Microttargeting: Threat of opportunity for Democracy
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2019-06-23
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en
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Developments in ICT1 have become increasingly relevant to political science. Autonomous weapons have changed just war theory (Asaro, 2008), social media has impacted democratization theory (Effing, Van Hillegersberg & Huibers, 2011), and the development of surveillance technologies have raised questions about modern civil liberties (Reiman, 2017). ICT is also quickly changing political election campaigns as parties try to keep up with what is possible. The USA are said to lead the way in developing campaign techniques. Those techniques are often adopted by campaigns in different (Western) countries. In academic literature this is called the ‘Americanization’ of political campaigns (Groen-Reijman, 2018). One development in campaign techniques that has received much attention over the last few years is the ICT-powered use of psychographics. What psychographics are exactly, and how they are related to ICT, will be explained in more detail below. For now, it is enough to know that psychographics are quantitative research methods that can be used to construct psychological profiles of individual persons. Combined with extremely large databases full of personal information that companies like Facebook and Google possess, psychographics can be used to target individual voters with tailored campaign messages: a practice known as microtargeting.
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Faculteit der Managementwetenschappen