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Paper short abstract:

This paper studies how the development of voter surveillance among Swedish political parties is conditioned by cultural, economical and judiciary factors. Furthermore how this development might be changing not only the ways election campaigns are conducted but also the democratic system as a whole.

Paper long abstract:

As noted by Lyon (2019) the last couple of decades has seen a development in political campaigns towards enhanced “voter surveillance”. Data from the activities of everyday for citizens are collected and used to target specific voters with tailored messages. During the last decade there here has been a large body of research published on “data-driven campaigning” (Bennett, C. J. & Lyon, D. 2019) particularly focusing on US politics. Among these are the studies by Kreiss (2012; 2016) on how political campaigns in the US has adopted innovations in communication tools, practices and infrastructure. He underlines that data and analytics has become essential in the development. In a European context there has been case studies regarding data-driven campaigning in the UK (Anstead 2017), Germany (Kruschinski and Haller 2017) and the Netherlands (Dobber et al 2017). So far though there has been no systematic study of data-driven campaigning and voter surveillance in a Nordic context.

This study provides insights obtained from semi-structured and in-depth interviews with political operatives involved in data driven campaigning in all political parties represented in the Swedish parliament. Among the themes explored in this paper are how the work with voter surveillance is conditioned by organizational culture, resources, infrastructure, judiciary factors and the election system. Furthermore, the paper discusses how the development of data driven campaigning might be changing not only the ways election campaigns are conducted but also how political parties operate and the democratic system as a whole.