Communication à un colloque
| Résumé : | Literature on the incorporation of new digital campaign tools and practices by party organisations is scarce, mainly because of the difficulty to access such data from political parties (Faucher, 2021). Existing research has mainly focused on the overall professionalisation of digital campaigns (Mykkänen, et al., 2022), and on its end product (i.e., digitalised campaigns). Yet, we still know relatively little about how campaign professionals take up the variety of digital tools at their disposal, and to what extent and how their choices are influenced by their interactions with the party hierarchy. The present research proposes to address this gap in the literature by investigating the attitudes of staff within political parties towards digital campaign tools, in a day-to-day, non campaign setting. We seek to learn more about how digitalised campaigns are imagined and built, and more specifically how this varies across parties. We opt for a qualitative and inductive approach, and conducted semi-directive interviews with various staff that are in charge of managing and running the digital campaigns of Belgian political parties at both the regional and national levels. We analyse attitudes and opinions of interviewees towards the strategy of their party online, their reported interactions with party hierarchy. The aim of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of the interaction between the individual and the organisational level and how this affects campaign strategies, which is especially relevant considering the importance of individual attitudes (and capabilities), the organisational structure, and the frequency of self-reflectivity of parties in the context of ever-changing media environment. |
