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AbstractTo the detriment of liberal democracy, governments have struggled to prevent the exploitation of personal data for voter manipulation in the digital era. Laws pertaining to political microtargeting are often piecemeal and tend to derive from a combination of laws on electoral advertising and privacy. Evidence indicates that this approach is insufficient to curtail microtargeting. However, little is known about the regulation of microtargeting outside of the European and US contexts within which the bulk of anti‐microtargeting research has been undertaken. Accordingly, this paper aims to shed light on the preparedness of the law in Australia and New Zealand to mitigate the potential harms of political microtargeting. A comparative analysis of legislation pertaining to microtargeting is therefore undertaken using a blended approach of comparative law and content analysis. This paper: (1) identifies current legislation relevant to microtargeting in Australia and New Zealand; (2) assesses patterns of similarity and difference between each country's laws in relation to microtargeting; and (3) evaluates the preparedness of current legislation to curtail microtargeting in an evolving social media landscape. It finds that in both countries, legislation is sufficiently robust to mitigate microtargeting in some limited circumstances, but a cohesive regulatory approach is needed to constrain the most insidious microtargeting operations.

Despite the resources devoted to microtargeting in recent election campaigns, we still have a limited understanding of its impacts on the electorate. This article aims to test the reinforcement effect of microtargeted messages on voters' attitudes. Specifically, it looks at how microtargeting influences the strength and stability of partisan affiliation and the probability of voters changing their vote choice during the 2015 Canadian election campaign. Given that individuals are not targeted randomly, entropy balancing is used to model selection into treatment and create a valid counterfactual for microtargeted individuals. This approach is complemented by an extensive sensitivity analysis to improve confidence in selection on observables. We find evidence that microtargeting reinforces party ties and makes voters less likely to defect from their preferred party.

In modern elections, ideologically motivated candidates with a wealth of information about individual voters and sophisticated campaign strategies are faced by voters who lack awareness of some political issues and are uncertain about the exact political positions of candidates. This is the context in which we analyze electoral competition between two ideologically fixed candidates and a finite set of voters. Each political issue corresponds to a dimension of a multidimensional policy space in which candidates' and voters' most preferred policy points are located. Candidates can target messages to subsets of voters. A candidate's message consists of a subset of issues and some information on her political position in the subspace spanned by this subset of issues. The information provided can be vague, it can be even silent on some issues, but candidates are not allowed to bluntly lie about their ideology. Every voter votes for the candidate she expects to be closest to her but takes into account only the subspace spanned by the issues that come up during the campaign. We show that any prudent rationalizable election outcome is the same as if voters have full awareness of issues and complete information of policy points, both in parliamentary and presidential elections. We show by examples that these results depend on the strength of electoral competition, the ability to target information to voters, and the political reasoning abilities of voters.

In modern elections, ideologically motivated candidates with a wealth of information about individual voters and sophisticated campaign strategies are faced by voters who lack awareness of some political issues and are uncertain about the exact political positions of candidates. We study to what extent electoral campaigns can raise awareness of issues and unravel information about candidates' political positions. We allow for microtargeting in which candidates target messages to subsets of voters. A candidate's message consists of a subset of issues and some information on her political position in the multi-dimensional policy subspace spanned by this subset of issues. The information provided can be vague, it can be even silent on some issues, but candidates are not allowed to bluntly lie about their ideology. Every voter votes for the candidate she expects to be closest to her but takes into account only the subspace spanned by the issues that come up during the campaign. We show that any prudent rationalizable election outcome is the same as if voters have full awareness of issues and complete information of policy points, both in parliamentary and presidential elections. We show by examples that these results may break down when there is lack of electoral competition, when candidates are unable to use microtargeting, or when voters have limited abilities of political reasoning. Allowing for negative campaigning restores the positive results if voters' political reasoning abilities are limited. It can even be achieved with just public campaign message in the presidential elections while parliamentary elections still require microtargeting of voters.

Since the 2016 U.S. presidential election, both scholars and news media have been discussing the impact of technology-driven campaign tools, such as online microtargeting, on the election outcome. Technological developments allow campaigners to analyze voters' psychological profiles and to adapt political advertisements accordingly. However, little is known about the effectiveness of this technique in election campaigns and about the underlying processes behind its persuasiveness. This study examines the effects of congruence between a voter's personality and a candidate's message on the voter's feelings toward and propensity to vote for the candidate. A U.S.-based online experiment (N = 199) reveals that ad congruence elicits a more positive feeling toward the candidate but does not significantly affect the propensity to vote for the candidate. The proposed mediators of cognition, emotion, and trust are not significant.

Messages that are designed to match a recipient's personality, as enabled by microtargeting, have been found to influence political reasoning and even voting intentions. We extended these findings by adding prior attitudes to a microtargeting setting. Specifically, we examined what role different microtargeting approaches play in political reasoning by conducting an online experiment with a 2 (extraverted vs. introverted communication) × 2 (attitude-congruent vs. attitude-incongruent statement) between-subject design (N = 368). In line with the assumptions of the theory of motivated reasoning, attitude position matching emerged as an effective microtargeting strategy, and attitude strength moderated the effect of attitude congruency on recipients' evaluations of political ads. While extraverted messages had no direct effect, that was unrelated to attitude congruency, recipients' level of extraversion moderated the effect of extraverted communication on their evaluation of an ad. Interestingly, the intention to vote was significantly higher when an attitude-incongruent statement was phrased in an introverted rather than an extraverted manner, suggesting that information that challenges prior attitudes might be more persuasive when it is delivered in a more temperate way. In sum, the study indicates that matching message with personality alone might not be the most effective microtargeting approach within democratic societies.

Low and uneven turnout is a serious problem for local democracy. Fortunately, one simple reform—shifting the timing of local elections so they are held on the same day as national contests—can substantially increase participation. Considerable research shows that on-cycle November elections generally double local voter turnout compared with stand-alone local contests. But does higher turnout mean a more representative electorate? On that critical question, the evidence is slim and mixed. We combine information on election timing with detailed microtargeting data that includes voter demographic information to examine how election timing influences voter composition in city elections. We find that moving to on-cycle elections in California leads to an electorate that is considerably more representative in terms of race, age, and partisanship—especially when these local elections coincide with a presidential election. Our results suggest that on-cycle elections can improve local democracy.

Amongst other methods, political campaigns employ microtargeting, a specific technique used to address the individual voter. In the US, microtargeting relies on a broad set of collected data about the individual. However, due to the unavailability of comparable data in Germany, the practice of microtargeting is far more challenging. Citizens in Germany widely treat social media platforms as a means for political debate. The digital traces they leave through their interactions provide a rich information pool, which can create the necessary conditions for political microtargeting following appropriate algorithmic processing. More specifically, data mining techniques enable information gathering about a people's general opinion, party preferences and other non-political characteristics. Through the application of data-intensive algorithms, it is possible to cluster users in respect of common attributes, and through profiling identify whom and how to influence. Applying machine learning algorithms, this paper explores the possibility to identify micro groups of users, which can potentially be targeted with special campaign messages, and how this approach can be expanded to large parts of the electorate. Lastly, based on these technical capabilities, we discuss the ethical and political implications for the German political system.

Western political debate, like other areas, has entered the digital world. Political actors have had to adapt to new communication strategies linked to technology in general and to social networks in particular. A new debate has opened that has provoked changes in the traditional system of political communication with its different audiences. Thus, the configuration of negotiation and dominance in democratic systems is linked to technological change. This research aims to provide a descriptive interpretation of the role of social networks, specifically Facebook, by the Popular Party to win the elections of June 26, 2016 in Spain. How the strategies of microtargeting, data mining and geolocation were hollowed out in order to capture the indecisive vote and thus obtain the seats necessary to expand the electoral advantage. To this end, a comparison will be made with Barack Obama's campaigns in 2008 and especially 2012, which were also carried out by The Messina Group (TMG) and whose results were a great success. The results show that Facebook is one of the social networks more successfully used in the campaigns.

Digital technologies have taken individualized advertising to an unprecedented level. But the convenience and efficiency of such highly tailored content comes at a high price: unbridled access to our personal data. The rise of sophisticated data-driven practices, otherwise known as "Big Data," enables large datasets to be analyzed in ways that reveal useful patterns about human behavior. Thanks to these novel analytical techniques, businesses can cater to individual consumer needs better than ever before. Yet the opportunities presented by Big Data pose new ethical challenges. Significant scholarly research has examined algorithmic discrimination and consumer manipulation, as well as the ways that data-driven practices undermine our democratic system by dramatically altering the news ecosystem. Current scholarship has especially focused on the ways illegitimate foreign and domestic operatives exploit the advertising tools of digital platforms to spread fake and divisive messages to those most susceptible to influence. However, more scholarly attention should be devoted to how these digital technologies are exploited by legitimate political actors, such as politicians and campaigns, to win elections. By combining data-driven voter research with personalized advertising, political actors engage in political microtargeting, directing communications at niche audiences. Political microtargeting fits within a broader conversation about data-privacy regulation, as individuals lack sufficient control over how digital companies handle their personal data. The First Amendment currently limits data-privacy reform, so any meaningful changes must reconcile data privacy with the First Amendment. Professor Jack Balkin has argued that online service providers should be defined as "information fiduciaries," or businesses that, because of their relationship with another, have taken on special duties with respect to the information they obtain in the course of the relationship. Because online service providers receive sensitive ...