Lessons of the US digital campaign.

The internet has had a profound impact on the 2008 US presidential election. Senator John Edwards, who was at one stage a serious contender for the Democratic party's nomination, declared that had it not been for the internet, Barack Obama would not have become the Democratic nominee (Edwards, 2008). Final judgment must await the November election, but at the time of writing (late July 2008), the mainstream media's consensus is that Obama's online tools were decisive in his defeat of Hillary Clinton.

It is not just Obama's victory in the primaries that is significant. Equally important was the manner of his triumph. This primary season saw massive increases in voter turnout. Americans appear to be re-engaging with civic life, reversing a prolonged period of declining political involvement. This process was typified by the high levels of support Obama gained among younger voters.

British politicians have been watching these developments with interest, hoping to understand Obama's recipe for civic re-engagement and effective campaign mobilisation. Progressives have a particular incentive to do this. The contrast between the Democrats and the current state of the Labour Party is stark. While Labour lags in the polls, seemingly set for severe losses at the next election, the Democrats look most likely at this stage to re-capture the White House and to maintain or even improve their position in the House and the Senate.

The clear desire to 'learn lessons' from the 2008 election follows a longstanding tradition of assuming that British politicians will eventually replicate techniques employed in the United States. Adherents to this 'Americanisation' thesis cite such examples as the growing role played by personality, the rise of infotainment-style news coverage, the use of pollsters, spin doctors and other political professionals, and the dominance of the sound-bite, as evidence that Britain has usually followed in America's wake when it comes to elections and political campaigning. However, even if we accept that these arguments were applicable in the past, there are good reasons to doubt that the adoption of the internet by British parties will follow patterns similar to those on the other side of the Atlantic. The 2001 and 2005 British general elections offered scant evidence of online campaigning. If Britain is playing catch-up, how much longer must we wait?

The difference between the American and British experiences requires explanation. We argue that a comparative approach to analysing the relationship between technology and political institutions has the potential to offer renewed understanding of the development of the internet in election campaigning. Taking the different characteristics of political parties and the norms and rules of the electoral environment in the United States and Britain as an illustration, we aim to show that the relationship between technology and political institutions is best perceived as dialectical. Technologies can reshape institutions, but institutions will mediate eventual outcomes (1). This argument has important implications for precisely how British political parties may learn from the United States in the area of digital campaigning.

The 2008 digital campaign in context

Obama's online record has been staggering. At some points during the course of his primary campaign, the central website received over a million unique visitors a week. His Facebook group currently has 1.2 million members, while he has nearly half a million friends on MySpace. Obama's YouTube videos have currently been watched 56 million times, with the most viewed video being the 37-minute 'more perfect union' speech on race at Philadelphia, which had, by July 2008, been seen 5.6 million times in its entirety.

Impressive though these numbers are, they are significant for what they helped Obama achieve. A year ago, he was viewed--at best--as a long shot candidate, likely to be electorally annihilated by the Clinton juggernaut. However, Obama's early success online generated a buzz around his campaign and, crucially, allowed him to quickly achieve financial parity with the Clinton fundraising machine through the support of hundreds of thousands of small donors who gave sums far below the federal limit. While the campaign employed internet professionals in senior positions, such as Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, it also relied heavily on the work of grassroots political entrepreneurs with no direct links to the campaign, other than a desire to see Obama elected president. For example, the successful Facebook group 'one million strong for Barack' was founded by Farouk Olu Aregbe, an administrator at the University of Missouri. Within three weeks of its creation in January 2007, it had 200,000 members (Stelter, 2008, Vargas, 2007).

The Obama campaign's online structures were multi-functional. Vertical communication, between the upper echelons of the campaign and activists on the ground, operated in both directions. The campaign's massive email list could be used to send out updates and fundraising appeals to supporters, while an online telephone canvassing system enabled supporters to enter information directly into a central database. Perhaps most innovative was the horizontal communication between activists enabled through MyBarackObama, the social network element of the main campaign site. This allowed supporters to interact with each other, to create groups and to write about issues that interested them.

Effective though the Obama primary campaign was, its political achievements have not occurred in isolation and are not unprecedented. Over the last decade, internet campaigning has become deeply embedded in American electoral politics. Other 2008 candidates, for example Mike Huckabee, had sophisticated online campaigns, but as early as 1998, Independent candidate Jesse Ventura won the Minnesota gubernational contest (against well-established Democratic and Republican candidates) by using the net to organise and publicise campaign rallies in the hours before polls closed. Other notable examples include John McCain's online fundraising achievements following his victory against George W. Bush in the 2000 New Hampshire Republican primary, and Howard Dean's rise from little known Vermont governor to serious contender for the Democratic nomination in 2004. Along the way, Dean became the most successful primary fundraiser in the history of his party and pioneered many of the techniques used by Obama in 2008 (Chadwick, 2006, 2007, Trippi, 2004). In the 2006 midterms the internet was key to a number of races. It had a decisive impact in Connecticut and Virginia, and Democrat-supporting online movement Moveon.org mobilised volunteers to make 7 million calls and hold 7500 house parties (Kranish, 2006; MoveOn, 2006; Murray, 2006).

It is tempting to suggest that American online campaigning has been driven by higher levels of connectivity. It is true that Americans are marginally more likely to use the internet than the British. By 2005, 76 per cent of Americans were recorded as being online; in the UK, the figure was 60 per cent (International Telecommunication Union, 2005). However, the internet started to have a significant impact on American politics in the late 1990s, when US connection rates were much lower than they are currently in Britain. It seems untenable to suggest that once internet penetration reaches some kind of notional 'critical mass' (which the US has passed but the UK has still to attain) decisive political impacts somehow become inevitable.

It is also tempting to suggest that the current American election is a unique event, and that high levels of online citizen engagement have been driven by unusual circumstances. The attributes of the two major Democratic contenders have of course done much to provoke interest in the contest. But the 2008 online campaign is about more than the candidates. American internet campaigning has now evolved through several cycles. Campaign staff have refined their models and now blend the war room with the network. More importantly, they are incentivised to do so due to the unique institutional features of the American electoral environment. This environment, as we next discuss, is conducive to digital campaigning; Britain's is less so.

Party organisation and electoral environment: catalysts and anti-catalysts for internet election campaigning

British and American party organisations and their electoral environments have much in common. When it comes to national elections, both are historically embedded two-party systems: only two parties have a realistic chance of securing executive power; single-party executives are the norm at the national level (not at the devolved level in the United Kingdom); and parties 'take turns' in controlling the executive. Both countries have simple plurality electoral systems based on geographical constituencies, and this reinforces the two-party system. But there are highly significant differences between the two countries.

For the purposes of this paper, these may be mapped along four distinct, though interrelated, dimensions: the degree of systemic institutional pluralism; the organisation of membership; candidate recruitment and selection; and campaign finance. The aim here is to show how differences between the United States and the United Kingdom in each of these areas explain the characteristics of online election campaigning in each system.

Degree of systemic institutional pluralism

Federalism and the separation of powers, both key constitutional values in the United States, guarantee substantial institutional pluralism. This greatly weakens national party integration (Epstein, 1980; Harmel and Janda, 1982; Key, 1964). Though they have grown in power since the 1970s, national party committees remain institutionally separate from the party in office and have limited control over those holding or seeking office. During presidential races, the staff and infrastructure built up by candidates themselves during both the primary season and the general election campaign play a far more significant role than any element of the national party machine. Parties do have state and local committees but their influence and level of organisation differ significantly from state to state and they have few formal policymaking roles.

Contrast this with the United Kingdom, where the separation of powers is strictly circumscribed by the near-fusion of the legislature and the executive (Lijphart, 1984) and where, despite recent devolution reforms, the state is still highly unitary. The prime minister and parliament share an electoral base, incentivising party cohesion. British parties are characterised by greater levels of national coordination and integration, and while there are different political traditions associated with party activism in localities, the party structures are internally uniform. While some local associations can and do deviate from the leadership's script, national party organisations nevertheless have a major influence on the election campaign, by channelling resources, coordinating activity and applying sanctions (Ware, 1996).

How do these characteristics interact with the technological affordances of the Internet? The pluralistic environment in the United States has long necessitated building campaign organisations composed of both horizontal and vertical connections which create lines of communication between relatively isolated levels of the party organisation and activist base. Compare this with the United Kingdom. Here, though constituency level organisations can be rebellious, the lines of communication are more vertically oriented and based in long established formal structures with accompanying bureaucracies. The internet's technological affordances for creating loose horizontal networks have fewer affinities with Britain's arrangements.

Organisation of membership

The absence of a tradition of formal permanent membership is a defining characteristic of the American party system. Those seeking office are required to develop their own campaign infrastructure, based around personal support for their platform. This is reinforced by the primary system, which features a large scale campaign from which elements of the party's organisation, such as national and state committees, are sometimes marginalised.

In the United Kingdom, parties have an organic existence outside election campaigns; they are organs of policy and participation and have formal, though currently declining, memberships. National party conferences differ in terms of policy influence from party to party, but conferences do retain a residual policy making role, while local, regional and national policy forums provide opportunities for rank and file activists to participate. Though campaign machinery deteriorates during the periods between elections, greater institutional presence and continuous membership do not create pressures to continually rebuild from scratch. In contrast to the US model of candidate-centred politics, British politics clearly continues to be party-centred.

The often temporary associations that constitute the American campaign offer strong incentives for using the internet. The most successful and publicised examples, for example Howard Dean's use of Meetup or Barack Obama's creation of Facebook groups in the earliest possible stages of the campaign are attempts to construct an online network of supporters and activists at the lowest possible cost and often well in advance of organisation on the ground. We may also consider this from the perspective of activists themselves, who seek policy influence and expressive benefits from political participation. For such individuals, the internet provides these benefits earlier and, for some it seems, with greater intensity than in the 'old' campaign environment.

In Britain, while volunteer activists are hardly in abundant supply, the party membership is at least a pre-existing resource that can be tapped in more routinised and predictable ways by party elites, candidates and members alike. Party elites often engage in administrative reform of internal structures to realise political or bureaucratic goals (Webb, 2000), but the sense of fast-moving organisational fluidity, even chaos, that often characterises American candidates' attempts to mobilise support is not evident.

Candidate recruitment and selection

In the United States, mechanisms for the selection of candidates offer an institutional framework for sanctioned dissent. Since the 1970s, primaries have become fundamental to US politics, greatly increasing the level of intra-party competition. For citizens, participation in primaries is restricted, but the thresholds are low. One must usually, though not always, simply register as a Democrat or a Republican, in some cases on the day of the ballot. Caucuses create slightly higher barriers to participation but they are also characterised by fluidity and openness (McKay, 2005, 93).

Recent marginal experiments in the Conservative Party aside, primaries are of course fundamentally absent from the British party system. Internal competition between contenders takes place in arenas sealed off from direct participation by the general public. British parties do have internal procedures which, to varying extents, involve mass memberships in the selection of national leadership positions, and permanent local constituency associations select their local party candidates, subject to the final approval of central staff. However, electoral rules guarantee party elites a significant power bloc in national leadership contests, parliamentary candidates are heavily vetted by central party elites, and the committees of local constituency activists are usually small and exclusive. The environment for candidate selection is much less open and fluid, much more tightly managed, and more nationally-oriented than is the case in the United States.

It is notable that in America, most of the internet campaign innovations (McCain during 1999-2000, Dean during 2003-2004, Lamont during 2006, Obama during 2007-2008) have occurred in the primaries. Primary elections may be influenced but cannot be controlled by the parties themselves. Resources permitting, any individual may run for the nomination and those without 'establishment' party backing have found the internet particularly attractive for garnering support. In Obama's case, an outsider candidate found that he could use the net to quickly ratchet up a campaign and make himself look viable against a far-better known 'insider'. The uncertainty of the primary environment forces candidates to experiment with new technologies and cast around for opportunities to build what are often fragile and fleeting coalitions of support. In contrast, in the British environment there are fewer incentives to take advantage of the internet for lowering costs and reducing uncertainty and risk by spreading a campaign across a wide range of networks.

Campaign finance

For British observers, the most striking aspect of the US campaign finance system is sheer scale of the money changing hands. There is talk of 2008 being the first $1 billion presidential election (Malbin and Cain, 2007, 4). In contrast, in the twelve months preceding the 2005 British general election, the combined spending of the Labour and Conservative parties was just [pounds sterling]90 million ($185 million) (Phillips, 2007, 13). It is worth remembering that the discrepancy between these amounts is even greater than it first appears. The American figure only accounts for the election of the executive and does not include money spent on Senate and Congressional elections; a British general election creates both the executive and the legislature. In a political system where such vast sums are required by candidates in order for them to appear competitive, new sources of revenue, such as online donations, have an obvious attraction, especially since Americans have a long established tradition of seeing voluntary political donations as a civically virtuous activity.

Beneath these divergences lay deeply embedded institutional differences between the campaign finance systems. Prime among these are the different revenue sources upon which long-established regulations incentivise parties and candidates to rely.

In the United States, the donation regime is more heavily regulated than it is in Britain. Direct political donations from corporations and trade unions have long been outlawed, while caps on donations from individuals have existed since the 1974 Federal Election Campaign Act, which imposed a limit of $1000 on contributions to candidates. This principle was re-stated in the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, which increased the limit to $2000 and index linked it to inflation. Regulation of this sort compels parties and campaigns to build broad financial bases among a great many supporters. Such an objective meshes tightly with the affordances of the Internet for building distributed networks.

In contrast, no such regulations exist in Britain, where parties, should they be able to attract them, are free to rely on a small number of institutional or individual donors. In the first quarter of 2008, 90 per cent of Labour's income came from the trade unions (Hencke, 2008), while it has been estimated that a donation cap of [pounds sterling]5000 (approximately five times the US cap imposed in 2002) would deny British parties nearly 90 per cent of their current income (Grant, 2005, 390). Such funding arrangements are unavailable in America, and in Britain they embed patterns of political finance that are the antithesis of volunteer-based online fundraising (Anstead, forthcoming, 2009).

Conclusion

Our analysis leads to an important conclusion for British politicians seeking to harness the power of the internet.

While it is certainly the case that British parties and candidates can learn something from the United States, precisely how they should measure their success in so doing is far from straightforward. The challenge is as much one of institutional design as it is about the adoption of the latest technology: how do we reform British politics to set free the full democratic potential of the internet? This is a long term project, but it could lead to huge rewards. Many of the issues identified in this article as significant are now frequently debated in the UK: democratising party organisations, forging links between parties and broader citizen campaigns, reforming campaign finance laws, and entrenching a culture of constitutional pluralism, to name but a few. It is now imperative that the relationship between political institutions and technology is considered in these debates.

The real lesson of Obama 2008 is that British parties need to approach this issue from two complementary perspectives. They should design their online campaigns so that they mesh with the aspects of their organisational structures and Britain's electoral environment that they value and wish to maintain. But they should consider simultaneously how they might democratise their organisational structures and the electoral environment in ways likely to catalyse internet-enabled civic engagement.

References

Anstead, N. (forthcoming, 2009) 'The Internet and Campaign Finance in the US and the UK: An Institutional Comparison' Journal of Information Technology and Politics.

Anstead, N. and Chadwick, A. (2008) 'Parties, Election Campaigning, and the Internet: Toward a Comparative Institutional Approach' in Chadwick, A. and Howard, P. N. (eds.) The Handbook of Internet Politics, London, Routledge.

Chadwick, A. (2006) Internet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication Technologies, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Chadwick, A. (2007) 'Digital Network Repertoires and Organisational Hybridity', Political Communication, 24, 283-301.

Edwards, J. (2008) 'Elizabeth and John Edwards's Address to the Personal Democracy Forum', Personal Democracy Forum, New York. Available at http://blip.tv/file/1042220/ (accessed on 27 July 2008).

Epstein, L. D. (1980) Political Parties and Western Democracies, New Brunswick, New Jersey, Transaction.

Grant, A. (2005) 'Party and Election Finance in Britain and America: A Comparative Analysis', Parliamentary Affairs, 58, 71-88.

Harmel, R. and Janda, K. (1982) Parties and Their Environments: Limits to Reform?, New York, Longman.

Hencke, D. (2008) 'Labour Relies on Unions as Donations Dry Up' The Guardian. Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/23/partyfunding.labour (accessed on 28 July 2008).

International Telecommunication Union (2005) 'ICT Statistics Database' Geneva, ITU. Available at www.itu.int/ITU-D/icteye/Indictators/Indicators.aspx# (accessed on 22 November 2007).

Key, V. O. (1964) Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups, New York, Thomas Y. Cromwell.

Kranish, M. (2006) 'Allen Campaign Brought Down by Mistakes', Boston Globe, Boston. Available at http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2006/11/10/allen_campaign_brought_down_by_mistakes/ (accessed on 28 July 2008).

Lijphart, A. (1984) Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and Consensus government in Twenty-One Countries, New Haven, Yale University Press.

Malbin, M. J. and Cain, S. A. (2007) The Ups and Downs of Small and Large donors: A Campaign Finance Institute Analysis of Pre- and Post-BCRA Contributions to Federal Candidates and Parties, 1999-2006, Washington, DC, Campaign Finance Institute.

McKay, D. (2005) American Politics and Society, Fifth Edition, Oxford, Blackwell.

MoveOn (2006) 'Election 2006: People Powered Politics', Washington DC, MoveOn. Available at http://pol.moveon.org/2006report (accessed on 22 November 2007).

Murray, S. (2006) 'Lamont Relies on Net Roots--and Grass Roots' Washington Post, Washington DC. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080801766.html (accessed on 28 July 2008).

Phillips, H. (2007) Strengthening Democracy: Fair and Sustainable Funding of Political Parties--the Review of the Funding of Political Parties, Norwich, HMSO.

Stelter, B. (2008) 'The Facebooker who Friended Obama', New York Times, New York. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/technology/07hughes.html?hp=&pagewanted=all (accessed on 28 July 2008).

TechPresident (2008) 'TechPresident Blog'. Available at http://techpresident.personaldemocracy.com/ (accessed on July 27, 2008).

Trippi, J. (2004) The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything, New York, ReganBooks.

Vargas, J. A. (2007) 'Young Voters Find Voice on Facebook', Washington Post, Washington DC. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/16/AR2007021602084.html (accessed on 28 July 2008).

Ware, A. (1996) Political Parties and Party Systems, Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Webb, P. (2000) The Modern British Party System, London, Sage.

Note

(1.) For an extended version of this argument, see Anstead and Chadwick (2008).

Nick Anstead is Lecturer in American Politics at the University of East Anglia and a Research Associate of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. Email [e-mail].

Andrew Chadwick is Professor of Political Science and Founding Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London (http://newpolcom.rhul.ac.uk). He is the author of Internet Politics: States, Citizens and New Communication Technologies (Oxford University Press). Email [e-mail]