Glenn, and Duncan McDonnell. 2016. Ballots and billions: Clive Palmer’s personal party. Australian Journal of Political Science 51 (2): 183–197. Kefford, Glenn, and Shaun Ratcliff. 2018. Republicans and Democrats are more polarized on immigration than parties in the UK or Australia: Here’s why. The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/mon key-cage/wp/2018/08/16/republicans-and-democrats-are-more-polarizedon-immigration-than-parties-in-the-u-k-or-australia-heres-why/. Accessed 16 Aug 2018. Levitz, Eric. 2020. David Shor’s unified theory of American politics. https:// nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/david-shor-cancel-culture-2020-ele ction-theory-polls.html Accessed 19 July 2020.

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Lipset, Seymour Martin, and Stein Rokkan. 1967. Party systems and voter alignments: Cross-national perspectives. New York, NY: Free press. Manwaring, Rob, and Paul Kennedy. 2017. Why the left loses: The decline of the centre-left in comparative perspective. Bristol: Policy Press. McKenzie, Nick, Richard Baker, and Peter Ker. 2017. The coal war: Inside the fight against Adani’s plans to build Australia’s biggest coal mine. Accessed 7 June 2018. Mols, Frank, and Jolanda Jetten. 2016. Explaining the appeal of populist rightwing parties in times of economic prosperity. Political Psychology 37 (2): 275– 292. Mols, Frank, and Jolanda Jetten. 2017. The wealth paradox: Economic prosperity and the hardening of attitudes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moon, Jeremy, and Campbell Sharman. 2003. Australian politics and government: The Commonwealth, the states and the territories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nicholson, Stephen P. 2012. Polarizing cues. American Journal of Political Science 56 (1): 52–66. Nickerson, David W., and Todd Rogers. 2014. Political campaigns and big data. Journal of Economic Perspectives 28 (2): 51–74. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Norris, Pippa, and Ronald Inglehart. 2018. Cultural backlash: Trump, Brexit, and the rise of authoritarianism populism. HKS Faculty Research Working Paper Series RWP16-026, August 2016. QLD Labor. 2018. QUESTION: Who is Pauline Hanson really working for? Twitter. https://twitter.com/QLDLabor/status/992227568953708544. Accessed 19 Sept 2019. Ratcliff, Shaun, Jill Sheppard, and Juliet Pietsch. 2020. Voter behaviour: Age, ancestry and economic self-interest. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer, and Marian Simms, 253–274. Canberra, NSW: ANU Press. Scott, Roger, Peter Coaldrake, Brian Head, and Paul Reynolds. 1986. Queensland. In Australian state politics, ed. Brian Galligan, 51–73. Melbourne, VIC: Longman Cheshire. Warren, Christopher. 2019. Did news corp’s Queensland monopoly decide the election? Crikey. https://www.crikey.com.au/2019/05/20/news-corpqueensland-federal-election/. Accessed 13 Apr 2020. Watt, Murray. 2018. Votes with Turnbull 90% of the time. Twitter. https:// twitter.com/MurrayWatt/status/1013192989940727809. Accessed 19 Sept 2019.

CHAPTER 7

Voter Attitudes to Data-Driven Campaigning

Data-driven campaigning practices are increasingly common in Australia, like they are in many advanced democracies. These practices are affecting the nature of electoral competition and political parties. This much has already been shown. Thus far, voters1 have been sidelined from the discussion. However, better understanding how voters perceive data-driven campaign practices—as well as many of the common issues associated with data-driven campaigning, such as disinformation—is an important piece of the puzzle. Australian political elites, like those in many advanced democracies, have expressed unease with the way that these campaigns are conducted (ABC 2019; Zhou 2020). Therefore, public opinion data can inform discussions on how a country like Australia should respond to some of the public policy challenges related to data-driven campaigning. Drawing on data from an original survey instrument that was fielded in June 2020 via YouGov,2 I unpack how voters perceive various campaign practices and a range of related issues. As will be shown, voters have significant concerns about some of the campaign practices political parties engage in, as well as the role that other entities play in facilitating the campaigns that political parties conduct, such as social media companies. Australian voters also have clear preferences on how social media companies should deal with disinformation online. Given the perception that data, privacy and disinformation problems are besetting democracy © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_7

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is widespread (The Financial Times 2018; Johnson 2019), public opinion data of this nature should be an important contribution in its own right. But there are other reasons why this data matters. The first of these relates to the conflation of a whole range of issues associated with data-driven campaigning, as discussed in the introduction. It is only by unpacking each of the individual components of data-driven campaigning and their perceived effects that we can properly understand Australian voter attitudes to these issues. There is very little data on what Australian voters think about these matters in the public domain. Given declining satisfaction and trust in Australian democracy, the perception or the reality of voter data being used in ways that they oppose is only likely to exacerbate the fracturing of the Australian polity. There is also a dearth of data on what Australians think about political parties. This is especially true of voter attitudes on how parties’ campaign, including their collection and use of data, targeting and the role that social media and technology companies play in facilitating party campaigns.3 There are surprisingly few studies of Australian parties which have incorporated survey data into their analysis beyond that available through the AES. The exceptions to this, primarily come from Gauja and collaborators (Gauja and Jackson 2016; Gauja 2017; Gauja and Grömping 2020). Each of these studies is interesting and relevant to this project, especially the surveys on what Labor and Green members and non-member supporters think about party reform. There are also studies from Werner (2016, 2019a, b) which focus on representation and promise keeping. However, the focus of the literature thus far has not been on campaigning practices or the use of data or targeting. This chapter will therefore fill two important gaps in the scholarly literature. First, it will provide more concrete answers to questions about how voters perceive the campaign practices of the parties, including their use of data and targeting. Second, it will add to the emerging international literature on data-driven campaign practices to better understand how voters perceive these practices. This chapter will proceed in the following way. I begin by discussing Australian voter attitudes to the role of political parties. I then discuss previous studies and findings about data and privacy in Australia. I then move on to discuss how Australian voters perceive a range of relevant issues, such as data collection, targeting and how they think social media companies should deal with advertising from political parties which contains false or misleading information. I demonstrate that Australian voters view political parties as playing an important role in Australian

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democracy. However, like their international counterparts that we have data on, they are concerned about the prospect of political parties gaining information on them from third parties and they also think more should be done to prevent disinformation online.

Voter Attitudes to Australian Parties While Australian political scientists have held a sustained interest in political parties since the discipline emerged in this country, research into how voters perceive the parties was limited until more recent times. The AES has provided useful data for over three decades, but significant gaps in our knowledge of how Australian voters perceived political parties remained. Thankfully, a new wave of scholarship on political parties in Australia has emerged, including analyses which explore what voters want from their parties, including their responsiveness (Werner 2016, 2019a, b), whether parties aggregate the interests of voters (Ratcliff 2017), and the demographic and attitudinal profiles of party members and supporters (Gauja and Jackson 2016; Gauja and Grömping 2019, 2020). This new wave of party scholarship in Australia has added much to our understanding, however, the number of scholars working in this space is low compared to many other advanced democracies. Significant gaps in our knowledge remain. This includes voter attitudes on the role parties play in Australian democracy, whether parties need to spend more time in the community talking to voters, whether voters think Australian political parties should remain exempt from privacy legislation and how they perceive significant issues about campaigning such as targeting and how social media companies should deal with attempts by parties to spread disinformation. To begin with, it is useful to consider how Australian voters view political parties. As Fig. 7.1 shows,4 Australian voters are strongly supportive of the view that political parties play an important role in Australian democracy. Across different party supporters and a range of other demographics this result held up exceptionally well, whether that was gender, age, education level, income bands, geography and generational cohort.5 In terms of party supporters, non-Green minor party voters were the cohort who rejected this view in the greatest numbers. But even in this cohort, three out of every four of these voters agreed or strongly agreed that political parties play an important role. Coalition voters were most supportive of this view, which may be a result of their preferred party

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TOTAL

30%

MALE

29%

60%

10% 1%

FEMALE

30%

59%

9% 2%

COALITION LABOR

38%

5% 0

61%

30%

10% 1%

62%

20%

Strongly Agree

10%

57%

28%

GREEN OTHER

60%

56%

Agree

Disagree

8% 0 19%

5%

Strongly Disagree

Fig. 7.1 Political parties play an important role in our democracy n = 1019

being in government at the federal level for the last three terms. This is strong evidence that Australian voters, despite all the doom and gloom about political parties and Australian democracy, still perceive parties to be a critical institution. The ‘love-in’ between Australian voters and political parties ends, however, when voters were asked their views on whether parties need to spend more time in the community talking to voters. As shown in Fig. 7.2, Australian voters’ attitudes in support of this are overwhelming. 95 per cent of respondents were supportive of the statement that political parties need to spend much more time in the community than they currently do, with 51 per cent strongly agreeing with that statement. Across all demographic categories, there was majority support for this position. This would suggest that the increased emphasis being placed on direct voter contact by Australian political parties is well-founded and may provide some clues to the perceived efficacy of these campaigns.6

Privacy and Data in Australia Beyond these considerations about the role political parties play, including whether they should engage with the community more, are questions about whether political parties should be exempt from privacy legislation

7

TOTAL MALE

VOTER ATTITUDES TO DATA-DRIVEN CAMPAIGNING

51% 53%

FEMALE

49%

COALITION

50%

LABOR

44%

4%1%

43% 46%

3%1%

46%

GREEN

59%

OTHER

58%

Strongly Agree

6% 1% 37% 37%

Agree

Disagree

4% 4%1%

46%

47%

145

4%0 3%2%

Strongly Disagree

Fig. 7.2 Political parties need to spend much more time in the community talking to voters about their concerns than they currently do n = 1019

and how parties manage and collect data on voters. From the design and implementation of direct mail campaigns in the 1980s to the creation of the first party databases in the late 1980s and early 1990s (Mills 1986, 2014; van Onselen and Errington 2004),7 questions have been raised about whether political parties adequately protect and manage the data of millions of Australians.8 Despite these longstanding concerns, political parties in Australia remain exempt from privacy legislation. As the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (n.d.) website states, A registered political party is exempt from the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act), as is a political representative when carrying out an exempt political activity. A political representative is a member of parliament or councillor of a local government authority. An exempt political activity is an act or practice carried out for: an election under an electoral law; a referendum under a federal, state or territory law; another aspect of the political process that the political representative takes part in. A contractor or volunteer is also exempt from the Privacy Act when carrying out an exempt political activity for a political representative or registered political party.

Given what has been shown thus far in this book, an interesting question is would the Australian parties continue to campaign the way they currently do if the legislative and regulatory environment were different?

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I argue they likely would, as tightening the rules about what data parties can collect online and offline would have limited effect on their strategies. This is because the most useful data parties possess remains that which voters give to them via direct voter contact or via robo-polling. Perhaps if parties were not given access to the electoral roll and other relevant data from the AEC, this may affect campaigning practices, but this is debatable. The views on whether Australia’s political parties should be exempt from privacy legislation were mixed (see Fig. 7.3). However, two in every three voters disagree with the view that parties should be exempt, and across every demographic category a majority disagreed with the exemption from privacy legislation. This is a particularly important finding as the last time serious consideration was given to whether Australia’s parties should remain exempt was in 2000. At the time the government argued that the exemption was important for political communication purposes (Vaile 2018; Orr 2019). The major parties, in particular, have wheeled this argument out whenever the issue is raised (Munro 2018). But this argument carries little weight any longer. The world has changed, the internet has changed, and the threats have changed. The regulatory and legislative environment should also change.

TOTAL

10%

24%

MALE

11%

22%

FEMALE

10%

COALITION

12%

LABOR

12%

GREEN OTHER

9% 7%

41% 40%

26%

23%

43%

24%

18%

41% 42%

23%

Strongly Agree

27%

42%

27%

11%

25%

38% 35%

Agree

23%

Disagree

35%

Strongly Disagree

Fig. 7.3 Political parties should be exempt from privacy legislation n = 1019

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There is, of course, a broader question here. This is whether the data privacy of Australians should be taken more seriously than it currently is, and this extends well beyond the domain of electoral politics. The data that already exists is clear on this. Australians are concerned about their privacy online and their data. To quote parts of the Digital Rights in Australia project (Goggin et al. 2017: 1–2), Australians are concerned about their online privacy. While two thirds of our respondents believe they personally have nothing to hide, only a small group (18%) think that more general concerns about online privacy are exaggerated…A majority of our respondents do not feel in control of their privacy online. While a majority take active steps to protect their privacy (67%), and have changed settings on the social media they use most often (61%), a minority (38%) felt that they can control their privacy online…In the online focus group, participants’ views were mixed on the use of data in targeted advertising and price discrimination. But there was a consensus that content targeting for political purposes is different: for example, paying a social media platform to boost a negative opinion article about a rival party to users in marginal seats was seen as crossing a line.

Similar sets of findings can be found elsewhere. For example, a Roy Morgan (2018) and Crikey study into Australian attitudes to privacy and data found that ‘76% of people objected to the collection of data about political or social views to share with political parties’. This study did, however, suggest that Australians were far less active in protecting their privacy and data online. Including that, ‘Just 15% say they read the terms and conditions of online products or services’ (Keane 2018). Australian voters are, of course, not alone in this regard and most international surveys have produced similar results (for example, see Pew Research Center 2019; Young and McGregor 2020). Clearly, the problems are more wide-ranging than campaigning and any attempt to change how personal data is dealt with in Australia would require a significant change in the regulation of most commercial organisations as well as a dedicated and sustained education campaign to inform and educate Australian citizens to take their own data privacy seriously. To start with, Australia would likely need to implement something akin to the European Union’s GDPR, but even that is unlikely to solve all the related issues. This is also extremely unlikely, as there appears little enthusiasm to make the changes needed to protect the data and privacy of Australians.

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Another part of the story is evidently how organisations like political parties collect data on voters. As discussed in detail, especially in Chapters 3–6, the Australian parties have databases which they use to communicate with and to target voters. This targeting may be via digital, field, or even direct mail communications. The granularity of the targeting is uneven as discussed in these chapters, but the point is that these databases exist and contain data on Australian voters. Despite this, we have no data that I know of which explores how Australian voters feel about the parties collecting information about them, even if that information may seem innocuous. Given the most important data for modelling and targeting usually comes from voters themselves, I asked respondents how comfortable they would be with the parties recording three datapoints about their interactions: who they said they were going to vote for; the issues they said they were especially concerned about; and, their views on the prime minister (see Figs. 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6). The first two of these are data points all the parties want and ask voters. The third one is not common.9

TOTAL

17%

MALE

18%

FEMALE

16%

COALITION

17%

LABOR

20%

GREEN

19%

OTHER

18% Very comfortable

19%

28%

36%

22%

31%

31%

18%

26%

36%

12%

26%

43%

Comfortable

13%

28%

41%

22%

15%

25%

41%

31% Uncomfortable

30% Very uncomfortable

Fig. 7.4 Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding who you said you would vote for to their database about you?10 n = 1019

TOTAL

7

VOTER ATTITUDES TO DATA-DRIVEN CAMPAIGNING

30%

50%

32%

MALE FEMALE

LABOR

Very comfortable

12%

46%

31%

OTHER

Uncomfortable

5% 10%

6% 4%

42% Comfortable

8%

12%

52%

44%

GREEN

7%

13%

51%

27%

8%

11%

50%

32%

COALITION

12%

51%

29%

149

14%

13%

Very uncomfortable

Fig. 7.5 Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding the issues that you said you are especially concerned about to their database about you? n = 1019 TOTAL

25% 30%

MALE FEMALE COALITION LABOR GREEN OTHER

45% 47%

21%

43%

14%

49%

23%

45%

26%

42%

28%

38% Comfortable

11%

22%

27%

Very comfortable

19%

Uncomfortable

8% 14%

17% 18% 20% 19%

8% 14% 12% 14%

Very uncomfortable

Fig. 7.6 Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding what you said your views were on the prime minister to their database about you? n = 1019

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G. KEFFORD

As Figs. 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6 show, Australian voters appear to not be overly concerned with Australian parties adding information about their vote intention, political preferences or views on the prime minister to their databases on them provided they are the ones who give this information over to the parties. There was some variation and the piece of data that Australian voters appear to be least comfortable providing was their vote intention, which was something I noted during my participant observation. But, as Figs. 7.7, 7.8, 7.9 and 7.10 show, as soon as information about voters comes via a third party, attitudes to data collection look significantly different. Over 90 per cent of respondents said they would be ‘very concerned’ or ‘a little concerned’ if Australian parties were acquiring personal data on them from banks or other financial institutions, companies they buy things from and from social media companies. Moreover, in excess of 60 per cent said they would be ‘very concerned’. While the views on how concerned voters would be with the AEC providing data to political parties is the most evenly distributed in terms of whether voters were ‘very concerned’, ‘a little concerned’ or ‘not concerned’, 35 per cent still said they would be ‘very concerned’ if parties acquired personal data on them in this way. Of course, the parties do just this. They also have access to significant social media data and tracking data. And, as has been discussed in previous chapters, the major parties have admitted that

67%

TOTAL MALE

65%

A lile concerned

9% 24%

70%

Very concerned

9%

28% 74%

OTHER

7%

24%

63%

GREEN

7%

25%

67%

COALITION

7%

28%

69%

FEMALE

LABOR

26%

28%

1% 2%

Not concerned

Fig. 7.7 How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from banks or other financial institutions? n = 1019

7

Total Male

VOTER ATTITUDES TO DATA-DRIVEN CAMPAIGNING

62%

Coalion

61%

10%

32%

6%

29%

55%

10%

36%

9%

73%

Green Other

8%

32%

59%

Female

Labor

32%

60%

26%

68%

Very concerned

151

27%

A lile concerned

1% 5%

Not concerned

Fig. 7.8 How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from companies you buy things from? n = 1019 Total

63%

Male

62%

Female

64%

Coalion

63%

Labor

11%

28%

8%

27%

10%

28%

11%

75%

22%

66%

Very concerned

9%

28%

61%

Green Other

28%

26%

A lile concerned

2% 8%

Not concerned

Fig. 7.9 How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from social media companies? n = 1019

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TOTAL

35%

35%

30%

MALE

35%

35%

30%

FEMALE

35%

35%

30%

COALITION

35%

LABOR

GREEN

OTHER

33%

31%

34%

37%

31%

30%

40% 41%

Very concerned

30% 36%

A lile concerned

23%

Not concerned

Fig. 7.10 How concerned, if at all, would you be if political parties were acquiring personal data on you either directly or indirectly from the Australian Electoral Commission? n = 1019

they have acquired data from a variety of sources, including commercial data which they have purchased to improve their modelling and targeting operations. Thus, we see yet another disconnect between practices and voter attitudes in Australia.

Targeting and Disinformation No contemporary discussion of campaigning is complete without reference to microtargeting and disinformation. While much of the popular debate in Australia reflects the ‘data dystopia’ I discuss in previous chapters, there is little doubt that debates about the effects of targeting, disinformation and the role social media companies play are only likely to gain further traction. The survey data collected for this project provides important insights into how Australians view these issues. In simple terms, Australian voters do not accept the argument that political advertising, as a form of free speech, should go unregulated. There is deep opposition to the microtargeting of voters online that currently occurs, and Australian voters strongly support the idea that social media companies should refuse to run political advertising that attempts to spread disinformation, no matter how detached from the truth the advertising is.11

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As Figs. 7.11 and 7.12 show, very few Australian voters think that online political advertising should be left unregulated. While most respondents did not favour one option over another, almost half of respondents thought online political advertising should be regulated and should disclose who paid for the ads, how much was spent and who the ad was aimed at. This is not dissimilar to what Facebook, for example, has offered in other jurisdictions for some time and has only been introduced relatively recently in Australia. Interestingly, one in four respondents said they want no online political advertising at all. This is borne out in the data on microtargeting, as shown in Fig. 7.12. Over half—58 per cent of respondents—opposed social media companies facilitating microtargeting, as is common. An additional 30 per cent were of the view that social media companies should provide only limited information to political parties looking to target voters using these features. While there is a need to be cautious in comparing these results to those from the US,12 Australian voters were slightly less concerned about current targeting practices than US voters when they were surveyed on

TOTAL

11%

46%

MALE

11%

47%

FEMALE

12%

45%

COALITION

13%

LABOR

10%

GREEN OTHER

18%

47%

24% 27%

19% 17%

48% 48%

26%

16%

45%

15% 8%

17%

23% 26%

15% 16%

22% 28%

Online poliƟcal campaign ads should not be regulated because they are a form of free speech Websites should be required to disclose who paid for a poliƟcal campaign ad, how much it cost and who the ad is aimed at Websites should not show any poliƟcal ads in the final week of an elecƟon campaign No poliƟcal campaign ads should be shown

Fig. 7.11 Which one of the following approaches to displaying political advertisements on the Internet do you favour most? (single response)

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TOTAL MALE FEMALE COALITION

58% 54% 61% 59%

LABOR

56%

GREEN

56%

OTHER

57%

30% 33%

12% 14%

28% 29% 30% 34% 30%

11% 12% 14% 10% 13%

No informaon -- the ad should be shown to anyone who uses the website or app without regard to their background characteriscs Limited, broad informaon, such as gender, age or postcode Any available informaon the social media company has, including specific informaon such as a person's interests, frequently visited websites, and search topics

Fig. 7.12 Suppose a political parties’ campaign wants to buy an online ad to reach certain voters on social media. What information about its individual users should a social media company offer to parties so they can decide who should see the ad? (single response)

these issues. In the US, 72 per cent were opposed to social media companies providing any information to political parties and an additional 20 per cent supported only limited information being provided (McCarthy 2020). Given the wide-ranging debates about targeting, election interference and disinformation in the US, it is perhaps surprising that the differences were not larger. Only 12 per cent of Australian respondents thought social media companies should provide whatever information they had to help political parties deliver targeted advertising. In the last two Australian federal elections, accusations of disinformation have been rife (Jensen 2019). While the veracity of the claims made about the effects of disinformation are debatable (Jackman and Mansillo 2018), there certainly is a need to understand how Australian voters think disinformation should be dealt with. Disinformation can come in a variety of forms and there are degrees of disinformation. Disinformation can be an attempt to partially misrepresent a position, to suggest an opponent holds a position that they do not have, or to impugn an opponents’ personal character. Whichever form it comes in, the scholarship suggests social media plays an important role in its consumption and

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spread (Allcott et al. 2019; Pennycook and Rand 2019). Facebook has been seen to be especially significant (Guess et al. 2018). To explore these issues, respondents were asked how they think social media companies should deal with three distinct scenarios or types of disinformation. The first can be described as an outright falsehood. Namely, that the ad says a party or candidate supports a policy which they do not. A good example of this type of advertising came from the United Australia Party during the 2019 federal election. While there were numerous examples that could be drawn on, one of the more egregious falsehoods in the advertising the party ran, was the claim that Labor will ‘hit us with another trillion dollars of taxes and costs’ (Kefford 2020).13 The second type of disinformation is an attempt to disparage an opponent’s character to alter perceptions of them. An example of this comes from the by-election in the seat of Wentworth, which had been held by the former prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull. During the campaign, an email was sent around the electorate claiming the Independent candidate, Dr. Kerryn Phelps, had been diagnosed with HIV (Knowles 2016). Another example comes from the 2020 by-election in the electorate of Eden-Monaro where emails were distributed which claimed the Labor candidate, Kristy McBain, had Covid-19 (Whyte 2020). The third example, and arguably the most difficult to define—let alone regulate— is the half-truth which provides some accurate information but leaves other important information out.14 Arguably, a great deal of political advertising would fall into this category.15 The results, shown in Figs. 7.13, 7.14 and 7.15, suggest a majority of Australian voters think that social media companies should refuse to run advertising from political parties which attempt to spread any of these types of disinformation. This includes advertising which: suggests a candidate or party supports a position they do not; makes unsubstantiated claims about an opponent’s character; misrepresents a candidate’s position on an issue by providing some accurate facts or details but leaving out others. Disinformation which smears an opponents’ character is that which respondents felt strongest about. 72 per cent of respondents said the social media company should refuse to run an ad such as this. However, the numbers who thought social media companies should refuse to run advertising with the other types of disinformation were similar. 67 per cent thought social media companies should refuse to run an ad which says a party or candidate holds a position which they do not and 62 per

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8%

TOTAL

10%

MALE FEMALE

25%

6%

27% 22%

LABOR

5%

GREEN

4%

24%

65%

29% 21%

66% 75%

12%

OTHER

63% 71%

11%

COALITION

67%

21%

67%

Allow the ad to run Allow it to run but warn users that the informaon may not be correct Refuse to run the ad

Fig. 7.13 If a party wants to publish an ad which says a party or candidate supports a policy which they do not, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? (single response) TOTAL

6%

MALE

7%

FEMALE

5%

4%

G R E E N 1% OTHER

24% 19%

10%

COALITION

LABOR

22%

68% 76%

19% 26% 26%

7%

72%

16%

71% 70% 73% 77%

Allow the ad to run Allow it to run but warn users that the informaon may not be correct Refuse to run the ad

Fig. 7.14 If a party wants to publish an ad which makes unsubstantiated claims about an opponent’s character on social media, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? (single response)

7

TOTAL MALE

FEMALE

COALITION

7%

VOTER ATTITUDES TO DATA-DRIVEN CAMPAIGNING

31%

10% 5% 9%

LABOR

7%

GREEN

7%

OTHER

6%

157

62% 33%

28%

57% 67%

27% 33%

64% 60%

35% 28%

58% 66%

Allow the ad to run Allow it to run but warn users that the informaon may not be correct Refuse to run the ad

Fig. 7.15 If a party wants to publish an ad that misrepresents a candidate’s position on an issue by providing some accurate facts or details but leaving out others on social media, how should the company in charge deal with the ad? (single response)

cent thought an ad which contains some accurate information and leaves other information out should also not be allowed to run. In each example, no more than 8 per cent thought the ad should be allowed to run and the rest thought the ad should contain information warning users that the details may not be correct. What can be said here, then, is that the data suggests the way social media companies currently deal with disinformation in Australia is out of step with community expectations. There may be debate about how countries like Australia should deal with tech giants like Facebook, including which mechanisms these companies have available to them to deal with disinformation. There may also be debate about what governments can do to social media companies that act like digital states, including what sort of threats companies like these may make if regulatory and legislative measures are increased.16 However, the data strongly suggests that Australians support governments intervening to deal with these challenges.

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G. KEFFORD

Conclusions Prior to this chapter, I sought to do two things. I introduced an original theoretical framework for understanding data-driven campaigning practices. I then described and explained the contemporary campaign practices of Australian political parties in detail and considered the effects of these practices on the parties and Australian democracy more broadly. This chapter has sought to better understand how Australian voters perceive political parties, how comfortable they are with political parties collecting and adding data about them to their databases, as well as their preferences on how political advertising should operate online. This includes whether political advertising should be regulated, whether social media companies should assist political parties in microtargeting voters, as well as how they think social media companies should deal with disinformation disseminated via their platforms. Australian voters have clear preferences on most of these issues. These preferences stand in stark contrast to the current regulatory and legislative context of Australian democracy. Political parties in Australia are exempt from privacy legislation. A majority of voters disagree that they should be exempt. Political parties in Australia are acquiring significant amounts of data online and offline about voters and, the major parties have also both acquired commercial data on voters. A majority of Australian voters say they would be very concerned if this was occurring. Australian political parties operate in a largely unregulated environment online with transparency and truth in advertising provisions almost non-existent. Australian voters strongly support increasing regulation and transparency in online political advertising and think social media companies need to play a much more significant role than they currently do in dealing with disinformation in election campaigns. Unfortunately, as clear as the evidence is here, the appetite for change from the Australian government or social media companies such as Facebook, appears minimal. While the government may reasonably argue that it has other more pressing priorities, social media companies such as Facebook have no such excuse and their intransigence in confronting the bleeding obvious is deserving of the rebuke they receive from scholars working in this area internationally. Thankfully, Facebook has finally decided to provide Australia with additional details about campaign advertising, similar to what other advanced democracies have had for some time. This includes details such as the money spent and who is

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being targeted (Hunter 2020). But much more detail is required than is currently available. This chapter provides an important snapshot of what Australian voters think about the political parties, data collection and online political advertising. This data is likely to be an important resource for scholars and regulators thinking about these issues as they are unlikely to disappear anytime soon.

Notes 1. I recognise that in countries which use voluntary voting, they would normally talk of citizens and then separate those who vote or intend to vote from those who do not. But this makes little sense in Australia, so I simply talk about voters thoughout this chapter. 2. The survey was fielded online between the 17 and 21 of June 2020 and was based on a nationally representative sample of 1019 Australian voters taken from the YouGov panel of respondents. The survey contained 8 batteries of questions. Not all these questions are used in this chapter. In addition to the responses to the question items, data was provided on age, gender how the respondent voted in the 2019 Australian federal election, income, geographic location including which state or territory, whether they were in a regional area of capital city, generational cohort and education level. 3. A useful, albeit dated now comparative piece comes from Kreiss and Howard (2010). 4. The data which make up Figs. 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3 come from a battery of questions were respondents were asked, “Thinking about political parties and what role they play in our democracy, do you agree or disagree with the following statements?”. The three statements are the titles of the figures. 5. Not all this demographic data is contained in this and the following tables due to the space it would take up. Party supporter should be taken with a degree of caution here as it is based on the way the respondent voted in the 2019 Australian federal election. 6. A common criticism made when I have presented this research to academic colleagues is that parties still only engage in voter contact during the campaign period. But this is incorrect, many of these campaigns begin a year out from the election campaign period. Given how close state and federal campaigns are in Australia, this means campaigns are being conducted almost continuously. 7. As is discussed in more detail in these sources, the databases were as is often the case designed based on experiences that party operatives had in the US, UK and Canada, seeing how their databases worked.

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8. For a more general consideration of data and privacy and Australia, see Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (2017) and the digital rights project (Goggin et al. 2017). 9. Albeit questions like this are often included in robopolls or online panels looking to explore changes in voter attitudes. 10. The question wording for Figs. 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6 asked respondents, ‘Many political parties have a database which contains information such as where each voter lives and how they are likely to vote. If you spoke to someone from one of the political parties in-person or over the phone, how comfortable would you be with them adding the following information to their database about you?’ 11. The questions about online campaigning replicate questions from the US that were fielded by the Knight Foundation working with Gallup (McCarthy 2020; Young and McGregor 2020). 12. There are a number of reasons for this, but one is that the surveys were asynchronous. 13. As the book was being completed, the same party started running advertising for the Queensland state election claiming Labor would introduce a “Death Tax”. This was another falsehood. 14. For a comprehensive discussion on the challenges of regulating this sort of disinformation, including the historical debates and precedents in Australia, see Orr (2019: 139–144). 15. One only needs to look at the outcomes of ‘fact-check’ articles that websites such as The Conversation run to see how common this type of messaging is. It is not a new phenomenon. 16. Evidence of this has already happened with Google and Facebook threatening to either withdraw or to not allow news to be shared on their platforms (Doran and Hayne 2020; Meade 2020).

References ABC. 2019. Parliament to examine social media attacks on democracy. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/par liament-to-examine-social-media-attacks-on-democracy/11778852. Accessed 12 Dec 2019. Allcott, Hunt, Matthew Gentzkow, and Chuan Yu. 2019. Trends in the diffusion of disinformation on social media. Research & Politics 6 (2): 1–8. Doran, Matthew, and Jordan Hayne. 2020. Facebook threatens to ban Australians from sharing news after Google launches attack on Government plans. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-01/facebook-thr eatens-to-ban-australians-from-sharing-news-content/12616216. Accessed 2 Sept 2020.

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Gauja, Anika. 2017. Party reform: The causes, challenges, and consequences of organizational change. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gauja, Anika, and Max Grömping. 2019. The expanding party universe: Patterns of partisan engagement in Australia and the United Kingdom. Party Politics. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354068818822251. Gauja, Anika, and Max Grömping. 2020. Australian Labor as a federal organisation: State uniformity or distinctiveness? Australian Journal of Politics & History 66 (1): 35–49. Gauja, Anika, and Stewart Jackson. 2016. Australian Greens party members and supporters: Their profiles and activities. Environmental Politics 25 (2): 359– 379. Goggin, Gerard, Ariadne Vromen, Kimberlee G. Weatherall, Fiona Martin, Adele Webb, Lucy Sunman, and Francesco Bailo. 2017. Digital rights in Australia. Digital Rights in Australia. ISBN-13:978–970. Guess, Andrew, Brendan Nyhan, and Jason Reifler. 2018. Selective exposure to disinformation: Evidence from the consumption of fake news during the 2016 US presidential campaign. European Research Council 9 (3): 4. Hunter, Fergus. 2020. Facebook imposes new transparency rules on political ads in Australia. Sydney Morning Herald. https://www.smh.com.au/politics/fed eral/facebook-imposes-new-transparency-rules-on-political-ads-in-australia20200309-p54861.html. Accessed 10 Mar 2020. Jackman, Simon, and Luke Mansillo. 2018. The campaign that wasn’t: Tracking public opinion over the 44th parliament and the 2016 election campaign. In Double disillusion: The 2016 Australian federal election, 133–158. Canberra: ANU Press. Jensen, Michael. 2019. ‘Fake news’ is already spreading online in the election campaign—It’s up to us to stop it. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/fake-news-is-already-spreading-online-inthe-election-campaign-its-up-to-us-to-stop-it-115455. Accessed 25 Apr 2019. Johnson, Chase. 2019. Big tech surveillance could damage democracy. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/big-tech-surveillance-could-dam age-democracy-115684. Accessed 12 July 2019. Keane, Bernard. 2018. Australians are concerned about their online privacy but do little to protect it. Crikey. https://www.crikey.com.au/2018/07/02/aus tralians-are-concerned-about-their-online-privacy-but-do-little-to-protect-it/. Accessed 15 May 2019. Kefford, Glenn. 2020. The minor parties. In Morrison’s miracle: The 2019 Australian federal election, ed. Anika Gauja, Marian Sawer, and Marian Simms, 343–355. Canberra: ANU Press. Knowles, Lorna. 2016. Fake email claiming Kerryn Phelps has HIV part of ‘dirty tricks’ in Wentworth by-election campaign. ABC. https://www.abc.

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net.au/news/2018-10-17/wentworth-by-election-fake-email-claims-kerrynphelps-has-hiv/10382406. Accessed 19 Oct 2018. Kreiss, Daniel, and Philip N. Howard. 2010. New challenges to political privacy: Lessons from the first US Presidential race in the Web 2.0 era. International Journal of Communication 4: 19. McCarthy, Justin. 2020. In U.S., most oppose micro-targeting in online political ads. Knight Foundation. https://knightfoundation.org/articles/in-us-mostoppose-micro-targeting-in-online-political-ads/. Accessed 5 Mar 2020. Meade, Amanda. 2020. Google accused of ‘bullying’ Australians with news code letter and yellow warning signs. The Guardian. https://www.thegua rdian.com/media/2020/aug/20/google-accused-of-bullying-australianswith-news-code-letter-and-yellow-warning-signs. Accessed 26 Aug 2020. Mills, Stephen. 1986. The new machine men: Polls and persuasion in Australian politics. vol. Book, Whole. Ringwood, VIC: Penguin. Mills, Stephen. 2014. The professionals: Strategy, money and the rise of the political campaigner in Australia. Collingwood: Black Inc. Munro, Kelsey. 2018. Australia’s major parties defend privacy exemption over Cambridge Analytica. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/aus tralia-news/2018/mar/22/australias-political-parties-defend-privacy-exempt ion-in-wake-of-cambridge-analytica. Accessed 23 Mar 2018. Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. 2017. Australian community attitudes to privacy survey. https://www.oaic.gov.au/assets/engage-with-us/ research/acaps-2017/acaps-2017-report.pdf. Accessed 2 July 2019. Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. n.d. Political parties and elections. https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy/your-privacy-rights/political-par ties-and-elections/. Accessed 3 Apr 2020. Orr, Graeme. 2019. The law of politics: Elections, parties and money in Australia, 2nd ed. Alexandria, NSW: Federation Press. Pennycook, Gordon, and David G. Rand. 2019. Fighting disinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (7): 2521–2526. Pew Research Center. 2019. Americans and privacy: Concerned, confused and feeling lack of control over their personal information. https://www.pew research.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-con fused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/ Accessed 1 Dec 2019. Ratcliff, Shaun. 2017. Interest aggregators, not office chasers: Evidence for party convergence and divergence in Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science 52 (2): 236–256. Roy, Morgan. 2018. Australians worried about online privacy but slow to act. http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/7650-online-privacy-concernsjune-2018-201807060422. Accessed 15 May 2019.

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The Financial Times. 2018. Democracy has to be protected from data. The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/5c012980-84fd-11e8-a29d73e3d454535d. Accessed 3 March 2019. Vaile, David. 2018. Australia should strengthen its privacy laws and remove exemptions for politicians. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ australia-should-strengthen-its-privacy-laws-and-remove-exemptions-for-politi cians-93717. Accessed 3 June 2019. van Onselen, Peter, and Wayne Errington. 2004. Electoral databases: Big brother or democracy unbound? Australian Journal of Political Science 39 (2): 349– 366. Werner, Annika. 2016. Party responsiveness and voter confidence in Australia. Australian Journal of Political Science 51 (3): 436–457. Werner, Annika. 2019a. Voters’ preferences for party representation: Promisekeeping, responsiveness to public opinion or enacting the common good. International Political Science Review 40 (4): 486–501. Werner, Annika. 2019b. What voters want from their parties: Testing the promise-keeping assumption. Electoral Studies 57: 186–195. Whyte, Sally. 2020. Emails making false allegations about Kristy McBain referred to Australian Federal Police. The Canberra Times. https://www.canberrat imes.com.au/story/6807229/afp-called-in-over-fake-kristy-mcbain-emails/. Accessed 25 June 2020. Young, Dannagal G., and Shannon C. McGregor. 2020. Mass propaganda used to be difficult, but Facebook made it easy. Washington Post. https://www. washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/02/14/mass-propaganda-used-be-diffic ult-facebook-made-it-easy/. Accessed 20 Feb 2020. Zhou, Naaman. 2020. ACCC sues Google for collecting Australian users’ data without informed consent. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/ australia-news/2020/jul/27/accc-sues-google-for-collecting-australian-usersdata-without-informed-consent?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Outlook. Accessed 28 July 2020.

CHAPTER 8

Campaigning and Political Parties

How do modern political parties organise themselves? Despite the amount of work devoted to this question, answers remain elusive. Carty (2004: 7) has said, ‘The puzzle is that the most dramatic of these changes point in contradictory directions’. This appears to be especially true of campaigning as the drivers of change are pushing and pulling parties in different directions. While voter contact strategies such as field campaigning require a degree of power-sharing1 and a distribution of resources across parties, digital campaigns produce interesting and novel variations based on how much of this work is done by the parties themselves, the political system the party is working in, and the role of party activists (Kefford 2018; Dommett et al. 2020a, 2020b). How then are we meant to understand the ways that campaigning affects parties organisation given these contradictory pressures? In Chapter 2—political parties and campaigning—I began by describing some of the key literature on party organisation including how campaigning has often been overlooked or ignored by party scholars. I then set out a framework for understanding often related but distinct sets of campaign practices. In the chapters since then, I described not only contemporary campaign practices of the three political parties that contest the most elections in Australia, but also how these campaigns are organised. This chapter will consider the paradoxical effects that contemporary campaigning has on party organisation. It begins by discussing © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_8

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the evidence presented thus far on what contemporary campaign practice looks like in Australia. I analyse the ways that the practices are shaped by and shape party organisation and relate this to the theoretical literature on party organisation, including my own framework set out in Chapter 2. I argue that orthodox theoretical models of party organisation continue to underestimate the scale of change when it comes to non-member supporters and their involvement in parties. I then move on to discuss the effects of digital and data campaign practices on party organisation.

Campaigning by Political Parties in Australia As Chapters 3–6 demonstrated, there is no single template of campaigning in Australia and the three political parties covered here have responded to shared and individual forces in three distinct ways. Effectively, they have developed three competing campaigning models.2 I set these models out in Table 8.1. I describe these models as a datadriven model, a narrowcasting model and a community organising model. The first of these aligns with how the international, and especially the US, scholarship has operationalised data-driven campaigning. This is the Labor model, which prioritises persuasion via both digital and field, and these campaigns are underpinned by sophisticated data and analytics. This involves large-scale data collection, analyses and the creation of models and scores which are then used for targeting at the individual level. This approach is largely top-down, apart from the decentralising forces of the field campaign, as well as digital and data work being undertaken by external or subnational actors. This model is only possible as the party has invested heavily in a bespoke CRM which provides the necessary data segmentation and targeting functionality, while also providing the capacity for data to potentially be synchronised across online and offline campaigning. Although as discussed previously, issues remain with this according to interviewees. As discussed in Chapter 2, the set of practices which come together to form the data-driven model are both capital intensive and labour intensive and this has a significant effect on party organisation. The second model is that of the Liberal Party. Unlike what has happened in other jurisdictions, such as the US, the campaigning ‘arms race’ has not driven the Liberal Party to match the investment of Labor in campaign infrastructure or personnel. One reason for this that interviewees regularly spoke of was disagreement within and between different

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Table 8.1 Three models of campaigning in Australia Labor

Liberal Party

Greens

Data

Publicly available, party-generated and collected via robo-polls or direct voter contact, some commercial data

Publicly available, party-generated and collected via robo-polls or direct voter contact, some commercial data

Publicly available, party-generated, with some polling data

Targeting Granularity

Individual level online and offline

Demographic level offline, individual level online

Individual level online, demographic offline

Infrastructure

Bespoke CRM (Campaign Central)

Generic CRM Primarily reliant on (NationBuilder) dated CRM (Feedback) with some experimentation with i360 in some states

Personnel

Major investment in Some investment in data and analytics data analysts, but operatives, including analytics primarily data scientists which is provided by supported by consultants consultants

Field

Relatively even mix of phonebanking and doorknocking undertaken by members and non-member supporters. Often more non-members than members, especially in target seats with large field campaigns being conducted

Phonebanking dominant mode of field campaigning with doorknocking more targeted at key seats/areas. More members than supporters, but still significant numbers of these non-member supporters

Tiny investment in data scientists

Generally more doorknocking, but phonebanking increasing. Field campaigns in target seats almost always have more non-members than members

(continued)

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Table 8.1 (continued) Labor

Liberal Party

Greens

Digital

Decent investment in digital operatives, but consultants are brought into amplify content and improve processes during campaigns

Some investment in digital operatives but heavily reliant on external consultants for message amplification, development and strategy in campaigns

Investment in digital personnel increasing, especially in some states. Sophistication of digital operations increasing. Little use of external consultants

Campaign Integration and Synchronisation

Attempts being made to integrate and synchronise data and analytics across field, digital, ad buys. Challenges remain

Little attempt to synchronise and integrate data and analytics insights across different campaigning modes

No integration across campaigning modes

Type of Campaigning

Data-driven campaigning

Narrowcasting

Community Organising

state divisions over how to proceed. Control of the campaign apparatus is as much about power as any other aspect of party organisation. But a lack of a national plan to transition from the antiquated Feedback system to a system comparable to Labor’s Campaign Central remains a sticking point for many campaign operatives. As discussed in previous chapters, while some state divisions have used i360, there are tensions over its use, and varied perspectives on its applicability to the Australian electoral context. This suggests that like Labor, the Liberal Party may eventually need to invest in a CRM system fit for the Australian electoral environment if they want to undertake the type of data-driven campaigning that parties like Labor and others internationally are now commonly engaging in. Two other significant factors influence Liberal Party campaigns and, as a result, the party organisation. The first of these is their use of external providers, including digital consultants. The other relates to their capacity to mobilise members and supporters. On both, they differ significantly from Labor and, thus, their campaigns are organised differently. Given the Liberal Party is largely reliant on demographic rather than individual level targeting, I describe their campaigns as a form of narrowcasting. It certainly remains capital

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intensive, but it is less labour intensive than that of the Labor Party. The effects of this type of campaigning on party organisation are significant, but less than that on Labor. The third model is that of the Greens. This is almost the inverse of the other two models and is predominately a bottom-up model with some top-down functions, which is primarily a product of their digital operations. The Greens are reliant on mass-produced CRM systems such as NationBuilder, while also using what one Greens operative described as a ‘spiders web of campaign software which work together to varying degrees and which were generally built by some Greens person for one campaign and then the whole party wanted to use it’. The party is almost entirely reliant on data collected via direct voter contact and online tracking. The Greens engage with the community to better understand which issues are especially salient, they attempt to build trust and relationships built on shared values in these communities and then they develop their messages—and sometimes even policy—based on these interactions. The decentralised nature of the Greens’ formal organisational structures certainly contributes to a different campaign culture, but resources—or lack thereof—is a significant factor as well. While the Greens digital campaigns are increasingly sophisticated, and they can target voters at the individual level when facilitated via technology companies, I argue the Greens campaigning model should be understood as a form of community organising. Some party officials might like to talk about how data-driven their campaigns are, but compared to the other parties or parties internationally, this argument is unsustainable. The Greens model is labour intensive rather than capital intensive and this affects party organisation primarily in terms of how they open themselves up to non-members. I talk more about these competing models in the conclusion, including the implications for Australian democracy.

Members, Supporters and Campaigning The political science literature on political parties remains steadfast in its commitment to political parties as membership organisations first and foremost. Members and membership are unquestionably important. In many democracies, political parties are given legal and even constitutional rights precisely because they are membership organisations (Gauja 2015). This shapes the normative expectations of what political parties are and indeed should be organisationally. But as numerous scholars have

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now explained, there are significant differences between these normative expectations of a political party, and what they actually look like (Fisher et al. 2014; Scarrow 2015; Gauja 2015). Despite growing acceptance that parties are increasingly open to non-member supporters, many theoretical models of party organisation are either dated, empirically inaccurate or hamstrung by the legacy of mass party theory. In particular, it is assumed in many of these frameworks that fluctuations in the membership should be taken as a key proxy of organisational change. But this is increasingly debatable as party change measured this way is done so in a vacuum, ignoring the broader socio-political context. While it is objectively true that membership numbers have declined, what matters is how the membership affects the organisation. And, just because there are fewer members does not necessarily mean members have less power. As has been noted in the international scholarship (Fisher et al. 2014; Bale et al. 2019), instead of relying solely on financial resources or members, parties—including those studied here—are increasingly relying on non-member supporters to do the high-intensity ‘donkey work’ required in an election campaign. The debates are not about whether this is occurring, most scholars agree it is, it is how much of this high-intensity activity work is done by these non-member supporters and what this means for how we understand party organisation. Members remain very important to political parties, for all the reasons the literature on party organisation suggests they are, but the problem is that membership is often used as the only lens through which party organisation is evaluated. The evidence about field campaigning presented here suggests there is a significant disconnect between many theoretical models and the empirical reality. This is why the work of Scarrow (2015) is particularly significant.3 In setting out the multi-speed membership thesis, Scarrow (2015: 29) argued that: Today, it seems clear that many parties are encouraging supporters to get involved, regardless of their membership status. For instance, non-member supporters may be asked to donate to the party, and they may be urged to distribute party materials to their digital friends; they may even be invited to help select party candidates or leaders.

As discussed in Chapter 2, the core argument of the multi-speed membership thesis is that parties have gone from the party affiliation model

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developed by Duverger, to this new multi-speed membership model. Three characteristics, according to Scarrow (2015) are common of these new forms of affiliation. They are centralised, they are digital and they are accessible. Scarrow (2015) also argued that these new supporters would be channelled into the party via communication with the national party, thereby bypassing local or regional party strata and these new forms of affiliation will be online affiliations. In Scarrow’s view, non-member supporters may (2015: 32): never become a full-fledged party member, but may serve as a digital ambassador, for instance by forwarding Twitter messages to her friends, sharing a link to a partisan YouTube video, or letting her Facebook friends know that she ‘likes’ her party and its leader…Whether or not she is a registered party member, she is closely linked to the party project, receiving messages from the central party, and possibly participating in two-way communications in the form of party-organised discussion groups and surveys. Her level of partisan engagement between national elections may not predict what she will do in the months leading up to an important political contest.

Despite the debt we owe to Scarrow for improving understanding of the way parties have opened themselves up to non-member supporters, the focus on digital means the model underestimates the extent of changes. Indeed, the extent of change is such that party elites are adamant that parties need to embrace a new way of engaging with their members and supporters if they are going to survive. This approach is not one in which there are two tiers—members on one level and supporters on another. Instead, the same rights and obligations are going to need to be bestowed on both. As one former Labor campaign director said, We currently have an official structure which doesn’t provide these people with any status and most of them don’t want a status or membership as it’s viewed as an over-commitment. It’s my view that those political movements that will be successful are those which recognise this and embrace these people even though it may be foreign to how we have traditionally done things.

Certainly, evidence of these changes was more pronounced in the progressive parties studied here, Labor and the Greens. But this is not because the Liberal Party would not like to replicate such a model, it simply is

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a product of who their supporters are—generally older, wealthier voters. They want to mobilise these supporters, like Labor and the Greens have, but they are unable to do so. What this says, then, is that Scarrow’s model has some explanatory power for the Australian cases but does not go far enough. The evidence collected here also shows that multi-speed membership parties are far from a digital phenomenon, or a product of citizens participating in politics in different ways, which is a common argument made about differences in political participation between different age cohorts, such as Gen X v Baby Boomers. Instead, the evidence from the Australian parties tells us that non-member supporters are undertaking much of what is considered the nuts and bolts of traditional member campaigning on the ground. While it is true that Scarrow (2015: 136) did say, ‘There is not a single template for these efforts’, there is significant variation between the empirical reality and Scarrow’s (2015) theoretical model. The same is true for much of the classic scholarship on party organisation. As documented in Chapter 2 (Table 2.1), what is quite evident in the party types is that fluctuations in the membership, and especially a declining membership, are seen to evolve in line with how parties’ campaign. These changes are unidirectional. The membership declines and so does what is referred to as ‘labour-intensive’ forms of campaigning. Fewer membership dues mean parties need resources from somewhere, so one theory was they would move closer to the state. Hence, the cartel party is born. As Katz and Mair (1995: 20–21) suggested: While members of a cartel party may have even more rights than those of catch-all parties, their position is sometimes less privileged. The distinction between members and non-members may become blurred, with parties inviting all supporters, whether formally enrolled or not, to participate in party activities and decisions…This atomistic conception of party membership is further facilitated by allowing people to affiliate directly with the central party, obviating the need for local organizations, and hence also for local organizers. Indeed, it becomes possible to imagine a party that manages all of its business from a single central headquarters, and which simply subdivides its mailing list by constituency, region or town when particular sets of candidates have to be selected or when subnational policies have to be approved.

It is not that surprising that the cartel thesis would overestimate the effect that a declining membership would have on how parties’ campaign.

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After all, it is 25 years old, but it has affected many theories of party organisation since this time. This includes the idea parties would no longer need local organisations or organisers as well as the argument that declining membership numbers can be taken as a proxy for a move away from civil society. Without rehashing the arguments made in Chapter 5, some of the key questions about campaigning and party organisation are: did members perform different functions to non-member supporters? And, did members have rights that were different to the non-member supporters? The answer to these questions is no. There was no distinction between members and supporters in the campaigns that I was involved in and subsequent interviews reaffirmed this for all three parties. In my notes from my time undertaking participant observation, I often wrote that I had no idea who was a member and who was not. I assumed almost everyone was a party member, but when I asked interviewees about this it became evident this was not the case. A selection of relevant interview material which was representative of the sample are as follows: At no time during the campaign did staff or operatives, split members and volunteers into different groups to perform different tasks (my notes). I never felt that being a volunteer, rather than a member mattered. It was never raised (Labor volunteer). We treat everyone the same. There are no additional benefits that come from being a member on these campaigns (Greens Organiser). Member or non-member, they all do the same thing (Liberal campaign director).

An important question to ask is why do these non-members do what they do? One explanation in the literature is that parties offer supporters incentives to mobilise them (Seyd and Whiteley 1992; Scarrow 2000: 84). According to the General Incentives Model, personal and group efficacy, as well as selective benefits shape how likely members or supporters are to get involved in a political party (Seyd and Whiteley 1992; Whiteley et al. 1994, 2006). But there were no incentives offered to supporters in any of these campaigns. There are clearly incentives in becoming a formal member of a party, whether that is social, educational or employment

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related. But these non-member supporters are offered none of that, and seemingly have little interest in these incentives, or they would presumably join. Many volunteers I spoke to, said they wanted to be involved in the campaign, they supported the candidate or the party and they liked the camaraderie, but had no interest in going to branch meetings or joining a faction. Questions certainly remain about these non-member supporters. And, scholars in both the UK and Australia have started to grapple with this and a range of related questions. This includes Bale et al. (2019) in the UK and Gauja and Jackson (2016) in Australia. While it is beyond the parameters of this study to statistically determine what motivates a member as opposed to a party supporter, some exploratory observations can be offered. The first of these is that in the view of campaign organisers, the perceived demographic difference between members and supporters often came down to age. Organisers from all three parties suggested that non-member supporters who participate in the field campaigns are often younger than party members. This view was expressed less consistently in Labor but was the majority view of those asked. It also supports what Gauja and Jackson (2016: 372) found previously. A further argument made by some interviewees in each party, though not unanimous within or across them, was that non-member supporters were often more diverse. Some interviewees suggested that more women participated, others suggested non-members were more representative of the community than party members, especially in terms of race. Other interviewees perceived other factors as important in who was mobilised. One long-term Labor organiser was of the view that the demographics of the candidate and organisers are important. In their view, ‘I see similar patterns in voting as in mobilising non-members, if the candidate and organisers are women, we attract more women, the same is true for other demographics’. In analysing what was occurring in UK campaigns, Fisher et al. (2014) argued that supporters were not just complementing the work or party members, but appeared to be supplementing it. This is certainly the case in Australia. Gauja and Grömping (2020: 43) in their analysis of Labor supporters said that, expressive types of engagement are much more widespread than high intensity forms of engagement. This echoes of course previous findings about engagement with political parties in general, which suggest that it is only

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the most committed groups of activists who undertake the highest intensity activities.

While it may certainly be the case that expressive forms of engagement are more widespread, the evidence presented in this book suggests further analysis and study of these non-member supporters is required. Indeed, I would argue the level of high-intensity activity undertaken by nonmember supporters remains underappreciated by party scholars. Clearly one of the issues is methodological. The work of Bale et al. (2019) was only possible as the online panel of voters they drew on from YouGov in the UK contains 10s of 1000s of voters. This enabled them to tap into important sub-populations in a way that has never been possible in Australia. Party scholars in Australia have some way to go to match that analysis.

Campaigning and Party Organisation Where exactly does this leave our understanding of party organisation then? The answer is that, like Carty suggested, it remains complex and contradictory. Indeed, generalisation across countries needs to come with a degree of caution given the contextual and mediating variables that affect the decisions that parties take. But a few conclusions can be drawn. The first of these relates to discussions of how campaigns affect party organisation. One of the central arguments in the party scholarship is that if we think of political parties as made up of ‘three faces’ (Katz and Mair 1993)—the party in public office, the party in central office and the party on the ground—the party in public office is often argued to be the ‘face’ that has become increasingly powerful, especially in relation to the party on the ground (Bardi et al. 2017). Given the significance of his thinking on these matters it is not surprising that Mair (1994: 17) had thought about the implications of the ‘three faces’ for the analysis of political parties. He said debates about whether one face or another was becoming more powerful were perhaps misleading. Instead, ‘we may actually be witnessing a process of mutual and growing autonomy’. I would add to what Mair said and say that in searching for generalisability, party scholars have often overlooked the tensions within individual party organisations. For example, how do parties manage the tensions between different sets of campaigning practices which push power in opposite directions? At present it could be

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argued that the parties in Australia are, as Nielsen (2012: 187) described, ‘trying to have it both ways’. They each want to draw on the capacities that a centralised digital campaign brings, while also drawing on the persuasion capacities a decentralised field campaign offers. These tensions are also mediated by other factors such as how willing the party has been to invest in the infrastructure that sophisticated data and analytics programs require. The way contemporary campaigning has manifested in Australia in each of the parties, therefore, reflects the blending of ideas and practices with the organisational structure and culture of the parties. The Liberal Party has a culture of top-down, professionalised campaigning. Given this, and their decision to not invest in the type of infrastructure requires to undertake data-driven campaigning, narrowcasting aligns with their organisation and culture. The Greens are a bottom-up party derived from movement politics. They possess far fewer financial resources and this explains their focus on community organising. Labor straddles two cultures, one the professional, top-down campaign operation and the other is the organising culture derived out of the union movement. These tensions shape and are shaped by campaigning. Hence, while there is a degree of hybridity in how the Australian parties’ campaign online, including the major parties’ use of external consultants and service providers, and there is evidence of the parties using email and social media to build relationships with non-member supporters somewhat similar to what Margetts (2006) envisioned, there is little evidence of ‘citizen campaigners’ (Gibson 2009). Digital campaigning in Australia remains highly centralised. In contrast, offline campaigning is largely decentralised and draws on significant numbers of members and non-member supporters. These non-member supporters are more engaged and undertake more high-intensity activity than has been previously assumed. They also appear to be doing so at levels higher than that in other countries like the UK (Bale et al. 2019). One possible explanation for this is that the UK has in recent years experienced a surge in party members and, arguably, many of those who would normally be non-member supporters have decided to join UK parties, whether that was the UK Labor Party, the SNP or the Conservative party (Bale et al. 2019: 87–90). But questions remain. Is there something unique about the number of non-member supporters engaged in these campaigns in Australia? Equally, are they undertaking that high-intensity campaign

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activity at rates greater than in other comparable democracies? The answer is that we do not know. The under-theorised aspect of campaigning and party organisation that this book has highlighted is the role of data and analytics operatives. The agency that these actors possess is significant and given many data scientists work outside the official party structure, this raises significant questions about intra-party power. While campaign directors and other senior party officials clearly play significant strategic decision-making roles, perceptions of campaign efficacy and even potential strategies often come via the models and analysis undertaken by data scientists. This role is not necessarily transformative, but it certainly can shape how and where resources are used and what types of citizens parties engage with. In writing about what we described as the digital ecosystem, Dommett, Power and I (2020a: 9) previously suggested that, this ecosystem is characterised by diversity and porous relationships. These insights are vital for scholars interested in party organisation as they suggest the pertinence of a range of new actors and raise questions about the way that these organisations interact with parties over time…Organisational boundaries are more fluid and porous than analyses from the pre-digital era suggest was the case. We also suggest that while these dynamics are particularly apparent when studying parties’ digital activities, the potential for wider, digitally facilitated, changes in how party activities are performed are also likely.

Data and analytics practices were not the focus of our article, but they certainly provide additional evidence of this hybridity. Some of those playing an influential role in data-driven campaigns, like those in the Labor Party, work for the party. Others are brought into do data work, create models and help campaign directors map out campaign strategies. While it is important to re-emphasise data-driven campaigns remain uneven in Australia, given what we know about campaigns internationally, the capacity of data and analytics operatives to affect resource allocation seems likely to increase. As I discussed in Chapters 3, 5 and 6, data scientists can shape how campaigns perceive the electorate. Whether that is through unconscious bias or the use of theoretical frameworks to understand voting behaviour that shapes modelling decisions, the interpretation of data can affect decision-making processes, including where and when a party uses resources. Data-driven campaigns rely as much on

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data analysts as the data that is collected, yet they remain in the shadows of campaigning and party organisation. Their roles and influence require much greater attention.

Conclusions In his final book, legendary political scientist Peter Mair (2013) argued, The age of party democracy has passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form.

While it was never my aim to test and critique Mair’s thesis, I argue that the evidence about Australian political parties presented in this book suggests Mair is at least partially wrong. Political parties in Australia are evolving because of a set of seemingly contradictory forces. This includes: the recognition that the way citizens are engaging in politics has changed and continues to change; and, the desire of the parties to scale up their direct voter contact operations. This certainly has not led to any significant change in how Australian democracy functions yet. But it might. We simply do not know. Members and membership are still valued by these parties. They try to cultivate and encourage supporters to become formal members. But ultimately the parties recognise the sand has shifted beneath their feet and they need to be open to the idea that membership, as historically understood, is limiting and not applicable to the way that many active supporters want to engage with the party in the twenty-first century. In seeking to better understand how campaigning affects party organisation, a significant conclusion from the Australian case is that the dominant theoretical models of party organisation have overestimated the effect that digital would have and underestimated the effect that field campaigning would have. Implicit in most models is the argument that it is digital which will open up new modes of affiliation and that this would occur at a time that offline campaigning and engagement would decline. While there is no disputing that digital has been significant, it is certainly not the ‘only game in town’ for non-members to engage with the parties. The evidence from the Australian campaigns suggests non-member supporters are engaging at a scale that has thus

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far been dramatically underestimated. This is, of course, not the only way campaigning affects party organisation. One intra-party actor, in particular, deserves increased attention: data scientists. In adding to the hybridity of political parties, their presence and role are influencing resourcing as well as where and when parties engage with voters. Their role remains under-theorised in the campaigning and party scholarship, but better understanding their influence is something scholars interested in the campaigning-party organisation nexus will need to grapple with.

Notes 1. By this I mean, national or even subnational party machines need to empower local organisers and local machines as the task of conducting field campaigns is immense. 2. Of course, as noted in Chapter 2, these are related and all still exhibit datadriven campaigning tendencies, it is about the intensity of these practices and their affect on party organisation that separates them. Moreover, the least intensive of these practices which I call voter outreach is evident in the campaign practices of all of these parties. 3. See also discussions about membership in Van Haute and Gauja (2015), which speaks of the blurring between members and supporters, as, of course Duverger (1969) also does. There is also (1973) May’s Law of Curvilinear Disparity which speaks to the idea of ideological differences between members, supporters and elected representatives. However, there is debate as to how well that ‘law’ actually holds up.

References Bale, Tim, Paul Webb, and Monica Poletti. 2019. Footsoldiers: Political party membership in the 21st century. Abingdon: Routledge. Bardi, Luciano, Enrico Calossi, and Eugenio Pizzimenti. 2017. Which face comes first? The ascendancy of the party in public office. In Organizing Political parties: Represenation, participation and power, ed. Susan E. Scarrow, Paul Webb, and Thomas Poguntke, 62–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carty, R. Kenneth. 2004. Parties as franchise systems the stratarchical organizational imperative. Party Politics 10 (1): 5–24. Dommett, Katharine, Glenn Kefford, and Sam Power. 2020a. The digital ecosystem: The new politics of party organization in parliamentary democracies. Party Politics (online first).

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Dommett, Katharine, Luke Temple, and Patrick Seyd. 2020b. Dynamics of intraparty organisation in the digital age: A grassroots analysis of digital adoption. Parliamentary Affairs (Online first). Duverger, Maurice. 1969. Political parties: Their organization and activity in the modern state. London: Methuen. Fisher, Justin, Edward Fieldhouse, and David Cutts. 2014. Members are not the only fruit: Volunteer activity in British political parties at the 2010 general election. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 16 (1): 75–95. Gauja, Anika. 2015. The construction of party membership. European Journal of Political Research 54 (2): 232–248. Gauja, Anika, and Max Grömping. 2020. Australian labor as a federal organisation: State uniformity or distinctiveness? Australian Journal of Politics & History 66 (1):35–49. Gauja, Anika, and Stewart Jackson. 2016. Australian greens party members and supporters: Their profiles and activities. Environmental Politics 25 (2): 359– 379. Gibson, Rachel K. 2009. New media and the revitalisation of politics. Representation 45 (3): 289–299. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1993. The evolution of party organizations in Europe: The three faces of party organization. American Review of Politics 14 (4): 593–617. Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1995. Changing models of party organization and party democracy: The emergence of the cartel party. Party politics 1 (1): 5–28. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Digital media, ground wars and party organisation: Does Stratarchy explain how parties organise election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs 71 (3): 656–673. Mair, Peter. 1994. Party organizations: From civil society to the state. In How parties organize: Change and adaptation in party organizations in Western democracies, ed. Peter Mair and Richard Katz, 1–22. London: Sage. Mair, Peter. 2013. Ruling the void: The hollowing of western democracy. London: Verso. Margetts, H. 2006. The cyber party. In The handbook of party politics, ed. R.S. Katz and W. Crotty, 528–535. London: Sage. May, John D. 1973. Opinion structure of political parties: The special law of curvilinear disparity. Political Studies 21 (2): 135–151. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scarrow, Susan E. 2000. Parties without members? party organization in a changing electoral environment. In Parties without partisans: Political change

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in advanced industrial democracies, ed. Russell J. Dalton, and Martin P. Wattenberg, 79–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scarrow, Susan E. (2015). Beyond party members: Changing approaches to partisan mobilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seyd, P., and P. Whiteley. 1992. Labour’s grassroots: The politics of membership. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Van Haute, Emilie, and Anika Gauja. 2015. Party members and activists. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Whiteley, Paul, Patrick Seyd, and Billinghurst Antony. 2006. Third force politics: Liberal Democrats at the grassroots. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whiteley, Paul, Patrick Seyd, and Jeremy Richardson. 1994. True blues: The politics of conservative party membership: The politics of conservative party membership. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion

Me: (knocking on door) Voter: (elderly woman walking to door) Volunteer 2: Oh hello, my name is X, and this is Glenn we are volunteers from the Labor Party and we are out here today on behalf of Labor’s candidate, and we want to talk to you about health. Did you know the government has cut significant funds out of health services in this area? Is health an issue you are particularly worried about? Voter: Not really. Volunteer 1: Fair enough, are there other issues you are particularly worried about? Voter: Plastic bags Volunteer 1: Oh really, why is that? Voter: Well I don’t throw my bags in the river, I’ve been re-using them for years, and now I go to the shops and people say I can’t use them as people throw them in the river. Me: What are your views on education?…

Big data, algorithms, microtargeting and disinformation. This is what dominates the headlines. There is good reason for this; there are legitimate concerns about contemporary campaign practices. Anxiety abounds about the way our personal data is used, and there is a general sense that © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_9

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we have little control over how information about us is used by a range of actors. The focus on technology and data also satisfies our desire to make sense of why things have happened. It also gives us a villain to blame for election results we do not like. But much of what we are told is wrong. The sophisticated data-driven campaigning we often hear about are nowhere near as prevalent as we are led to believe. Political parties may want to campaign in a way that aligns with the widely mythologised data-driven campaigning model, but they often do not. There is also good reason to be sceptical about the efficacy of these campaigns (Baldwin-Philippi 2019). The challenges for mainstream political parties in advanced democracies in the twenty-first century are immense. The environment they are operating in is one that is often hostile, whether that is a product of changing values, changing perceptions of what role political parties should play or whether it is a sense that representative democracy is failing many of its citizens. Whatever it is, political parties are required to evolve to the contexts they find themselves in. It is obvious that Australian parties are aware of the challenges confronting them, and the evidence presented thus far demonstrates some of the ways they are responding to the crises, while also trying to ensure they are capable of constructing effective persuasion campaigns. In this final chapter I draw the threads of the analysis together. I begin by considering what the evidence presented in this book says about the theoretical models on political parties and campaigning. I argue that the original framework I developed and presented in Chapter 2 has utility for scholars interested in data-driven campaigning. I then move on to consider the way data-driven campaigning is affecting Australian political parties. Most notably this is a product of field campaigning, but digital as well as data and analytics are also significant. I conclude by talking about how voters perceive these practices and what these findings mean for Australian democracy.

Theorising Campaigning Scholars have long agreed that campaigning matters for party organisation (Panebianco 1988; Katz and Mair 1995). Yet there have been precious few attempts to theorise this relationship and to offer new theoretical frameworks that can be used as a lens to better understand it. The framework introduced in Chapter 2 is therefore an important contribution to

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how we understand this relationship. Based on the idea that all political parties collect data and this data informs the way they campaign, it rejects unidirectional accounts which suggest campaigning is homogenous or unaffected by local conditions, contexts or the culture and resources of individual parties. This framework takes these variables seriously and contends that they play a significant role in how parties’ campaign. It also acknowledges that developments and conditions are not fixed. The way parties’ campaign may change between election cycles. Equally, different divisions of a party may be engaging in more or less data-driven campaign practices than other divisions. This approach and the flexibility of the framework overcomes many of the pitfalls that exist in the literature. Whether that is the relative silence about campaigning in the literature on party types (Katz and Mair 1995), or the arbitrary and empirically dubious ‘eras’ or ‘phases’ of campaigning (Norris 2000). While the framework was developed inductively from the empirical data on the Australian parties, it has also been created to be generalisable. In particular, it should be evident that in developing this framework I have been mindful of developments elsewhere. This includes cases that we know plenty about (the US), cases we know a little about (the UK and Germany) and cases we know almost nothing about (most advanced democracies). I argue the utility of the framework is that it recognises that parties are complex organisations and that within them skills and resources may vary widely. Some of this may be perception and some may be reality. But, as an example, if I asked operatives from some Australian states if their subnational campaigns were more data-driven than their colleagues in other states, the answer would be a resounding yes. Indeed, many operatives talked about this in interviews. Some pointed to resources or significant intra-party actors pushing the state division forward in how they campaign. The point here is that while I talk a lot about campaigning not being part of the ‘official story’ of political parties—including being absent from most party documents—this does not mean that campaigning is not affected by how a party is formally organised. Whether, as in the Australian major parties, the party is organised along federal lines, or whether like the Greens, the party is organised along confederal lines, the formal organisational structure still mediates and structures campaign innovation. But it can also inhibit it. Hence, while the Liberal Party is the dominant electoral force at the federal level in Australia, their campaigns are not as data-driven as is often assumed. As explained, the reasons for

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this are multifaceted, but clearly the federated nature of the organisation is one explanation. The state divisions and the national organisation would need to come together to invest heavily in the type of infrastructure that data-driven campaigning requires. While Labor is also federated and have gone down this path, losing at the federal level so consistently is a strong incentive to change practices. Given the costs involved—Labor spent over a million dollars three election cycles ago—it is only through a nation-wide push and contributions from each of the state divisions that the Liberal Party would likely be able to afford a comparable CRM. Of course, in other jurisdictions this may not be the case. Australian parties for all their flaws, and despite declining partisan identification, remain strongly institutionalised. That is certainly not the case everywhere else. One question worth posing is whether the Australian parties should be positioned in different parts of the model for digital, field or data and analytics. This is something that I thought long and hard about. Given what the evidence suggests about how each party collects and analyses data and campaigns online and offline, I have concluded they are best understood as exhibiting three distinct types of campaigning practice. One criticism that could be made is that the framework is very reliant and dependent on the individual parties’ data and analytics operation. I reject this as the parties do not need to have a sophisticated data and analytics operation to target voters at the individual level online. Technology companies largely facilitate this. Hence, while the Liberal Party and the Greens were both seen to not be employing many of the practices associated with data-driven campaigning, this does not mean their campaigns were not data-driven. The Liberal campaigns, while not as sophisticated as Labor in terms of how they collected and used data, was still far more data-driven than that of the Greens. As I say in Chapter 2, the starting point for thinking about data-driven campaigns should be a recognition that all established parties collect and use some data. Ultimately, the evidence presented in this book about data-driven campaigning in Australia demonstrates that it is uneven and differs significantly across the three parties that contest the most elections in Australia. It also provides strong support for the ‘sceptical account’ of data-driven campaigning practices internationally (Baldwin-Philippi 2017, 2019; Dommett 2019). While there is much more work required to better understand why practices vary so wildly within and across party systems, this book shows yet again why generalising from the US case

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is extremely problematic for political science and political communication scholars. The US is a complete outlier when it comes to electoral politics—especially presidential elections—and the domination of US case studies in the international literature continues to shape the parameters of the debate.

Campaign and Organisational Effects While this book was not about measuring campaign effects, it was inevitable that this would form part of the discussion. Perceived campaign effects form one part of the strategic decision-making calculation that parties make in terms of how to use resources. In fact, that Australian political parties place so much emphasis on their field campaigns makes sense given what we know about persuasion campaigning. Without rehashing all the literature discussed previously, what we know strongly suggests that the best way to mobilise or persuade voters is through a one-on-one conversation (Green and Gerber 2015; Kalla and Broockman 2020). There are caveats that come with this, including that campaigns need to invest significant resources in identifying potentially persuadable voters (Kalla and Broockman 2018). And we should be wary of applying these conclusions to the Australian context given the significance of compulsory voting. But there are no comparable scholarly studies on Australian campaigns. Hence, we need to cautiously rely on studies such as these. Interview data discussing internal experiments in Chapter 5, also largely supported these studies. They claimed that the effect of a fully operational and sufficiently well-resourced field campaign in an Australian federal division was between 1.2 and 1.6 per cent of the twoparty preferred vote. Another point here is that, for all the hype about digital campaigning and the effects it has, many senior campaigners in Australia are ambivalent about its ability to persuade voters. This helps to explain the way campaigns are organised and function the way they do in Australia. While the purveyors of data dystopia and those who work in the consulting industry might like to spruik the election-changing effects that some piece of software or data collection operation can have, most seasoned campaigners are much more measured in their assessments. Even the data and analytics operatives who might have an incentive to exaggerate the effects of data-driven practices did nothing of the kind. In fact, if anything, they tried to dampen expectations about what was possible,

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as discussed in Chapter 3. Without more empirical studies in Australia, we can only speculate on what effects are occurring and to cautiously rely on what has been reported in interviews, like those I conducted. There is certainly a range of questions about campaign effects in Australia that we do not have answers to. One I often return to is whether, for all the campaigning that goes on, parties are really just playing an agenda setting role and increasing the salience of issues which advantage their prospective sides (Hager 2019). Under this scenario, most data is likely to be of limited value and the narrowcasting approach to campaigning might be equally effective, yet less capital and labour intensive. Another interesting question is whether targeted campaigning can backfire and those targeted for messaging end up supporting your opponent. This is one potential consequence identified in the literature previously (Hersh and Schaffner 2013; Hersh 2015). Unless parties are willing to conduct more comprehensive experiments internally or to work with researchers on questions such as these, we will never know. Given this, the larger effects of data-driven campaigning identified in this book are on the parties themselves. Considering where I suggest each of the Australian parties should be located on my data-driven campaigning model, it should be no surprise that I argue the largest effects have been on Labor in the Australian system. Perhaps this is not that surprising. After all, the two National Secretaries before the current one have been clear about the trajectory the party has been on. Speaking after the 2013 federal election loss, then National Secretary, George Wright, said: We intend to take Labor into a new third generation of large-scale political campaigning. Unlike the two previous generations—which relied first almost exclusively on mass advertising, then second on demographic targeting—this third generation relies more heavily on direct and individual, one-on-one conversations and voter engagement, and the micro-targeting of information and messages to individuals. It requires better-trained, organised and resourced campaigners and supporters at every level of the party—and it will only work if we are truly willing to invite our supporters into our party and our campaigns. This type of campaigning requires widely accessible resources and many thousands of volunteers—but has a target audience of one (Wright 2015).

Wright’s successor, Noah Carroll was equally unambiguous saying in 2016:

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The interconnectivity of field work, data, analytics, research and messaging is the clear systems requirement of current and future campaigning (quoted in Bramston 2016).

Embracing data-driven campaigning like Labor has, comes with challenges. To begin with, it certainly raises questions about what opening the doors to all comers to participate in campaigns means for members and membership. It may not change all that much, and certainly members I encountered were happy that there were people beyond the membership willing to get involved. But does it put Labor on a path where they will need to open up other areas of the party that were solely the domain of members? This includes voting to select parliamentary leaders or further trialling of primary style candidate selection systems? It might. Another organisational challenge is ensuring the relationship between the organisational and parliamentary wings of the party is clearly understood and agreed upon. The old top-down model of campaign organisation which relied on broadcast media, ensured the parliamentary wing was extremely influential and powerful. Data-driven campaigning, however, puts some of this power back in the hands of the organisational wing. There is certainly a view within some sections of Labor that the organisational wing was unable to execute the 2019 campaign the way they wanted to because the parliamentary wing had made decisions on policy and messaging with little consultation with the organisational wing. The claim made by some Labor officials was this made it challenging for campaigners to map out and present a coherent campaign message. Whatever the merits of data-driven campaigning, it is not a panacea for more systemic flaws, whether that relates to policy, leadership or something else. One interviewee when asked to reflect on the 2019 campaign said: If your policies are not resonating with voters, your leader is unpopular or if the parliamentary wing are freelancing on policy and strategy without consulting the people thinking about whether we can win with these policies, no amount of data or analytics is going to help you. You’re pretty much fucked. And that’s what happened.

While it is debatable whether this is what happened, a reasonable takeaway is the whole party has to buy-in if this type of campaigning is going to work. But it also cannot be assumed that because you are conducting data-driven campaigns you are entitled to win election contests. Labor’s

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data and analytics are more sophisticated than their primary competitor, the Liberal Party, and they have a bespoke CRM system which should allow them to synchronise data and analytics across different channels. Yet they continue to lose at the federal level. The biggest surprise for me in terms of the findings was the Liberal Party. My assumption was Liberal campaigns would be far more datadriven than what they are. I assumed they would be hiring data analysts and operatives, investing in infrastructure and targeting voters at the individual level in a way that was comparable to Labor. But there was little sense this was occurring. One caveat I would add is that in interviews completed near the end of the project, interviewees suggested that there was a mood for change. Some of this appeared to be frustration with the inability to acquire a CRM system that allowed campaigners to do the types of things they wanted to do. Another seemed to be that there had been a ‘changing of the guard’ in terms of who were the senior campaign operatives. If the Liberal Party does invest in the personnel and infrastructure to advance their data and analytics work, it is an open question how this will affect their long-term relationship with consultants, and especially their deep ties to CrosbyTextor. This leaves the Greens. It was little surprise the Greens, as a minor party, were not running the types of data-driven campaigns that the major parties conduct. Nevertheless, what continues to surprise me about the Greens is that so many of their people like to talk about how data-driven their campaigns are. Indeed, one interviewee, when asked about how data and analytics had affected the way the party campaigns suggested that it had ‘revolutionised not only what we do, but how we do it’. Others were less emphatic about the extent of changes, but many were still adamant about the data-driven campaigning the party did. This is where my framework for understanding these practices is particularly useful. Greens campaigns certainly involve data, but they are not comparable to the practices of Labor or US parties. Given voters seem to loathe much of what constitutes data-driven campaigning, the Greens would probably be wise to distance themselves from these practices. In any event, their campaigns are, for the most part, an extension of what we already know about the organisation (Miragliotta and Jackson 2015; Gauja and Jackson 2016; Jackson 2016). The effects of the way they campaign on party organisation is the least pronounced, albeit digital appears to be making inroads in terms of resources and personnel and like with Labor, the effect of opening themselves up to non-member supporters is an open question.

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Indeed, across the three parties covered, the most consistent finding was that they were all completely ambivalent about the role that nonmember supporters were playing and were likely to continue to play. This is evidently not just about campaigning, and as discussed elsewhere, is partially a product of parties realising that many people want to engage in politics differently than they did a generation ago. But it is also about parties understanding that direct voter contact operations are more effective at persuading voters. This has encouraged Australian political parties to open their previously impenetrable walls to non-member supporters like they never have previously. During campaigns, there is a complete blurring between members and non-member supporters. The extent of this far surpasses what much of the scholarship assumes is going on. And I would argue the long-term effects of this on parties is not something we can have strong priors on either. Writing about the rise of the new campaign professionals and market research which came to dominate Australian campaign practices from the 1970s, Mills (2013: 3) said: As the new campaign style was adopted, party membership began - for whatever reason - a precipitate decline; head office adjusted by taking over or abandoning many of the powers, such as policy formation and candidate selection, formerly exercised by members through local branches. Grassroots canvassing performed by volunteer members was superseded by capital-intensive market research, direct mail and television advertising which linked head office directly to the electors.

Mills’ description of the link between changing campaign practices and party organisation is prescient. Not just because it aligns with party organisational theory about how parties changed during this period, but because it provides a useful counterpoint to contemporary developments. What I have demonstrated is campaigning practices have evolved since this period and this is affecting party organisation now just like it did then. This points to not only the evolutionary capacities of political parties, but the weaknesses of the eras or phases of campaigning literature which suggest the trajectory of campaigning and party organisation is unidirectional.

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Voters and Democracy Given what has been shown about campaigning in Australia, it would be remiss to not talk about the way political parties collect data on voters and the attitudes of Australian voters on these issues. While discussed in great detail in Chapter 7, it is worth emphasising some of these points as they are especially significant given international developments and debates. What the data shows unambiguously is Australian voters have very clear preferences on political advertising, the collection of data by political parties and how technology companies such as Facebook should deal with these issues. Overwhelmingly, Australian voters think political parties are important, but a clear majority think they should not be exempt from privacy legislation. Australian voters would also be unhappy with parties collecting data on them, whether that was from public sources or through purchasing commercial data. Beyond the parties themselves, Australian voters had very clear views on how disinformation included in online advertising should be dealt with by technology companies. To begin with, Australian voters thought social media companies should provide no information to parties to help them target voters. But a clear majority also thought social media companies should refuse to run ads that smear an opponents’ character, that says a party or candidate holds a position which they do not or an ad that contains some accurate information and leaves other information out should also not be allowed to run. The disconnect between Australian voter preferences on these issues and the current regulatory and legislative framework that elections are contested under is glaring. While it appears that political elites are waking up to the significant disconnect between what voters think about how advertising or disinformation should be dealt with and the current arrangements (ABC 2019), there is little sense that the spotlight will be turned on to their own organisations.

Conclusions With a project this large, there are always caveats and things that could have been done better or differently. One caveat with this project is that participant observation was only conducted with two of the three parties covered in this book. There is little I can say to rebut this criticism except that I did what was practical and what was possible. Would it have been better if I did participant observation with the Liberal Party? Of course.

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But it was not feasible for a range of reasons. The participant observation I did complete still sets this project apart from any other Australian political science project that I know of. There is also, to my knowledge, not a single study internationally in which the researcher undertook participant observation within two parties. I discuss the data collection processes and procedures in more detail in Chapter 10—the research appendix. Nonetheless, a criticism that could be—and likely will be—made by some is that interviews are unreliable. This is a very boring critique and generally is made by those with little ability to speak to other humans. Unfortunately, political science has its fair share of these people. Leaving my snark to one side, I would say the way I approached data collection, in a staged and systematic way, should ease some of these concerns. Again, this is discussed in the research appendix. In effect, I used participant observation and interviews to triangulate on key themes, developments and findings. I do not know of an Australian political science project which comes close to this one in terms of the number of interviews completed or the mix of data sources and methods. While this research is comprehensive and provides significant insight into data-driven campaigning in Australia, the task is clearly not over. In particular, a larger comparative project which analyses how prevalent datadriven practices are across the democratic world and then tries to unpack variations within and across countries would tell us a great deal about what the drivers of these campaigning practices are. It would also better inform discussions about how we can regulate or legislate practices which are undesirable. There is certainly much more that can be done in terms of measuring campaigns effects. Hopefully this project stimulates others to take on some of this work. This book has delivered one of the most fine-grained accounts of datadriven campaigning practices in an advanced democracy. It is based on 161 interviews, participant observation, original survey data and drew on an enormous secondary literature from Australia and internationally. I created an original theoretical framework that can be used to assess data-driven campaign practices in Australia and beyond. This contribution should hopefully be of interest to scholars as well as to campaigners and readers interested in democratic politics. It demonstrates that, despite what we often are told, the practices commonly associated with datadriven campaigning are not as common as is often assumed. It raises questions about the capacity of parties to successfully execute these practices

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in multi-party systems where elections are contested under proportional or preferential electoral systems. Most importantly, it demonstrates that despite the hype from the ‘data dystopia’ brigade, the biggest effects of data-driven campaigning are on political parties.

References ABC. 2019. Parliament to examine social media attacks on democracy. ABC. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/par liament-to-examine-social-media-attacks-on-democracy/11778852. Accessed 12 Dec 2019. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2017. The myths of data-driven campaigning. Political Communication 34 (4): 627–633. Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica. 2019. Data campaigning: Between empirics and assumptions. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Bramston, T. 2016. Labor’s new driver Noah Carroll may be antidote to complacency. The Australian. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commen tary/opinion/labors-new-driver-noah-carroll-may-be-antidote-to-compla cency/news-newsstory/763aa352be673f87275f39fa0b68d72b. Accessed 4 October 2016. Dommett, Katharine. 2019. Data-driven political campaigns in practice: Understanding and regulating diverse data-driven campaigns. Internet Policy Review 8 (4): 1–18. Gauja, Anika, and Stewart Jackson. 2016. Australian Greens party members and supporters: Their profiles and activities. Environmental Politics 25 (2): 359– 379. Green, Donald P., and Alan S. Gerber. 2015. Get out the vote: How to increase voter turnout. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press. Hager, Anselm. 2019. Do online ads influence vote choice? Political Communication 36 (3): 376–393. Hersh, Eitan D. 2015. Hacking the electorate: How campaigns perceive voters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hersh, Eitan D., and Brian F. Schaffner. 2013. Targeted campaign appeals and the value of ambiguity. The Journal of Politics 75 (2): 520–534. Jackson, Stewart. 2016. The Australian Greens: From activism to Australia’s third party. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2018. The minimal persuasive effects of campaign contact in general elections: Evidence from 49 field experiments. American Political Science Review 112 (1): 148–166. Kalla, Joshua L., and David E. Broockman. 2020. Reducing exclusionary attitudes through interpersonal conversation: Evidence from three field experiments. American Political Science Review 114 (2): 410–425.

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Katz, Richard S., and Peter Mair. 1995. Changing models of party organization and party democracy the emergence of the cartel party. Party Politics 1 (1): 5–28. Mills, Stephen. 2013. Campaign professionals: Party officials and the professionalisation of Australian political parties. PhD thesis, Department of Government and International Relations, University of Sydney. Miragliotta, Narelle, and Stewart Jackson. 2015. Green parties in federal systems: Resistant or compliant to centralizing pressures? Government and Opposition 50 (4): 549–577. Norris, Pippa. 2000. A virtuous circle: Political communications in postindustrial societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Panebianco, Angelo. 1988. Political parties: Organization and power. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Wright, George. 2015. The labor party campaign and aftermath. In Abbott’s Gambit: The 2013 Australian federal election, ed. Carol Johnson, John Wanna, and Hsu-Ann Lee, 203–210. Canberra: ANU Press.

CHAPTER 10

Research Appendix

This book was motivated by an interest in how political parties’ campaign and the ways they organisationally manage what seemed to be contradictory forces in digital and field campaigning. As is often the way with academic projects, the actual argument as well as the design changed significantly over time. When I first started researching campaigning, the questions I was interested in were quite modest. This was primarily due to a lack of time to do the research as well as a lack of financial support for this research. As my circumstances changed, the ambition and scale of the project expanded. As the project grew, I had planned to write a larger comparative book, but after completing most of the interviews and the participant observation, I thought the richness of the story would be lost if I did this. Hence, I decided to write this book which solely focusses on Australia and to write a larger comparative book in the coming years. Given the research questions I outlined in the introduction, I situate this research within the interpretivist tradition of political science. According to Boswell et al. (2019: 3), interpretive social science remains widely typecast as idiographic, both among its critics and its practitioners. For naturalist social scientists, interpretivists – if they enter the conversation at all – are deemed to be in the business of ‘mere description’. They provide rich, detailed and illuminating accounts of isolated social phenomena, but the relationship to theory © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7_10

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building and testing is tangential at best… Some humanist scholars who embrace, or at least are sympathetic to, the interpretive approach, invert this condescension and wear their idiographic robe with pride. Following Geertz, these scholars provide ‘thick descriptions’; that is, rich, detailed and illuminating accounts of particular social phenomena. Theoretical generalisation is seen as a fraught and fallible task…The common perception is that the interpretive enterprise remains rich, but context bound, and idiographic, unable to see the wood through the trees.

In line with Boswell et al. (2019), I reject this false dichotomy. The descriptive aspects of this book, including describing political phenomena such as how parties’ campaign and the way those interviewed interpret, perceive and make meaning out of the social and political world, were critically important to this project. It was only from this description that I was able to work inductively to generate theory about campaigning practices and political parties (outlined in Chapter 2). There is certainly debate about what is and is not Interpretivism and which methods and designs best allow the researcher to describe and theorise from their observations (Boswell et al. 2019). While the use of participant observation, and especially the style of participant observation used in this project may be viewed as closer to the ethnographic tradition, I contend it is not. While I am comfortable with being a ‘describer’ of things, my goals extend to theory and, as a result, generalisation. Indeed, the amount of fieldwork I completed for this project would in the mind of Anthropologists or other serious ethnographers likely be viewed as insufficient. My approach, therefore, aligns with what Boswell et al. (2019: 85) describe as the ‘yo-yoing’ approach to fieldwork. In discussing the experience of one of the co-authors, they say that ‘The observation experience added depth and richness to the account obtained via interviews and other public sources’. This is certainly also true of this project. I used participant observation to triangulate and to overcome some of the perceived weaknesses of interviews, such as confirming the hypotheses the researcher starts with. While I reject many of the criticisms of interviews as part of the boring turf war inherent in academia, I do think interview data works best when it is complemented with other pieces of evidence. The participant observation usefully pointed to contradictions in what interviewees said, as well as when there was no contradiction at all. I would also add that, for scholars interested in institutions like political parties, participant observation allows researchers to better understand

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how different parts or layers of an organisation like a political party make sense of their role and place within these institutions. In some ways, this situates my work in the tradition of Richard Fenno (2003), who described his approach to observation as ‘soaking and poking’. As far as I am aware, I am the first academic to do this type of participant observation in Australia, and the list of scholars who have undertaken this kind of research internationally is not a long one. There have been important contributions in the electoral politics space by Nielsen (2011, 2012), Glaser (1996, 1998), Munroe and Munroe (2018), Cutts (2006), Klein (2011) and Howard Frederick (2010). However, it is obvious to anyone who works in political science that this method is increasingly rare, as is fine-grained qualitative research. The field is now dominated by positivist quantitative studies. I have no objection to this, but I do think the scarcity of fine-grained qualitative research is problematic. The primary reason for this is that without case studies and fine-grained qualitative research most theorisation that goes on, at least from my perspective, is baseless and ad hoc. Without deep understanding of cases, the nice way to describe what goes on is that an educated guess is operationalised into hypotheses which are then tested. My approach in this project was different. Given that I had already interviewed a significant number of party officials and members before I undertook participant observation, I decided that I would try to triangulate on key themes during the participant observation, and complement this with additional interviews during the election campaign, as well as afterwards. I would then subsequently collect survey data to ascertain the perspective of voters on campaigning. The following was the structure of the project in terms of data collection and the methods used. I talk in more detail about individual methods further along. • Data Collection Wave 1—Interviews 2015–2017—I completed interviews for a range of projects during this time. I have drawn on 47 of these for this book. As explained in the list further along, there is a relatively even spread of interviewees across the three parties studied in this book. • Data Collection Wave 2—Interviews March 2018–Nov 2018—I completed interviews for a related project (Kefford 2018) which was looking at how parties were dealing with the organisational challenges of campaigning. I completed 24 interviews in this period

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across the three parties, as well as additional interviews with unions and other relevant campaigners. Collection Wave 3—Interviews and Participant • Data Observation—Feb–May 2019—Before and during the 2019 Australian federal election campaign, I completed 25 interviews about campaigning covering data, digital and field. These interviews were with former & current party officials, elected representatives and consultants that had worked with Labor, the Greens, the Liberal Party & the LNP. I also logged 96 hours of participant observation with Labor and Greens field campaigns. • Data Collection Wave 4—Interviews and Survey Data—July 2019–July 2020–65 interviews with party operatives, candidates, members & supporters across the three parties. I also conducted interviews for a related project about the use of consultants (Dommett et al. 2020). After spending some time thinking about the interview data, I decided that I needed to try to triangulate in on some key themes and push interviewees on different explanations. I went back and reinterviewed 12 interviewees that I thought had important insights about the key themes in this period. I also attempted to seek out other actors who may have different views. This included electorate level and regional field organisers as well as volunteers rather than elite voices who may know how to ‘spin’ the story. I also sought out volunteers & candidates outside the seats I knew best. This included talking to candidates, members and operatives who worked in seats that were not target seats. In June 2020, I fielded a survey that sought to understand the views of Australian voters on the collection and use of data by Australian political parties. These results are reported in Chapter 7. This survey was fielded by YouGov using their online panel of voters which they weighted to provide a nationally representative sample. An important question is why study campaigns—and their subsequent effects—solely in Australia? There are many reasons for this. Once I began studying campaigning, it soon dawned on me that what was required was a fine-grained qualitative analysis so that developments could first be described, and then subsequently analysed. The energy and time required to complete this task were very significant, more than I even expected. At certain points I considered writing this book solely about

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field campaigning or digital, but the more I talked to people involved in these campaigns, the more it seemed that by doing so I would be missing key themes or the account would be parsimonious but superficial. Many scholars choose to write comparative books and by doing so they increase the breadth of the analysis but reduce the depth and richness. I have decided to go deeper.

Interviews There is a view in some quarters of political science that interviews are ‘softball’ political science or that interviews are not a useful method. This view ignores the basis of political action and participation—actors ‘act’ within a tradition or a set of customs, rituals or practices. To understand meaning, norms and traditions, we need to understand how these actors understand this world, how they perceive it, and where they perceive power lies. My view is that methods come after questions. The questions I am interested in are often those which try to understand how political actors try to make sense of the political world, how they perceive their role in it and how they think they can achieve political and social change. The interviews I conducted were across a five-year period. When I did many of the earlier interviews, I had no intention of writing a book. The interviews between 2015 and the middle of 2018 were quite different to those in 2019 and 2020. Nonetheless, while they covered different themes, they were still very useful for this project and many of the interviews, once I went back and looked at the transcripts, spoke about the significance of the changing campaign practices. As outlined in the log of interviews below, I ended up completing 161 interviews. In total, I had 88 hours of formal interview data and an additional 183 pages of written responses to questions from current and former operatives, party members, non-member supporters, consultants, and other people I thought were worth talking to including union staffers and others aligned to Conservative campaigns. In terms of the breakdown of the interviews, there were 64 with Labor, 39 with the Greens, 40 with the Liberal and Liberal National parties, as well as 18 others. I quote 83 different interviewees in the book. Across the five years I sent out approximately 600 interview requests. I am sure that some campaigners were well and truly bored of me and my requests by the end, or potentially thought I was unhinged. Nonetheless, as is to be expected in a project such as this, there were people I wanted

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to speak to that either did not reply, or said they were not interested. This is disappointing as I think many of these people had critically important insights which could have added to the overall picture presented here. Despite this, I still ended up with a good mix of interviewees from across the three parties the book is centred around. This includes high-level party elites, operatives and organisers who work across the three main areas I cover, as well as members and non-member volunteers. There was also a good mix of interviewees across the states and territories. My approach to securing interviews was to draw up an extensive list of potential interviewees and then contact these people via email, if possible, or to call their office. From that initial group that agreed to do an interview, I used chain-referral and snowball sample techniques to increase the number of potential interviewees and continued using this approach throughout the entire project. As the project progressed, I attempted to triangulate in a number of ways, but this included attempting to interview figures who I thought (or I had been told) would probably disagree with what I had heard thus far. For example, while the former and current digital operatives were generally, though not always, consistent about digital and its role, I specifically sought out operatives, especially older, experienced operatives who learnt their craft in the pre-digital era and who had focussed on broadcast advertising. These people were not hard to find and displayed what I would describe as an instrumentalist approach to digital and its potential for parties. Younger more savvy digital operatives were largely of the view that campaign directors had not realised the full potential of digital or what they could do for the campaign. Given the organisational tensions I had identified in previous work (Kefford 2018; Dommett et al. 2020), it would have been remiss of me to not seek out actors at different layers of the parties and certainly this explained why certain trends were uneven within and across political parties. All of the interviews were eventually transcribed and I ended up spending a lot of time pouring over the comments and trying to make sense of various answers to get a clearer sense of what was occurring within the parties. Often this was relatively straightforward, but there were plenty of responses that were contradictory or introduced variables to explain how or why things were changing. Wherever possible, I have tried to note this nuance and contradictions in the responses of interviewees. The log of interviews, including the party or organisation the interviewee was from and how the interview was conducted is as follows. 12 January 2015—Interview, Hobart (Liberal)

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20 January 2015—Interview, Hobart (Greens) 21 January 2015—Interview, Hobart (Greens) 10 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Labor) 10 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Greens) 11 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Labor) 11 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Greens) 11 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Liberal) 11 February 2015—Interview, Canberra (Labor) 6 March 2015—Interview, Hobart (Labor) 10 March 2015—Phone Interview, Brisbane (LNP) 13 March 2015—Phone Interview, Sydney (Consultant) 16 March 2015—Interview, Melbourne (Labor) 8 September 2015—Phone Interview, Canberra (Liberal) 9 September 2015—Phone Interview, Canberra (LNP) 10 September 2015—Phone Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 30 September 2015—Phone Interview, Canberra (Labor) 7 October 2015—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 10 October 2015—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 9 October 2015—Interview, Hobart (Labor) 14 October 2015—Interview, Hobart (Liberal) 3 February 2016—Phone Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 10 March 2016—Interview, Hobart (Greens) 17 March 2016—Email Correspondence, Perth (Liberal) 22 March 2016—Interview, Hobart (Liberal) 10 April 2016—Interview, Hobart (Greens) 14 April 2016—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (Labor) 26 April 2016—Interview, Hobart (Labor) 17 May 2016—Interview, Hobart (Labor) 2 June 2016—Interview, Hobart (Liberal) 8 August 2016—Interview, Hobart (Labor) 10 September 2016—Phone Interview, Brisbane (Union Staffer) 27 April 2017—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (LNP) 26 May 2017—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (LNP) 29 May 2017—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (Labor) 31 May 2017—Email Correspondence, Sydney (Greens) 1 June 2017—Phone interview, Adelaide (Labor) 5 June 2017—Email Correspondence, Canberra (Greens) 18 June 2017—Email Correspondence, Perth (Greens) 22 June 2017—Email Correspondence, Melbourne (Greens)

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7 July 2017—Phone interview, Hobart (Labor) 13 July 2017—Phone Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 14 July 2017—Phone Interview, Adelaide (Labor) 31 July 2017—Phone Interview, Perth (Labor) 1 August 2017—Email Correspondence, Canberra (Labor) 4 August 2017—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (Labor) 14 November 2017—Phone Interview, Canberra (LNP) 12 March 2018—Phone Interview, Canberra (Liberal) 16 March 2018—Phone Interview, Canberra (Labor) 5 April 2018—Phone Interview, Brisbane (LNP) 11 April 2018—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 3 May 2018—Phone Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 28 June 2018—Phone Interview, Canberra (LNP) 29 June 2018—Phone Interview, Canberra (Labor) 30 June 2018—Phone Interview, Brisbane (LNP) 1 July 2018—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 3 July 2018—Phone Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 6 July 2018—Phone Interview, Sydney (Labor) 9 July 2018—Phone Interview, Newcastle (Liberal) 17 August 2018—Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 22 August 2018—Email Correspondence, US (Liberal) 28 August 2018—Interview, Sydney (Greens) 18 September 2018—Interview, Sydney (Consultant) 20 September 2018—Email Correspondence, London (Liberal) 28 September 2018—Interview, Sydney (Greens) 30 September 2018—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Greens) 30 September 2018—Phone Interview, Perth (Greens) 2 October 2018—Email Correspondence, Washington, DC (Consultant) 4 October 2018—Interview, Sydney (Greens) 6 October 2018—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Consultant) 9 October 2018—Email Correspondence, Canberra (Labor) 10 March 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 14 March 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 16 March 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 2 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 6 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 7 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 9 April 2019—Email Correspondence, Canberra (LNP)

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10 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 10 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 11 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 12 April 2019—Email Correspondence, Canberra (LNP) 12 April 2019—Phone Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 13 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 14 April 2019—Phone Interview, Perth (Liberal) 15 April 2019—Email Correspondence, Canberra (LNP) 15 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 16 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 17 April 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 22 April 2019—Email Correspondence, Canberra (LNP) 10 May 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 12 May 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 14 May 2019—Interview Brisbane (Greens) 17 May 2019—Email Correspondence, Canberra (LNP) 8 June 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Greens) 9 June 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Labor) 10 June 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union staffer) 10 June 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Greens) 12 June 2019—Interview Brisbane (Greens) 13 June 2019—Phone Interview, Townsville (Labor) 15 June 2019—Phone Interview, Sydney (Labor) 17 June 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 8 August 2019—Phone Interview Melbourne (Greens) 8 August 2019—Phone Interview Melbourne (Labor) 9 August 2019—Interview Melbourne (ACTU) 10 August 2019—Interview Melbourne (Greens) 15 August 2019—Interview Brisbane (Greens) 20 August 2019—Phone Interview, Northern NSW (Labor) 20 August 2019—Phone Interview, Mackay (Labor) 21 August 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 21 August 2019—Phone Interview, Sydney (Labor) 23 August 2019—Phone Interview, Gladstone (Labor) 23 August 2019—Phone Interview, Canberra (Labor) 27 August 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 28 August 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 29 August 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 30 August 2019—Phone Interview, Rockhampton (Labor)

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30 August 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 3 September 2019—Interview, Brisbane (LNP) 6 September 2019—Email correspondence, London (Liberal) 10 September 2019—Phone interview, Perth (Liberal) 19 September 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 2 October 2019—Phone Interview, Perth (Liberal) 7 October 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Liberal) 9 October 2019—Phone Interview, Townsville (Labor) 11 October 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 16 October 2019—Phone Interview, Rockhampton (Labor) 24 October 2019—Phone Interview, Canberra (Labor) 28 October 2019—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 1 November 2019—Phone Interview Sydney (Liberal) 13 November 2019—Phone Interview, Perth (Greens) 19 November 2019—Phone Interview Rockhampton (Labor) 23 November 2019—Phone Interview, Perth (Greens) 27 November 2019—Phone Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 28 November 2019—Phone Interview, Townsville (Labor) 5 December 2019—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Labor) 21 January 2020—Phone Interview, Washington, DC (Consultant) 23 January 2020—Phone Interview, Sydney (Labor) 24 January 2020—Email correspondence, London (Liberal) 28 January 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Liberal) 29 January 2020—Email correspondence, London (Consultant) 29 January 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Liberal) 30 January 2020—Phone Interview, Cairns (Labor) 4 February 2020—Phone Interview, Sydney (Liberal) 5 February 2020—Interview, Brisbane (Union Staffer) 6 February 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Union Staffer) 7 February 2020—Phone Interview, Sydney (Labor) 8 February 2020—Phone Interview, Sydney (Greens) 10 March 2020—Interview, Brisbane (Labor) 13 March 2020—Interview, Brisbane (LNP) 26 March 2020—Phone Interview, Townsville (Labor) 3 May 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (consultant) 19 June 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Liberal) 21 June 2020—Email Correspondence, Brisbane (Labor) 26 June 2020—Phone Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 27 June 2020—Email Correspondence, Melbourne (Greens)

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7 July 2020—Phone Interview, Melbourne (Labor) 12 July 2020—Phone Interview (Labor) 15 July 2020—Interview, Brisbane (Greens) 17 July 2020—Phone Interview, Sydney (Non-party campaigner) 20 July 2020—Email correspondence, Sydney (Liberal) Once I had conducted some of the early interviews and started to get a sense of the way many campaigns were organised, I made the decision that I would try to go deeper and further than anyone else had in relation to campaigning in Australia. I decided that I would attempt to do what Nielsen (2012) did for his book ‘Groundwars ’, where he actively participated in two Democratic congressional campaigns. However, given the nature of Australian electoral competition, I decided that I would try to participate in the campaigns of not just one party like Nielsen, but two— Labor and the Greens. And during the 2019 Australian federal election, this is exactly what I did. While I spent nowhere near the amount of time with the Greens and Labor that Nielsen did with the Democrats, my short experience inside these campaigns, made me question some of my previous assumptions and opened up entirely new lines of enquiry.

Participant Observation Participation observation is an increasingly rare method in political science. There are good reasons for this. My experience was that it certainly enriched my understanding of the phenomena I was trying to study. However, there are a range of issues that I need to address with the nature of my participant observation. I was in no way, shape or form central to either of these campaigns. In the classic pyramid structure, I was at the base, a grunt, a regular volunteer. As I discuss further along, I provided no strategic input into the campaign and did what I was instructed to do from the organisers and campaign managers. I resisted the temptation, as strong as it sometimes was, to offer advice or input. I bit my tongue as I did not want to intervene or contaminate the ‘site of research’. While that sounds awfully detached, it is true. The amount of time I spent on these campaigns was quite limited. Many volunteers spend much more time on campaigns than I did. One of the questions I have often been asked when I presented this research to academic colleagues was how much did I ‘observe’ and how much did I ‘participate’. There is certainly a distinction and discussion in

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the scholarly research about this (McCurdy and Uldam 2014). According to Gillespie and Michelson (2011: 261): Qualitative political science research more closely hews to the traditional model of participant observation research. Perhaps the most famous participant observer in the field is Richard Fenno, whose Home Style (1978) is the gold standard of qualitative research in political science. Fenno remained famously detached from his research subjects in order to maintain objectivity. Other researchers, however, have deliberately positioned themselves at the center of the action.

My approach was the latter. I participated rather than observed. Knowing Australian political parties, I knew they would absolutely hate the idea of someone watching them, taking notes. So, I surmised that the best way to learn more about the campaign was to be actively involved. Having dealt with parties previously on a range of issues and research questions, you need to make the interaction as easy as possible for them. As is evident in the chapters that constitute this book, I used my participant observation experiences to contextualise the campaigns and as a single point of evidence, which I then combine with other evidence, mainly from interviews, to triangulate in on core arguments and findings. I do not speak of any decision-making processes I observed, discussions of other parties, campaigns or specifics about each of the campaigns. Before I undertook participant observation, one of the most important pieces of advice I came across was the need to take detailed and extensive notes (Gillespie and Michelson 2011). My strategy was to take notes via text message. So, every time something happened that I thought was interesting or noteworthy, I would text myself. Some days I would think—and record—via text messages to myself things like the following: Why the fuck would they send me out here to the middle of nowhere, where no-one is home. 19 March. 11:23am

I still do not have an answer for that. In the end, I sent myself about 700 text messages, which I was able to download and add to a word document that I could then analyse alongside interview data and other notes I had, which were usually written as soon as I came home from doing fieldwork. In terms of how I got access, it was slightly different with each party. For the Greens I got in touch with some contacts I had and discussed with

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them what I was doing, the outline of the project, the questions I was interested in and why I wanted to know more about their field campaigns. These contacts got in touch with some organisers which ‘opened the door’. Shortly after this, I received a phone call from one of the organisers who said to me that they had told them that I was doing research on campaigning and wanted to see what they were doing by volunteering on the campaign. From this point, I was added to the various mailing lists and began integrating myself into the campaign apparatus. At first that meant attending a ‘mega doorknock’ event in early March. When I arrived, there were speeches by the house candidate, a Senate candidate, and we then broke into groups and did some training on conversations, the scripts we would use and then we were sent out with an experienced doorknocker. After 2 hours of doorknocking, we came back to the location we first met at to talk about how we went, key themes from voters, issues and to discuss the metrics and to finalise the relevant paperwork about our engagements with voters. In the weeks that followed, I went out with the Greens a further nine times, some of this was doorknocking, other times it was doing leaflet dropping into mailboxes in the electorate I volunteered in. In total, I estimated that with a partner I knocked on approximately 280 doors, and I had approximately 65 ‘meaningful conversations’ with voters on behalf of the Greens. Including the time I spent training, debriefing, engaging with party members, volunteers and candidates, I was embedded in the campaign for a total of 28 hours. It was my original intention to spend more time with the Greens but two things happened which prevented me from doing this. First, my relationships and engagement with the Labor campaign expanded significantly. There are a number of parts to this, but one was the Labor campaign was in the electorate I live in, it is the electorate that I have spent significant parts of my adult life and it felt more authentic to me to be in my own electorate. Second, somewhat unexpectedly, my daughter was born 5 weeks early and hence my campaigning was brought to an abrupt halt. In terms of volunteering for Labor, I spoke to some contacts about what I wanted to do, as I had with the Greens. Some were ambivalent about the project and the goals. Others were more supportive. One prototypical Queensland Labor right-winger suggested that the best way to ‘learn this shit is to do this shit’. It is hard to argue with logic like that. In early March I started to contact a variety of actors in the party

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with the intention of discussing some form of volunteering and participant observation, just as I did with the Greens. A few days after I emailed some intra-party actors about this, an organiser in the local area called me. In my initial conversation I explained that I was an academic interested in campaigning and wanted to learn more about their campaign and was happy to volunteer on the campaign to do so, they were completely unfazed by this idea and my involvement started from there. A few days after my initial contact, I went into the campaign office, was given a T-shirt, some flyers and I was off to doorknock with an older party member who described our job as ‘talking shit and delivering the mail’. Marshall Ganz eat your heart out. In the weeks that followed, I went out doorknocking with Labor a further 19 times. In total, I estimated that I knocked on approximately 1050 doors, made 300 phone calls and had approximately 270 ‘meaningful conversations’ with voters. Including the time I spent training, debriefing, engaging with party members, volunteers and candidates, helping set up booths the night before the election and all sorts of other activities, I was embedded with the campaign for a total of approximately 70 hours. Clearly, these cases were not selected based on some rigorous process of deciding which campaign in which electorate would tell me the most. They were cases where the research was possible and practical. Naturally, there are caveats that come along with this. I do, however, still argue that the way I have used the data from the participant observation in contextualising developments and to triangulate means those criticisms hold less weight than they perhaps otherwise would. Indeed, I would argue that the core arguments of the book are primarily derived from the interview data. There are good reason for this. The material was so rich and so detailed, I thought it would be mad to not use it to its full extent. Another reason is that my ethical clearance was quite strict on what I could and could not use.

Conversing with Voters The first day I volunteered, I went out with a friend who is involved in the Greens and he knocked on the first 8–10 doors and then he said, ‘right, time for you to have a go’. The first door I knocked on was a committed Greens voter who I got to put a corflute up in their front yard. The confidence generated from this encounter was completely misplaced as I

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never again got someone else to agree to put a corflute up. Most encounters with voters were civil and while many voters were not interested in conversing with me and other volunteers they were, for the most part, surprisingly polite. There were exceptions, of course, like the one below. Me: Voter: Me: Voter: Me and other volunteer:

(knocking on door) (opens door) Oh hello, my name is Glenn, we are volunteers from the Labor Party Not interested, fuck off (fucking off)

Nothing whets your appetite for democracy more than an encounter like that!

References Boswell, John, Jack Corbett, and R.A.W. Rhodes. 2019. The art and craft of comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cutts, David. 2006. Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes: The Liberal Democrats in Bath. Political Geography 25 (1): 72–88. Dommett, Katharine, Glenn Kefford, and Sam Power. 2020. The digital ecosystem: The new politics of party organization in parliamentary democracies. Party Politics (online first). Fenno, Richard F. 2003. Home style: House members in their districts (Longman Classics Series). New York: Pearson. Gillespie, Andra, and Melissa R Michelson. 2011. Participant observation and the political scientist: Possibilities, priorities, and practicalities. PS: Political Science & Politics 44 (2): 261–265. Glaser, James M. 1996. The challenge of campaign watching: Seven lessons of participant-observation research 1. PS: Political Science & Politics 29 (3): 533–537. Glaser, James M. 1998. Race, campaign politics, and the realignment in the South. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Howard Frederick, Angela. 2010. “Practicing electoral politics in the cracks”: Intersectional consciousness in a Latina candidate’s city council campaign. Gender & Society 24 (4): 475–498. Kefford, Glenn. 2018. Digital media, ground wars and party organisation: Does stratarchy explain how parties organise election campaigns? Parliamentary Affairs 71 (3): 656–673.

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Klein, Axel. 2011. The puzzle of ineffective election campaigning in Japan. Japanese Journal of Political Science 12 (1): 57–74. McCurdy, Patrick, and Julie Uldam. 2014. Connecting participant observation positions: Toward a reflexive framework for studying social movements. Field Methods 26 (1): 40–55. Munroe, Kaija Belfry, and H.D. Munroe. 2018. Constituency campaigning in the age of data. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 51 (1): 135–154. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2011. Mundane internet tools, mobilizing practices, and the coproduction of citizenship in political campaigns. New Media & Society 13 (5): 755–771. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2012. Ground wars: Personalized communication in political campaigns. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Index

A ABS. See Australian Bureau of Statistics Adani Carmichael mine, 122 AEC. See Australian Electoral Commission Alinsky, Saul, 105 Alternative Vote, 8, 124 Anstead, Nick, 2, 6, 29, 30 Australian Bureau of Statistics, 47, 113 Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), 50 Australian Co-operative Election Study, 72, 74, 96 Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU), 114, 205 Australian Election Study (AES), 10, 64, 72, 73, 96, 98, 142, 143 Australian Electoral Commission, 8, 47, 70 Australian Greens, 9, 14, 15, 87, 108 Australian Labor Party, 2, 85, 136 Australian Progress, 106

Authoritarianism, 126, 130 B Baldwin-Philippi, Jessica, 2–7, 12, 28, 30, 33, 58, 59, 69, 83, 131, 133, 184, 186 Bale, Tim, 27, 38, 111, 170, 174–176 Bennett, Colin, 4, 28, 30, 45, 63, 71, 73 Big data, 2, 46, 183 Blue State Digital, 45, 77 Brisbane, 120, 122, 127, 203–207 By-elections, 110, 124, 155 C Cadwalladr, Carole, 1 Cambridge Analytica, 1, 3, 7, 46, 62 Campaign Central, 52, 53, 105, 131, 167, 168 Campaign effects, 3, 4, 14, 37, 85, 87, 108, 134, 187, 188 Campaign eras, 25, 26, 34, 185, 191

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 G. Kefford, Political Parties and Campaigning in Australia, Political Campaigning and Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68234-7

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214

INDEX

Campaign finance, 8, 54 Canada, 159 Canning, 110 Carroll, Noah, 188 Carson, Andrea, 85 Cartel thesis, 38, 172 Catch-all party, 25, 172 Centre-left, 120, 122, 123, 135 Centre-periphery cleavage, 122 Centre-right, 26, 122, 129, 209 Chadwick, Andrew, 27 Chen, Peter, 5, 70, 72, 75, 76, 87 Climate change, 64, 121–123 Clinton, Hilary, 69, 130, 132 Commonwealth Electoral Act , 63 Community organising, 11, 30, 33, 34, 36, 39, 94, 105–108, 111, 166, 168, 169, 176 Consultants, 3, 14, 32, 37, 45, 47, 52, 62, 71, 77–79, 81, 82, 167, 168, 176, 190, 200, 201, 203, 204, 206 CrosbyTextor, 52, 80, 81, 190 Custom audiences, 73 Customer relationship management (CRM), 32, 33, 39, 52, 53, 84, 105, 131, 166–169, 186, 190 Cyber parties, 26 D Data, 2–7, 12–14, 28–30, 32–36, 38, 39, 45–51, 53, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61–64, 70–72, 77–79, 83–85, 96, 98, 99, 103–105, 108–110, 112–114, 119, 120, 127, 128, 130, 132–136, 141–143, 146–148, 150–153, 157–159, 166, 167, 169, 178, 183–186, 188–190, 192, 193, 198–201, 208, 210 Data and analytics, 4, 5, 7, 8, 13, 14, 30, 33, 35, 38, 46, 51–53,

55–62, 64, 72, 80, 84, 86, 87, 94, 103, 105, 111, 119, 120, 125, 126, 128–135, 166–168, 176, 177, 184, 186, 187, 190 Data dystopia, 5, 45, 152, 187, 194 Data science, 167, 177, 179 ‘Death Tax’, 85, 160 De-mobilise, 70 Democratic Party, 130, 135 Digital, 4, 5, 7, 8, 12, 13, 27, 28, 30, 34, 35, 38, 46, 50, 52, 62, 69–73, 75–87, 105, 124, 148, 157, 160, 165, 166, 168–172, 176–178, 184, 186, 187, 190, 197, 200–202 Digital citizenship, 7 Direct mail, 6, 29–31, 35, 51, 145, 148, 191 Dommett, Katharine, 12, 28, 32, 38, 47, 51, 71, 81, 131, 165, 177, 186, 200, 202 Duverger, Maurice, 26, 31, 33, 171, 179

E Electoral professional party, 24 Electoral regulation, 70 Electoral system, 8, 15, 61, 124, 129, 131, 133, 134, 194 Environment, 10, 26, 35, 36, 50, 55, 72, 75, 76, 84, 86, 100, 106, 129, 145, 146, 158, 168, 184 European Union (EU), 1, 35, 147 Extraction industries, 122

F Facebook, 1, 7, 29, 48, 69, 70, 72, 73, 77, 79, 80, 84, 153, 155, 157, 158, 160, 171, 192 Farrell, David, 25, 28, 38

INDEX

Federalism, 9, 14, 15, 34, 52–54, 59, 63, 70, 75, 77, 81, 82, 84, 87, 98, 99, 109, 119–122, 124, 129, 130, 135, 136, 144, 145, 154, 155, 159, 185, 187, 188, 190, 207 Feedback, 52, 60, 105, 167, 168 Fenno, Richard, 199, 208 Field, 3, 5–8, 12–14, 30, 34–36, 38, 46, 52, 56, 62, 80, 82, 83, 86, 87, 94–96, 98–101, 103–114, 119, 124–126, 129, 133, 134, 148, 165–168, 174, 176, 178, 179, 184, 186, 187, 189, 197, 199–201, 208, 209 Fisher, Justin, 27, 38, 170, 174

G Ganz, Marshall, 32, 39, 105, 106, 108, 114 Gauja, Anika, 5, 24, 27, 36, 46, 96, 107, 111, 142, 143, 169, 170, 174, 179, 190 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 35, 50, 147 Gerber, Alan, 4, 46, 108, 187 Get Out The Vote (GOTV), 61, 78, 83, 87 GetUp!, 71 Ghostery, 48 Gibson, Rachel, 5, 11, 26–28, 30, 38, 70, 75, 176 Google, 7, 48, 50, 70, 75, 160 Grassroots, 112, 132, 191 Green, Donald, 4, 108, 187 Griffith, 107 Grossmann, Matt, 25

H Han, Hahrie, 32, 107, 114

215

Hanson, Pauline, 13, 62, 121, 123, 124 Hersh, Eitan, 2, 6, 30, 47, 54, 55, 59, 61, 114, 133, 188 Hybridity, 176, 177, 179 I i360, 52, 63, 167, 168 Identity, 25, 132 IMGE, 77, 81 Inglehart, Ronald, 123 Instagram, 7, 70, 72, 73 International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 61 Interpretivism, 198 Interviews, 3, 5, 13, 62, 70, 86, 87, 95, 99, 108, 109, 111–114, 124, 127, 173, 185, 187, 188, 190, 193, 197–208, 210 Issenberg, Sasha, 45, 46, 70 J Jackson, Stewart, 9, 14, 27, 96, 107, 142, 143, 174, 190 K Karpf, David, 3, 32 Katter, Bob, 121 Katz, Richard, 6, 24, 25, 30, 33, 36, 172, 175, 184, 185 Kefford, Glenn, 5, 8, 9, 28, 81, 96, 108, 121, 123, 127, 165, 199, 202 Kreiss, Daniel, 6, 11, 12, 29, 30, 32, 35, 45, 71, 75, 159 L Leadership, 28, 37, 85, 100, 106, 108, 189

216

INDEX

Le Pen, Marine, 123 Liberal Party of Australia, 24 Lookalike audiences, 32, 73 Loughnane, Brian, 77 M Mair, Peter, 6, 24, 25, 30, 33, 36, 172, 175, 178, 184, 185 Maiwar, 122 Marginals, 25, 29, 46, 54, 84, 98, 113, 131, 135 Market research, 32, 39, 50–53, 58, 63, 80, 95, 105, 135, 191 Mass party, 9, 25, 170 McAllister, Ian, 10, 97 McGregor, Matthew, 35, 71, 75, 77, 147, 160 Median voter, 59 ‘Mediscare’ campaign, 85 Message testing, 62, 78, 120, 125 Microtargeting, 1, 2, 26, 28, 85, 125, 133, 152, 153, 158, 183, 188 Mills, Stephen, 5, 7, 14, 29, 46, 50, 51, 62, 63, 81, 104, 105, 108, 112, 145, 191 Miragliotta, Narelle, 9, 15, 190 Misinformation, 14, 87 Models, 1, 6, 24, 27, 30, 33, 34, 37, 38, 47, 53, 54, 57, 59, 60, 63, 105, 126, 129, 132, 166, 169, 170, 177, 178, 184 Multi-speed membership thesis, 170 N Narrowcasting, 7, 11, 30, 32, 34, 39, 53, 60, 87, 94, 111, 166, 168, 176, 188 NationBuilder, 32, 105, 167, 169 Nativism, 128 News Ltd, 121 New South Wales, 104

Nickerson, David, 46, 55, 58, 59, 61, 129 Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, 3, 7, 71, 94, 124, 176, 199, 207 Non-member supporters, 13, 15, 27, 36, 95, 96, 98–101, 104, 111, 142, 166, 167, 170–176, 178, 190, 191, 201 Norris, Pippa, 25, 26, 123, 185 O Obama, Barack, 3, 45, 46, 62, 75, 106, 112 One Nation, 13, 48, 103, 121, 123–128, 130, 136 Organising works, 106 Orr, Graeme, 146, 160 P Palmer, Clive, 121 Panebianco, Angelo, 6, 24, 71, 184 Parliamentary systems, 2, 6, 8, 28–30 Participant observation, 3, 150, 173, 192, 193, 197–200, 207, 208, 210 Partisanship, 61, 64, 96, 98, 101, 103, 111, 128, 171, 186 Party membership, 111, 172, 191 Party organisation, 5, 7, 12–14, 24, 26, 28–31, 33, 36–38, 53, 57, 111, 131, 132, 165, 166, 168–170, 172, 173, 175, 177–179, 184, 190, 191 Party reviews, 24 Path dependency, 106, 130 Persuadability scores, 6, 33, 53–55, 57, 126 Persuadable voters, 13, 55, 56, 94, 103, 120, 132, 135, 187 Polarisation, 56, 131 Poletti, Monica, 27, 38

INDEX

Polling, 15, 32, 47, 53, 63, 81, 113, 135, 167 Populism, 13, 120, 123, 128 Populist radical right, 13, 120, 123, 128 Positivism, 199 Post-materialism, 123 Power, Sam, 177 Presidential election campaigns, 69, 187 Proportional representation, 112 Punctuated equilibrium, 23 Q Queensland, 9, 101, 104, 107, 108, 114, 119–122, 124–127, 129, 130, 132, 135, 136, 160, 209 R Randomised controlled trials (RCT), 62, 134 Ratcliff, Shaun, 123, 135, 137, 143 Red shirts scandal, 108, 112, 114 Republican Party, 76 Robo-polls, 47, 53, 54, 57, 120, 130, 160, 167 Roemmele, Andrea, 25, 26, 28, 30 Rudd, Kevin, 75, 121, 122 S SA1, 56, 101, 103, 113 Scarrow, Susan, 26, 31, 36, 170–173 Segmentation, 166 Seyd, Patrick, 173 Sheppard, Jill, 71 Shorten, Bill, 106, 132 Single Transferable Vote, 8 Story of self, 107, 108, 114 Stratarchical organisation, 28 Supporter scores, 57, 58, 129

217

Survey data, 3, 113, 142, 152, 193, 199 Swinging voters, 55

T Tactical Tech, 48 TikTok, 72 Topham Guerin, 81, 84 Tracking cookies, 48, 49, 84, 120 Trump, Donald, 1, 3, 4, 7, 35, 69, 84, 85, 123, 132 Turnbull, Malcolm, 55, 124, 136, 155 Twitter, 7, 48, 70, 124, 171

U United Kingdom Conservative Party, 176 United Kingdom Labor Party, 135, 176

V Vaccari, Cristian, 7, 27, 28, 38 Victoria, 63, 104, 105, 108, 112, 121 Vromen, Aridne, 30, 32, 46, 71, 105, 114

W Ward, Ian, 5, 9 Webb, Paul, 26, 27, 38, 98, 111 Werner, Annika, 142, 143 West Australia, 15, 110 Whiteley, Paul, 173 Wilders, Geert, 123 Wright, George, 77, 188 Wylie, Christopher, 1

Y YouTube, 7, 58, 70, 171