IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/anname/v597y2005i1p153-170.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy

Author

Listed:
  • Philip N. Howard

    (Department of Communication at the University of Washington in Seattle)

Abstract

Digital media strategies are a crucial component of contemporary political campaigns. Established political elites use database and Internet technologies to raise money, organize volunteers, gather intelligence on voters, and do opposition research. However, they use data-mining techniques that outrage privacy advocates and surreptitious technologies that few Internet users understand. Grassroots political actors and average votersbuild their own digital campaigns, researching public policy options, candidate histories, lobbyist maneuvering, and the finances of big campaigns. I examine the role of digital technologies in the production of contemporary political culture with ethnographic and survey evidence from four election seasons between 1996 and 2002. Democracy is deeper in terms of the diffusion of rich data about political actors, policy options, and the diversity of actors and opinion in the public sphere. Citizenship is thinner in terms of the ease in which people can become politically expressive without being substantively engaged.

Suggested Citation

  • Philip N. Howard, 2005. "Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy," The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, , vol. 597(1), pages 153-170, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:597:y:2005:i:1:p:153-170
    DOI: 10.1177/0002716204270139
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716204270139
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1177/0002716204270139?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Nezar AlSayyad & Muna Guvenc, 2015. "Virtual Uprisings: On the Interaction of New Social Media, Traditional Media Coverage and Urban Space during the ‘Arab Spring’," Urban Studies, Urban Studies Journal Limited, vol. 52(11), pages 2018-2034, August.
    2. Jiaye Zhao & Dechun Zhang, 2024. "Visual propaganda in chinese central and local news agencies: a douyin case study," Palgrave Communications, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 11(1), pages 1-14, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:sae:anname:v:597:y:2005:i:1:p:153-170. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: SAGE Publications (email available below). General contact details of provider: .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.