IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-04910761.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Politics in the facebook era. Evidence from the 2016 US presidential elections

Author

Listed:
  • Federica Liberini

    (QMUL - Queen Mary University of London)

  • Michela Redoano

    (University of Warwick [Coventry], CESifo - Center for Economic Studies - Ifo Institute - CESifo GmbH)

  • Antonio Russo

    (IMT-BS - Institut Mines-Télécom Business School - IMT - Institut Mines-Télécom [Paris], CESifo - Center for Economic Studies - Ifo Institute - CESifo GmbH)

  • Angel Cuevas Rumin

    (UC3M - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid [Madrid])

  • Rubén Cuevas

    (UC3M - Universidad Carlos III de Madrid [Madrid])

Abstract

Social media allow political campaigns to reach specific groups of voters with unprecedented precision, yet the effect on voting behaviour of this political micro-targeting is still uncertain. To identify this effect we match survey data with a novel indicator of Facebook political ads intensity, based on audience-specific ad prices and collected during the 2016 US presidential campaign. We find that being exposed to Facebook micro-targeted ads reduced the likelihood of persuading Democrat respondents to cast the ballot in favour of the Democrat candidate and, on the other hand, it increased the likelihood of persuading Republicans and residents of traditionally red or swing states to switch their vote in favour of Mr Trump. A counterfactual analysis exercise exploring the effect on voter mobilisation and persuasion of varying the intensity of political campaigning on Facebook confirms that Trump was the primary beneficiary of micro-targeted ad campaigns on Facebook.

Suggested Citation

  • Federica Liberini & Michela Redoano & Antonio Russo & Angel Cuevas Rumin & Rubén Cuevas, 2025. "Politics in the facebook era. Evidence from the 2016 US presidential elections," Post-Print hal-04910761, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04910761
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2025.102641
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    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:hal:journl:hal-04910761. 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: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    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.