Explaining digital campaign expenses: The case of the 2018 legislative elections in Colombia

Abstract

This paper analyses the investment in digital tools and the allocation of communication expenses in a Global South country with an uneven digital penetration rate. Data were collected for 2,563 candidates in the 2018 legislative election in Colombia, based on the official campaign finance disclosure documents. A multivariate analysis shows that particularly challengers invest in social media tools, which is a strong indication in favor of the equalization model. That such an effect is not found for radio and television expenses confirms this interpretation. Candidates on open lists are more inclined to spend on both digital and radio and television tools than candidates on closed lists. At the district level, the odds of spending on digital media increase with the digital media use, but so does the odds of spending on radio and television ads.

Level Playing Field or Politics as Usual? Equalization–Normalization in Direct Democratic Online Campaigns

“…Therefore, we had to limit our analysis to publicly available Facebook posts. For a more comprehensive assessment of the equalization-normalization thesis, however, studies should ideally keep up-to-date with the fast-paced development of technological innovations, including social media's particular and everexpanding affordances as recent research has done by including digital advertising in their analyses (e.g., Fowler et al, 2021;Vanden Eynde & Maddens, 2022). Finally, our conceptualization of more and less powerful political actors in the Swiss direct democratic context may be arguably too rough and not easily transferable to direct democratic campaigns beyond Switzerland.…”

“…Empirical work on the equalizing or normalizing effects of social media draws no unequivocal picture, with some studies finding support for a more level playing field between minor and major political actors (e.g., Bene, 2021;Samuel-Azran et al, 2015) and others pointing towards a normalizing effect (e.g., Strandberg, 2013;Van Aelst et al, 2017). Scholars argue that the ambiguity in the findings stems from methodological heterogeneity (Vanden Eynde & Maddens, 2022), conceptual weaknesses, and the dominance of single-case study designs (Bene, 2021;Gibson, 2020). Most studies on the equalization-normalization debate focus on electoral competitions (e.g., Larsson & Moe, 2014;Samuel-Azran et al, 2015) or non-electoral periods (e.g., Sobaci, 2018) and test their premises over relatively short periods, often covering only one single campaign.…”

Reckoning with the digital turn in electoral geography

“…Following previous critiques, this still requires broadening as these digital developments are not guaranteed to play out in the same way in different places. Studies from other contexts are proliferating (examples include India [Basavaraj 2022], Indonesia [Beta and Neyazi, 2022], and Colombia [Vanden Eynde and Madens 2021]), but little work has compared differences. A key area of interest that electoral geographers can therefore contribute to concerns the impact of the electoral system itself; FPTP systems arguably put a higher premium on spatial data as only select areas will swing an overall result.…”