“Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the 2008 United States Presidential Election

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“Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the2008 United States Presidential ElectionCristian Vaccari aa Department of Political Science, University of BolognaVersion of record first published: 21 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Cristian Vaccari (2010): “Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the 2008 United StatesPresidential Election, Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7:4, 318-339

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Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7:318–339, 2010Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 1933-1681 print/1933-169X onlineDOI: 10.1080/19331681003656664

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“Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the 2008 United States Presidential Election

Vaccari Cristian Vaccari

ABSTRACT. The role of the Internet as a tool for participation and organization has been consideredthe most important innovation in the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign and one of the key strategic factorsin Barack Obama’s conquest of the Democratic nomination and the White House. This article analyzese-campaigning in the 2008 election through data drawn from qualitative interviews with 31 consultantsand operatives who were involved in the presidential race. Rather than adopting a technocentric perspec-tive, our interviewees acknowledge that several contextual factors enhance or hinder the effectiveness ofonline tools, such as the message of the campaign, the candidate’s personality, and his or her ability togenerate enthusiasm in the electorate, together with the campaign’s strategic prioritization of grassrootselectioneering. Technology is seen more as an efficient channel of preexisting motivations and loyaltiesthan as a driver of these attitudes. Moreover, while the Web has often been characterized as presentingcampaigns with a dilemma between top-down hierarchy and bottom-up spontaneity, Internet profession-als and operatives argue that contemporary e-campaigning tools can help achieve both goals and breed ahybrid organizing model that reconciles control and empowerment through the skillful use of individualdata. These findings have important implications regarding the strategic and organizational dynamics ofcontemporary campaigns and the role of citizen participation within them.

KEYWORDS. Online campaigning, U.S. 2008 Presidential election, political organizations,internet politics, voter mobilization, Barack Obama

Unlike the ultimately failed campaigns ofHoward Dean in the 2004 Democratic prima-ries, of Ned Lamont in the 2006 race for

Connecticut Senator, and of Ségolène Royal inthe 2007 French Presidential election, the 2008United States presidential contest has finally

Cristian Vaccari (Ph.D., Università IULM, Milan, Italy, 2006) is Assistant Professor in politicalcommunication at the Department of Political Science of the University of Bologna. He studies politicalcommunication in comparative perspective, with a particular focus on the new media. He has authored andcoauthored three books in Italian, and his scholarship has been published in Political Communication,New Media & Society, European Journal of Communication, and French Politics, as well as in variousinternational edited volumes. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University, Massachusetts Instituteof Technology, and American University.

I would like to thank the three anonymous referees for their helpful comments, as well as the participantsto the international workshop “Citizen Politics: Are the New Media Reshaping Engagement?” (Barcelona,May 28–30, 2009) and to the American Political Science Association political communication preconfer-ence (Toronto, September 2, 2009), where earlier versions of this article were presented and invaluable feed-back was collected. Most of the data on which this article is based were gathered during my residence as avisiting scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, for which I would like to thankMichael Schudson for inviting me and the University of Bologna for providing a research grant for thisproject.

Address correspondence to: Cristian Vaccari, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche “Roberto Ruffilli”, ViaGiacomo della Torre, 1, 47100 Forlì, Italy (E-mail: [email protected]).

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crowned a winning “Internet candidate.” Thereis little doubt that the new media were instru-mental in Barack Obama’s victories in the gen-eral election and, especially, in the Democraticprimaries, where he defeated the seeminglyunbeatable frontrunner Hillary Rodham Clinton.The 2008 election was exceptional for theamount, intensity, and depth of online politicalengagement: A Pew Internet and American LifeProject report (2009) found that 74 percent ofInternet users and 55 percent of the U.S. adultpopulation went online to get informationabout, or participate in, the Presidential cam-paign; moreover, the study found that the Webis now second only to television as a source ofnews and competes on an equal footing withnewspapers. The new media have also becomeimportant sources of electoral funds and volun-teers: In 2008, 9 percent of Internet usersreported having gone online to make a cam-paign donation, and 6 percent claimed to havesigned up as volunteers on a candidate’s Website. Moreover, there was a remarkable gapbetween Obama’s and Republican candidateJohn McCain’s supporters in terms of their pro-pensity to engage in various online politicalactivities: While 15 percent of Obama votersdonated money online, only 6 percent ofMcCain voters did; whereas 11 percent ofObama voters signed up online as volunteers,only 4 percent of McCain voters did. AmongInternet users, 30 percent visited Obama’s cam-paign Web site, while 21 percent went onMcCain’s. Among e-mail users, 37 percentreceived messages signed by Obama and 24percent by McCain (Pew Internet & AmericanLife Project, 2009). So, not only have the 2008elections witnessed the integration of the newmedia into the mainstream of campaigning inthe United States, but they have also shown thatthe Internet can constitute a sizeable competi-tive advantage for candidates who take advan-tage of its potential.

This article analyzes the 2008 U.S. Presiden-tial race as a significant case study in the adop-tion of technology to enable citizenparticipation and enhance campaigns’ ability tobuild networks of supporters to deliver theirmessages. The next paragraph summarizes thetheoretical debate regarding the impact of the

Internet on political processes and campaigndynamics. Subsequently, we discuss theresearch questions and methodology of thisstudy, which draws on qualitative interviewswith 31 consultants and operatives involved inthe 2008 online campaign. We then present ourfindings, which shed light on the contextual,strategic, and organizational conditions thatmediated the impact of Internet campaigning inthe 2008 election, as well as the changes inpower relationships elicited by these dynamics.Finally, we will discuss the implications of theevidence presented here for citizen participa-tion and contemporary campaigning and willsuggest directions for future research.1

CONFLICTING PARADIGMS AND ORGANIZATIONAL TRADEOFFS

IN ONLINE POLITICS

Research on Internet campaigning has beenconditioned by the clash of two paradigms:technological determinism, which claims thattechnologies are an autonomous force thatshapes society, and social determinism, whichsees technologies as fundamentally neutraltools that are molded by social forces. Thesetwo approaches provide conflicting answers tothe questions of whether and how the newmedia can produce transformations in the polit-ical landscape. While supporters of technologi-cal determinism claim that the Internet is boundto redefine power relationships and, in the pro-cess, restructure democratic polities, advocatesof social determinism observe that online toolsare inscribed in a context where social forcesmediate the potential impact of technologies,thus favoring incremental changes while hin-dering more fundamental transformations (for adiscussion, see Chadwick, 2006, pp. 17–21).Indeed, in the literature on Internet politics, thedebate between technological and social deter-minism first emerged as a normative clashbetween optimists, who claimed that the newmedia would diffuse power, increase partycompetition, and empower non-elites vis-à-viselites, and proponents of normalization, whoargued that the Internet could not alter long-standing power balances and dynamics (see

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Bentivegna, 2006). While scholars have strivedto overcome these dichotomies, their heritage isstill apparent in many research subfields.

In this respect, the literature on Internet cam-paigning has more often sided with social ratherthan technological determinism. Scholars haverecognized that the diffusion of e-campaigningtools is not uniform across all parties and candi-dates but depends on various contextual factorsrelated to both structure and agency (Foot &Schneider, 2006; Gibson, Nixon, & Ward, 2003).Broader assessments of online politics have sofar concluded that the Internet has not dramati-cally altered the basic dynamics of politicalcompetition and participation (Margolis &Resnick, 2000). However, the 2008 electionmight be seen as a challenge to these theories,as Obama relied heavily on the Internet forfundraising and organizing purposes, raising asmuch as $500 million online, collecting 13 millione-mail addresses, and using his social network-ing platform to recruit two million volunteers,who in turn helped organize about 200,000offline events (Vargas, 2008). Never had theInternet benefitted a major candidate as muchas Obama, even by comparison with the signifi-cant role it played in the 2004 cycle (Vaccari,2008). The success of the Obama e-campaignraises the question whether the new media sim-ply channel preexisting attitudes and campaigndynamics, or, under certain circumstances, theyactually drive political processes that would nothave otherwise occurred, possibly altering thestrategic incentives of campaigns as a conse-quence. Although communication tools aresocially constructed by political institutions andactors, it is also clear that online electioneeringplatforms now present candidates with opportu-nities that are more relevant, and potentiallyimpactful, than they were in the first age ofInternet politics. In other words, the two con-flicting paradigms of technological and socialdeterminism still need to be reconciled if we areto comprehend the political dynamics broughtabout by the new media. As Chadwickexplains, “The Internet is an inherently politicalset of technologies, but its politics are subject todecisions made in supremely political contexts”(2006, p. 21). It is thus necessary to betterunderstand the complex context within which

online campaigning takes place and to assessunder what conditions these tools can drive orchannel political processes.

Another aspect on which the literature one-campaigning has often focused is the relation-ship between Internet adoption and organiza-tional power, pressures, and structures. Withrespect to election campaigns, Foot andSchneider have hypothesized a dynamic ofmutual influences by which “Web campaigningpractices both manifest campaigns’ organiza-tional practices and (re)structure those organi-zational practices” (2006, p. 18). Focusing onpolitical structures writ large, Bimber hasargued that information abundance is eliciting“postbureaucratic forms of politics” based on“the substitution of information infrastructurefor organizational infrastructure” (2003, p. 21).Subsequently, Bimber and his colleagues haveargued that the dynamics and cost-benefitcalculations of collective action might be trans-formed so that “the act of organizing may bedecoupled from formal organization and thetransition of private interests and resources topublic domains of collective activity may bemore easily accomplished than in the past”(Flanagin, Stohl, & Bimber, 2006, p. 30). Thus,political organizations built around formalbureaucratic and hierarchical principles wouldbe increasingly challenged by informal, flexi-ble, and fluid structures arising from informa-tion networks. As a result, the collective actionspace is expected to be more hospitable toentrepreneurial organizations, which leave theirmembers relatively great leeway to define thegoals and terms of their efforts, than to institu-tional groups, which impose strong constraintsand limitations on their members. Moreover,the current informational environment isthought to allow organizations to develop dif-ferentiated modes of collective action, leavingtheir “footprints” in various types of efforts,both institutional and entrepreneurial, personaland impersonal, thus giving way to multidi-mensional and complex structures (Flanaginet al., 2006, pp. 42, 49). Elaborating on thisframework, Chadwick (2007) has noted thatparties, interest groups, and social move-ments are imitating each other’s mobilizationtechniques and in the process are breeding

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hybrid organizational types. The creation of“digital network repertoires of collectiveaction” (Chadwick, 2007, p. 286)—whichallow for greater and more diversified opportu-nities for participation; produce and sustain dis-tributed trust among members; fuse subculturaland political discourses; and create and buildupon sedimentary online networks—hasresulted in an increase in grassroots influenceon parties’ and interest groups’ organizations,which has made them more similar to socialmovements than in the past and has enabledthem to integrate, and easily switch between,different modes of political action. However,Chadwick is cautious as to whether suchhybridity “is going to continue to open up tradi-tionally hierarchical organizations, especiallypolitical parties” and suggests that, rather thanbeing fully adopted within all units of politicalstructures, participatory practices might be nar-rowly channelled to particular organizationalsubunits or to specific social groups withoutsignificantly affecting the overall balance ofpower within political organizations (Chadwick,2007, p. 297).

Caution is indeed warranted, as institutionalpolitical actors have been found to be quite resis-tant to bottom-up pressures. With respect to elec-toral organizations, scholars have highlighted thecontrast between the command-and-control logicof campaign structures and the participatoryethos of information and communication tech-nologies (Löfgren & Smith, 2003). Parties andcampaign committees have been cautious inengaging with their supporters online and reluc-tant to cede control over their messages(Stromer-Galley, 2000). As Foot and Schneider(2006, p. 6) write,

While campaigns want to involve a largenumber of supporters, they also want toestablish the terms of that involvement.They desire to multiply their resources bymobilizing supporters to promote thecandidate in the supporters’ sphere ofinfluence, but they also want to manageand track these promotional activities.

Similarly, Chadwick notes that, while earlyassessments claimed that “the Internet may

increase grassroots control over candidates andparty leaderships, resulting in new, participa-tory campaigns [. . .] that depart from the hier-archical structure typical of the catch-all party”(2006, pp. 146–147), in reality “there are stillmany reasons why increasing grassroots influ-ence over party leaders will be difficult toachieve” (2006, p. 172) due to the persistenceof asymmetrical power relationships outside theonline realm that are too pervasive and conse-quential to be subverted by any reconfigurationof influence elicited by the new media. EvenHoward Dean’s campaign, hailed by manyscholars as a path-breaker in organizationalhybridity, ultimately failed to reconcile the“top-down ‘war-room’ style management andbottom-up ‘netroots’ mobilization” (Chadwick,2007, p. 289).

A related problem that may discouragecampaigns from adopting purely bottom-uporganizations powered by dialogic, peer-to-peercommunication is that, as Nielsen (2009) haspointed out, the proliferation of messages andmessengers allowed by low-cost informationtechnologies can create various types of“labors”—such as overcommunication, miscom-munication, and communicative overload—thatincrease the transaction costs in political orga-nizations and thus impede rather than enhancetheir functioning. Nielsen specifies that activ-ists and organizations are more likely to experi-ence these problems if they are (a)heterogeneous, (b) engaged in long-term ratherthan one-shot activities, and if they lack (c)organizational protocols for communicationand (d) pre-fashioned infrastructures and exter-nal structures that aggregate and channel theircommunications (Nielsen, 2009, p. 278). In thisrespect, a centralized organization can beexpected to help achieve all these goals, as adegree of top-down control can (a) reduce het-erogeneity by assigning volunteers to internallyhomogeneous groups and providing them withcoaching and shared values and norms, (b)“unpack” the broader goals of the organizationinto manageable and scalable action items, (c)define standard protocols for communication,and (d) build and maintain a trusted, centralizedcommunication infrastructure, or direct mem-bers to specific external platforms. As Nielsen

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(2009, p. 279) observes, the degree to whichpolitical professionals will embrace Internet-enhanced volunteer organizations depends ontheir ability to maximize their benefits whileminimizing their costs. One way to achieve thisgoal is to adopt organizational solutions thatlimit transaction costs by better directing andcontrolling the communication flow in bothdirections.

Moreover, the outcome of online campaign-ing does not necessarily result in a verticalredistribution of power. As Ward and Vedelargue, “Simply providing electronic tools forparticipation is not the same as actuallyempowering members” (2006, p. 217). One ofthe reasons is that political elites can takeadvantage of Internet applications to selectivelydirect supporters’ actions while claiming to beengaging them in democratic practices. Fromthis perspective, Howard (2006) has suggestedthat new media campaigns can exercise innova-tive forms of control over supporters throughdata-mining technologies that allow candidatesto tailor messages to different audiencesaccording to their online and offline behaviors,recorded in a large and constantly growing“data shadow.” Consequently, the practices ofcitizenship are increasingly managed as antici-pated responses to carefully crafted stimulifrom political elites. One implication of thesefindings is that political organizations should beless wary of losing control in the online land-scape, given that they can harness databasetechnologies to segment their supporter uni-verse and selectively communicate with iso-lated groups according to their preferences anddispositions. Another implication is that eventhose activities that members perceive to beentrepreneurial and self-managed might be sub-ject to a significant degree of control frompolitical organizations, as the presentation ofopportunities to participate online can be fine-tuned by information-savvy campaign manag-ers according to their own priorities.

Thus, as the Internet audience continues togrow and as online electioneering achievesincreasing political relevance, campaigns areunder pressure to develop organizationalmodels that reconcile both their need to accessvaluable resources through online engagement

and their desire to control such engagement.While it seems clear that the resulting organiza-tional arrangements will likely be a hybrid oftop-down and bottom-up practices, it is an openquestion where the equilibrium point is boundto lie and how far campaigns will be able tostretch their practices, thus leaving “footprints”on different modes of interaction and engage-ment in collective action, without (fear of)losing internal consistency and manageability.As the field is still relatively young, and both itsproducers and users are constantly refiningtheir approaches and practices, these tensionscontinue to elicit behavioral and structuralchanges that research needs to constantly assessin order to fully account for the empirical reali-ties of online politics. One possible way toachieve this goal is to move beyond the analysisof Web sites and other aspects of the supply ofInternet electioneering and to observe the orga-nizational field, where e-campaigning produc-ers make decisions based on cognitive andoperational schemata that are shaped by thecontext, but also mold it by selecting sometechnological affordances and refraining fromothers. This was the purpose that informed ourmethodological choices, to which we now turn.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS AND METHODOLOGY

In order to advance our understanding of theissues summarized above, this study aims toanswer two research questions. The first has todo with whether the Internet can be considered achannel of preexisting political dynamics or adriver of these processes, that is, whether it is aset of tools that in and of themselves can producepolitical transformations, or whether its impactdepends on other contextual forces, and, in suchcase, which factors can be hypothesized as medi-ating the effects of Internet electioneering. Thesecond question deals with whether and to whatextent the successful adoption of online cam-paigning techniques requires and promotes thedevelopment of hybrid organizational structuresthat blend top-down control and bottom-up spon-taneity, and what mechanisms enable sucharrangement. The 2008 U.S. presidential election

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offers a valuable opportunity to address theseissues, as the Obama Internet campaign was ableto tap into unprecedented levels of energies andresources, thus casting doubt on the idea that thenew media can merely be a channel rather than adriver of political support, and its organizationwas apparently based on a more participatorymodel than had previously been the case inmajor-party American politics.

As these questions deal primarily with themeso, organizational level, the perspectivefrom which they are best addressed is that ofthe e-campaign specialists, an increasinglynumerous and recognized cadre of political pro-fessionals and operatives who direct the adop-tion of online electioneering tools. It is throughtheir decisions and methods that e-campaigningtechniques are put into practice and acquiremeaning for citizens (see Foot & Schneider,2006, p. 13). The method of qualitative inter-viewing (Rubin & Rubin, 2005) is particularlywell suited to investigate these issues, as itallows us to extract data not only on the tech-niques and behaviors of these experts, but alsoon their mindsets and operational habits.

In order to fully understand the philosophies,methods, and practices of online campaignersin 2008, we defined our target population as (a)all consultants and operatives who had a high-profile role in the online campaigns of presi-dential candidates, both in the primary andgeneral elections; (b) directors of online com-munications for the two major parties; and (c)notable figures in the field. In our analysis, wedistinguish between political consultants, whowork for professional consulting companiesand make a living by selling products andexpertise to candidates, parties, and interestgroups (Thurber, 2000), and political opera-tives, who are hired as part of the staff of aparty or campaign. In the short term, the tworoles may overlap, as when a professional takesa position in a campaign staff, but in themedium term, these constitute two differentcareer paths. Based on information publishedon official campaigns’ Web sites and variousnews sources, we then constructed a list thatincluded the top e-campaign leadership for allcandidates and parties. Because Obama’s Inter-net team—which reportedly consisted of about

30 people, not including various employees of acontracting company—was much larger thanall other candidates’, consultants and operativeswho worked in his campaign were overrepre-sented in our sampling frame and thus are alsooverrepresented in the resulting sample.McCain’s Internet team was also larger thanmost other primary candidates’; thus it, too, isoverrepresented in our sample, although to amuch smaller degree than Obama’s. The finalsampling frame consisted of 66 total consult-ants and operatives; we then contacted all ofthem via e-mail, social networking sites and,when possible, telephone; prospective inter-viewees were contacted a maximum of fivetimes before excluding them from our sample.Twenty-eight of 66 people, or 42 percent of thesampling frame, agreed to be interviewed; fur-thermore, during interviews we adopted asnowball-sampling technique by promptingsuggestions about other informants that couldbe interviewed for this research, which pro-duced six more names, of which three agreed tobe interviewed. Thus, from a sampling frame of72 elite informants, 31 total interviews wereconducted, for a response rate of 43 percent.

Our sample includes 18 political consultants(nine Democrats, eight Republicans, and oneIndependent) and 13 political operatives (sevenRepublicans and six Democrats). Our sources arethus remarkably well balanced, not only betweenthe two major parties (15 Democrats, 15 Republi-cans, and one Independent), but also betweenconsultants and operatives, and between the twomajor parties within these two groups. The com-plete list of sources is shown in Table 1. As waspreviously indicated, the fact that 12 of our inter-viewees worked at some point with the Obamacampaign is not as much a source of bias as areflection of the reality that Obama employed asignificantly larger online staff than other presi-dential candidates. While our focus was mostlyon new media, we relied on a wider field ofexperts in order to assess the Internet’s impact oncampaign dynamics. Including perspectives fromdepartments other than e-campaigning, such asfield organization and central campaign manage-ment, minimized the risk of overestimating therole of technology and neglecting other crucialorganizational and political variables.

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The interviews were conducted betweenNovember 2008 and April 2009 and lasted onaverage about one hour each. All but two con-versations took place via phone or Skype; inter-views with Ralph Benko and Joe Rosparswere conducted in person in New York City.The interviews were conducted based on a

semistructured questionnaire, half of which wasidentical for all sources, while one-fourth wasdesigned to allow interviewees to provideknowledge that was unique to their particularskills and roles in the campaign, and one-fourthwas reserved for follow-up inquiries andquestions that stemmed from the topics raised

TABLE 1. List of Interviewees

Name Party affiliation and professional status

Role in 2008 campaign

Ralph Benko Republican consultant CommentatorJeremy Bird Democratic operative Obama Ohio general election directorJoy Cushman Democratic operative Obama Georgia and Florida deputy field directorSoren Dayton Republican operative Member of McCain’s political teamChristian Ferry Republican operative McCain deputy campaign manager, formerly

e-campaign directorJascha Franklin-Hodge Democratic consultant Chief technology officer at Blue State Digital, the

company that developed Obama’s Internet servicesJudith Freeman Democratic consultant Obama online organization advisorEric Frenchman Republican consultant Chief Internet strategist at Connell Donatelli, the

company that developed McCain’s Internet servicesMarshall Ganz Democratic consultant Obama advisor on organization and lecturer at the

Harvard University Kennedy School of GovernmentThomas Gensemer Democratic consultant Managing partner at Blue State DigitalJustin Germany Republican consultant McCain director of online media and employee of

Campaign Solutions, part of Connell DonatelliScott Goodstein Democratic consultant Obama external online director and founder of

consulting company Catalyst CampaignsSam Graham-Felsen Democratic operative Obama director of blogging and blog outreachKatie Harbath Republican consultant Rudolph Giuliani deputy e-campaign directorChris Hughes Democratic consultant Obama director of online organizing and co-founder

of FacebookDavid Kralick Republican operative Internet director of American Solutions, an organization

founded by Newt GingrichCyrus Krohn Republican operative Republican National Committee e-campaign directorJustine Lam Republican consultant Ron Paul e-campaign directorMatt Lira Republican operative McCain WebmasterBrad Marston Republican consultant Founder of http://www.letsgetthisright.com, a Web site

supportive of McCainPhil Noble Independent consultant CommentatorBen Olson Republican operative McCain deputy e-campaign directorJoe Rospars Democratic consultant Founding partner of Blue State Digital and Obama

new media directorPatrick Ruffini Republican consultant Giuliani Internet advisorTracy Russo Democratic consultant Obama advisor and John Edwards deputy online

communications directorTim Tagaris Democratic operative Chris Dodd Internet directorKevin Thurman Democratic consultant Hillary Clinton deputy Internet directorMichael Turk Republican consultant Fred Thompson e-campaign advisor and

George W. Bush 2004 e-campaign directorRobert Willington Republican operative Executive director of the Massachusetts

Republican partyBrian Young Democratic operative John Kerry Internet directorAnonymous source Democratic operative Member of the Obama Internet team who requested

anonymity

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during the conversation. Information on thequestionnaire design can be found in theAppendix. Due to space constraints, it is notpossible to include quotations from all inter-viewees in this article. Decisions on whom toquote were based on our assessment of the rele-vance of their viewpoints, as well as their repre-sentativeness of the opinions of the entiresample. Furthermore, we will provide summarystatistics that illustrate the degree of agreementamong our interviewees on the main findings ofour study, as well as the frequency with whichvarious issues were discussed and assessed.

In the next paragraphs, we first discuss theimpact of the Internet on campaign dynamics,which our interviewees assess as being medi-ated by various contextual factors, such as thecandidate’s popularity, a compelling campaignmessage, and the strategic centrality of grass-roots communication. Second, we draw onprofessionals’ and operatives’ perspectives toanalyze the organizational arrangements andmechanisms that emerged as a result of theintegration of the new media in campaignstructures. Finally, we discuss these findingsand suggest their implications for futureresearch on political organizations and citizenparticipation.

CHANNEL OR DRIVER? THE CONTEXTUALLY BOUNDED POWER

OF INTERNET CAMPAIGNING

The consultants and operatives interviewedfor this study emphasize that the Internet cannotbe seen as a “magic bullet” capable in and ofitself of driving support and resources to a can-didate. Although especially consultants, whocompete in a developing industry eager forhype and recognition, could be expected touncritically promote the power of the tools theydesign and sell, they acknowledge the complex-ities of Internet electioneering and refrain fromtechnological determinism. Shedding light onthe conditions they identify for the success ofe-campaigning strategies can help us betterunderstand which types of online applicationswill be prioritized by political actors, under

what circumstances campaigns will be morelikely to invest in this medium, and whether andhow these transformations will change politicalorganizations’ strategic incentives. In order topreview our key findings and to illustrate thedegree of agreement among our intervieweesabout them, Table 2 shows the number of inter-viewees who agreed (fully or with qualifica-tions), disagreed, or did not take position onnine assessments of online campaigning in2008. These evaluations were based not ondirect answers by the interviewees to specificquestions, but on secondary analysis performedby the author on the contents of the conversa-tions. As the data clearly show, there was aremarkable degree of concordance among theconsultants and operatives interviewed for thisstudy on all our main findings.

Two main sets of contextual factors are citedby our sources as mediating the effects of Inter-net campaigning: One is related to content, theother to organization. With respect to content,the characteristics of the candidate and of thecampaign message are seen as key to generat-ing enthusiasm among supporters, which thenevolves into a large following online. As theInternet is mostly a selective medium, wherethe possibility for candidates to attract an audi-ence largely depends on users’ decisions ratherthan inadvertent exposure (Bimber & Davis,2003), the success of e-campaigning is stronglyrelated to the candidate’s leadership skills andmessage, as these quotes demonstrate:

Technology is really a commodity, [. . .] itis enthusiasm for the candidate that drivespeople to act. The Internet is primarily amechanism to develop the rapid distribu-tion of enthusiasm for a campaign. If it isdesigned properly it enables the enthusi-asm to propagate itself. (Cyrus Krohn)

It’s more than just online tools, it’smore than just a fancy Web site that takesadvantage of every piece of Internet tech-nologies out there. At the end of the day,campaigns are about candidates and can-didates deliver messages, and unless thatcandidate has a feel, you can Twitter allyou want, it’s not going to make a differ-ence. (Christian Ferry)

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In these and other testimonies, “inspiration”and “enthusiasm” are the properties of candi-dates and messages most often associated witheffective online campaigns. At the same time,various interviewees emphasized the impor-tance of building trust and listening to support-ers. Campaign professionals and operativesclaimed that Internet tools thrive on a state ofcollective exuberance, more similar to thedynamics of social movements than to the atti-tudes commonly found among members ofinstitutional political organizations. Varioussources noted that movement-like dynamicssimilar to Obama’s campaign were in play withRon Paul, the candidate that attracted the larg-est Internet following during the 2008 Republi-can primaries. Justine Lam, who ran Paul’sonline operations, claims that “once Ron Pauldeclared his interest in running, a lot of peopleon the Internet were already rooting for him andspreading the word, so it was not like I had ini-

tiated a movement, it was already happening.”Paul’s online success can be related to the pop-ularity, among his Internet followers, of his lib-ertarian views, which suggests a communalityof values with social movements emphasizing“do-it-yourself” citizenship and nonhierarchicalarrangements (Chadwick, 2007, p. 286).

Remarkably, no differences emergedbetween the opinions of Democratic andRepublican consultants and operatives in thisarea, as was the case for most of the topicsaddressed in the interviews. Overall, 28 inter-viewees agreed on the first two statements inTable 2; three consultants, while agreeing thatthe Internet is mostly a channel rather than adriver of political dynamics, nevertheless sin-gled out fundraising as a partial exception tothis rule, noting that the Web probably drovethe increase in campaign donations observed in2008, especially for candidates such as Obamaand Paul. Joe Rospars thus argues for a finer

TABLE 2. Degree of Agreement on Various Assessments among Interviewees

Agree Agree with qualifications

Disagree Not assessed

The Internet mostly channels support and resources towards a candidate that already exist rather than driving political processes.

25 3 3

The characteristics of the candidate and the campaign message are key to generating enthusiasm among supporters and thus to develop a large following online.

28 3

Campaigns that rely heavily on grassroots supporters and on-the-ground electioneering are poised to benefit the most from online tools.

30 1

The Obama campaign provided an ideal seedbed for online electioneering, as its strategy was centered on sustained investment in grassroots activities.

27 4

The Web is not fundamentally transforming the dynamics of political organization and mobilization.

16 8 7

There were significant organizational differences between the Obama and the McCain campaign, the latter being more hierarchical and controlled.

20 3 1 7

Especially the Obama campaign employed the Internet to develop a hybrid organizational approach that reconciled control and participation.

26 5

Hybrid organizational arrangements are facilitated by the skillful use of individual data.

24 7

If volunteers receive directions and are motivated by a specific goal such as electing a candidate, they tend to reliably perform their duties.

23 8

Note: Based on author’s evaluation of interviewees’ statements.

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distinction between dynamics in which the Webcan be a channel and a driver:

I think when you have a job like mine, it isuseful to look at things and figure outwhere you can find an opportunity to be achannel and help make things more effi-cient and just be a connector, or whereyou can be a driver and put some newthings in play, because it’s not all aboutbeing one or the other, there are differentopportunities and different projects thatfall into each category.

Since most of our interviewees claim thatonline campaigning requires movement-likeeffervescence among supporters to be effective,they tend to see the Internet operations theysupervise more as conduits than as sources ofpolitical dynamics. Chris Hughes summarizeshis job as being “responsible for channeling allthe energy and enthusiasm of the Obama sup-porters into very real, tangible benefits for thecampaign that would help achieve our success.”In a similar fashion, most sources point out that,although the Web might not have spurred thedynamics that motivated supporters in the firstplace, it crucially contributed to effectively col-lecting and directing these energies, as arguedby Sam Graham-Felsen:

We knew there was just so much enthusi-asm and energy out there, it’s almost likeyou could envision a rainstorm of supporterenthusiasm, and what we tried to do wascollect that enthusiasm, put out as manybuckets as we could to collect that rain. [. . .]We cast such a wide net, we put out somany buckets, that we had the sense that ifyou liked Barack Obama, we were going tomake it almost impossible for you to missthe opportunity to get involved with thecampaign if you wanted to.

E-campaign consultants and operatives thussuggest that candidates differ in their ability totake advantage of Internet electioneering, andthat the same online tools might have a differ-ent impact depending on the candidate, thecampaign message, and the level of collective

energy mobilized by them. Thus, the incentivesfor politicians to engage in online campaigningmight vary depending on these political precon-ditions: As professionals and operatives work-ing for certain candidates realize that theircampaigns cannot inspire the movement-likedynamics that dovetail with effective onlineorganizing, they might rationally decide todirect resources into other campaigning areas.Conversely, however, should the trend continuethat has seen the new media achieve increasingrelevance in U.S. campaigns, the ability tospark enthusiasm and inspire supporters onlinemight become a factor to be reckoned with inthe winnowing of candidates, to the samedegree that the capacity to attract mass mediacoverage has been a fundamental prerequisiteto evaluate the viability of any political con-tender over the last five decades.

The second aspect that professionals andoperatives identified as relevant in the successof Internet electioneering is related to thecampaign’s overall strategy. As claimed byThomas Gensemer, “You shouldn’t start byinvesting in technology, you’d better start byinvesting in strategy.” Our intervieweespointed out that campaigns that heavily rely ongrassroots supporters and on-the-ground activ-ity are poised to benefit the most from onlinetools, provided that the Web is strongly linkedto offline efforts. As claimed by Jeremy Bird,“the new media is a tool, not the engine, [. . .]in and of itself it’s nothing, it had to be con-nected with [. . .] the organizing that was hap-pening.” Similarly, Jascha Franklin-Hodgestates that “you have to have the technologyavailable, but you also have to have an organi-zation that actually wants people to be organiz-ing events, that wants people to be active intheir neighborhood, and not every organizationhas this ethos.” Matt Lira even argues that“Every person that does e-campaigning shoulddo at least a couple months as a field orga-nizer,” thus suggesting that the connectionbetween online and offline organizing shouldbe a centerpiece not only of campaigns’ strate-gies, but of Internet campaigners’ basic skills.As shown in Table 2, all interviewees but onementioned the elective affinity between Weband grassroots campaigning. Furthermore, the

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Obama campaign is seen by most intervieweesas providing a particularly favorable environ-ment for online electioneering, as its strategywas centered on sustained investment in on-the-ground activities. There are again few dif-ferences between Democrats (all of whomagreed) and Republicans (all of whom but fourmentioned it) on this score. As suggested byScott Goodstein,

In the end, campaigns come down to time,people, and money. [. . .] The Obama cam-paign was not about spending all theresources on mass communication to get thejob done; we invested in the “people” part ofthe “time-people-money” equation morethan we invested, or as much as we invested,in the “time” and “money” pieces.

It is important to recognize that the organiza-tional and strategic decisions that Goodsteinhighlights derive from a significant change inthe basic approach to campaigning, whichMarshall Ganz describes as a shift from market-ing to organizing:

There is a big difference between runninga marketing campaign where you are try-ing to provide people with symbols andsources of information that will hopefullyinfluence their behavior, and drawing peo-ple into relationships with one another andmutuality of commitment that in fact doesshape behavior, and that’s what organiz-ing is all about, so the move from market-ing to organizing was something that [theObama campaign] were very clear theywanted to do.

The strategic development that Ganz describescan be seen as a specification of the idea thatcampaigns have moved from a modern to apostmodern era (Norris, 2000), that is, from amanagerial–marketing approach based on therepeated presentation of undifferentiated mes-sages to the mass public through broadcastmedia, to a relationship–marketing orientationbased on a deeper engagement of specific sec-tors of the public through narrowcast and

potentially dialogic media (Bannon, 2005).While it has been claimed that the postmodernapproach came of age in the 1990s in theUnited States, the Obama campaign might beseen as a particularly pure, or advanced, speci-men of this ideal type due to the combination ofnow-mature technologies and a deliberate orga-nizational ethos.

An implication of these findings is that theincentives for campaigns to invest in newmedia might be significantly related to theirstrategic orientation towards building large-scale, labor-intensive operations, which haveboth an online and offline dimension andoften occur at the intersection of the two:Only campaigns that are based on these stra-tegic premises might be able to harness thefull potential of the Web. On the other hand,if Internet tools continue to change the econ-omies of scale in direct-contact campaign-ing—as most of our interviewees believe theydid in 2008 and will continue doing in thefuture—then field organization may becomemore relevant in U.S. campaigns as a result.This is also to be expected in light of the factthat voter mobilization seems to be payinghigher electoral dividends than in the past(Endersby, Petrocik, & Shaw, 2006). How-ever, once again Internet consultants andoperatives do not see the Web as fundamen-tally transforming the dynamics of politicalorganization and mobilization: 24 of ourinterviewees agreed on this point, as exem-plified by these quotes:

I don’t think [the Internet] changes any-thing. Organizing is organizing. [. . .]Online organizing is just making it easierfor campaigns to ask people to getinvolved and for people to learn aboutyour campaign or your ideas. (ScottGoodstein)

The best online campaigns are the onesthat recognize that they have a lot to learnfrom hundreds of years of campaigning.[. . .] I don’t think the Internet changesanything, I think it gives us different waysto do the same things and makes doingthings easier. (Tracy Russo)

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I think even more than the field sidechanging, the new media side changed alot, because its mindset was not, “How dowe get people engaged online?,” it alwayswas, “How do we get people online to goout and work in the field program?” (JoyCushman)

On this subject, however, while 16 of our inter-viewees manifested full agreement, a sizeableminority of eight expressed qualified agree-ment: Six consultants and two operativesemphasized that, while the Internet has notchanged the way campaigns are run and voterscontacted, they have made these processesmore efficient and have lowered the barriers forcitizens to become engaged in politics, as theyare no longer bounded by most of the time andspace constraints that used to hinder participa-tion in the past.

In sum, the Internet’s impact on elections isconsidered to be contingent on the candidate’spersonality and message, and in turn by theirability to generate movement-like enthusiasmamong supporters. Furthermore, the power ofthe new media is seen as dependent on the cam-paign’s strategic orientation to grassroots orga-nizing. That the Internet is not considered as astandalone force, but as part of a multifacetedprocess where campaign strategy and organiza-tion play significant roles, brings us to the orga-nizational issues raised by new mediaelectioneering and how they were addressed inthe campaign.

TOP-DOWN AND/OR BOTTOM-UP? HYBRID CAMPAIGN

ORGANIZATIONS AND SHIFTING POWER RELATIONSHIPS

The 2008 Presidential race offered examplesof radically different models of campaign orga-nizations, which had significant implicationsfor the adoption and effectiveness of Internettools. Twenty-three interviewees, equally bal-anced between Republicans (11) and Democrats(11) together with one Independent, identifiedsignificant organizational differences between

the Obama and the McCain campaigns. The lat-ter was often judged to be more institutionaland less open to external input, to the extentthat, for instance, supporters who organizedevents through McCain’s Web site neededapproval from the campaign before their eventwas published.2 By contrast, 26 consultants andoperatives observed that the 2008 campaignmarked the development of a hybrid organiza-tional model that integrated hierarchical andparticipatory aspects, which had until recentlybeen treated as mutually exclusive in electoralorganizations, and that the Obama campaignbest embodied such a hybrid model. MichaelTurk, who directed George W. Bush’s 2004e-campaign, claims that the Bush and DeanPresidential campaigns can be seen as idealtypes of organizational polar opposites: Whilethe former was based on strict control of volun-teer activity through detailed instructions andmetrics-based accountability, the latter was, atleast in the online realm, an almost entirely bot-tom-up endeavor, premised on the idea thatelecting Dean was a side effect of his support-ers’ engaging with one another. While the Bushcampaign was strictly centralized, the Deancampaign was not decentralized, but, rather,was acentric in its relationship with supporters,which, as we noted earlier, resulted in conflictswhen the spontaneous efforts of its volunteerscollided with the campaign’s top-down mes-sage dissemination. Turk argues that “Obamalearned very well the lessons of both those cam-paigns. [. . .] They had the human connection,they had the sort of Howard Dean model, butthey also applied to the Howard Dean modelthe Bush idea that [. . .] you need to make surethat those people are making their numbers.”Obama’s hybrid organizational model synthe-sized those two opposites because it acknowl-edged the relevance of both structure andspontaneity and moved fairly seamlessly andeclectically between these two models, as Ganzand Bird explain:

It is not either/or, whether you look at it asbeing top-down or bottom-up or whetheryou look at it as being part and whole. [. . .]It must be very clear from the get-go thatstructure enables cooperation and creativity,

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it’s not a constraint on it, it rather creates aspace for it to be meaningful, and parts needto be parts of a whole in order to be able totranscend the limitations of localism. (Ganz)

I think what we were able to do is com-bine the sort of empowerment model interms of the way we related to people, butalso putting them into a structure thatmade sense so that people knew what theirgoals were, they knew what they wereresponsible for and they were being heldaccountable, but yet they had the ability toreally take ownership. (Bird)

In a more iconic way, Goodstein argues that “alot has been written about online organizingand the grassroots ‘revolution.’ Well, thegrassroots revolution still needs to be orga-nized.” Consequently, the Obama campaigndid not see control and participation asconflicting goals and turned what used to beconsidered a trade-off into a multiplier mecha-nism by which online supporters’ entrepre-neurial activities were integrated with aninstitutional structure that maintained somedirectional power on them. The interplay ofnew political technologies and hybrid organi-zational developments has thus replaced thedilemma between centralization and decentral-ization with mechanisms that breed distributedstructures that are both scalable and controlla-ble and merge practices drawn from paradigmsthat were previously believed to be mutuallyexclusive.

The question of how the combination ofthese two models was achieved then arises.Most of the evidence points to the importanceof data-assisted guidance, which was men-tioned by 24 of our interviewees. One of themain tenets of the Obama campaign, as we havealready seen, was the imperative to integrate thesupporters’ spontaneous online activities withthe campaign’s strategic goals and on-the-ground operations. So Obama’s staff constantlyrelied on the Internet to provide clear requeststo volunteers in order to effectively channeltheir behavior, as Hughes explains:

The overall philosophy was truly ahybrid approach: We wanted people to

self-organize, we thought that self-organizing was really the cornerstone ofthe campaign, so anybody could createany event, anytime, anywhere, and thatwas certainly the basic tenet of what webelieved in. But, at the same time, wereally believed in structuring what thecommunity was doing, suggesting asmany things as we could that would bedirectly helpful to the campaign, whilealso providing support to the activists whowere really feeding into the larger cam-paign goals.

In practical terms, although Obama’s Web siteallowed visitors to freely engage in variousefforts and to organize some at their discretion,it also explicitly requested that particular activi-ties and events be carried out by a precise set ofvolunteers, on a certain day, in a specific area,and with defined goals; it provided selectiveincentives, such as help and recognition fromcampaign leadership and staff, to those volun-teers that most closely followed the instruc-tions; it encouraged supporters to increase theircontributions by asking them to raise their levelof involvement, for instance, from attending ahouse party to hosting one; and finally, it pro-vided training both offline, in dedicated orga-nizing camps, and online, through Web videosand detailed “how-to” information pages. AsBird explains, “a lot of campaigns become top-down because they are afraid that their volun-teers will do stuff that they don’t want them todo. That happens when you’re not given cleargoals and then people go on and do whateverthey want to do and there is no structure.” Inproviding volunteers with explicit and detaileddirections, the use of individual data to targetmessages and tasks was paramount, as Rosparsexplains:

Through the use of data, you can betterdirect the work of people who are doingstuff from the bottom-up. So, what’s theuse of having a bunch of people doingbottom-up canvassing and phone-bakingif the data is not fed back into the systemto measure effectiveness and target differ-ent universes of voters in the same way

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that they would if they came into theoffice? [. . .] If somebody who is a veteranlogs onto [Obama’s online volunteeringtool] to make phone calls, and the systemserves him up voters who are veterans,that’s an important use of data that helpsgrow a more bottom-up community ofveterans that are helping the campaign.

Obama’s hybrid organizational model there-fore rested on the equilibrium between support-ers’ movement-like entrepreneurial activismand the campaign’s ability to institutionallymonitor and direct it. Because it actively man-aged the flow of volunteer information ratherthan passively observing it, the campaign couldmake relatively safe assumptions as to theprogress and outcome of its supporters’ efforts.From Howard’s (2006) viewpoint, thisapproach can be seen as a further extension ofthe realm of managed citizenship, as itincreases the power of campaign managerswhile at the same time encourages carefullycontrolled citizen participation. On the otherhand, database technologies also create oppor-tunities for deeper volunteer engagement andmore trustful relationships between campaignsand supporters. Both the Obama campaign and,to a lesser degree, the McCain campaign notonly shared their voter-contact data with theironline supporters, but they also allowed them toedit such information, thus marking a signifi-cant departure from a recent past in which polit-ical organizations jealously concealed thesedata from outsiders. From the campaigns’ per-spective, the ability to guide and monitor volun-teers’ activities through Internet-shared dataalleviates the preoccupation that control is lostwhen supporters deliver messages, thus encourag-ing political organizations to become more opento outside participation and to adopt more flexibleand grassroots-oriented power arrangements.

Indeed, most (23 out of 31) of our inter-viewees emphasized that, in this hybrid envi-ronment, supporters tend to be more docile andreliable than is commonly assumed by bothscholars and political operatives. Remarkably,the majority of both Democratic and Republi-can sources agreed on this score (11 and 12,respectively, out of 15), notwithstanding the

fact that Republicans have been described bymany of our informants, from both parties, asnot trusting volunteers enough to cede themsome control over the campaign message andthus preferring hierarchical and centralizedorganizations. As Kevin Thurman highlighted,supporters can be considered reliable to theextent that they receive clear directions and aremotivated by a specific goal such as electing acandidate:

I think it’s a big mistake to think that a lotof the organizing that is done online is notas top-down as the campaigns in the past.[. . .] The Internet has allowed creatingorganizations that have very specificgoals, such as electing a candidate orfighting a proposition, and so in the end,as much as they may be bottom-up,because they are directed towards tryingto achieve a specific goal, they are morelikely to follow a top-down direction thanthe old political institutions that had theirown interests and goals.

This notion recalls Bimber’s (2003) concept ofevent-based political membership and high-lights one of its seldom mentioned potentialconsequences: As citizens self-select specific,time-bound, and goal-oriented causes in anenvironment that offers multiple low-barrierengagement opportunities, savvy organizationsmight be able to wield more power over theirmembers than was the case with permanent-membership bureaucratic structures. While theconsultants and operatives interviewed for thisstudy emphasize that the Obama campaignstrongly relied on individual empowerment andgrassroots activity, summarized in its “Respect– Empower – Include” mantra, they also notethat these efforts required a robust structure anda conspicuous organizational effort, whichinvolved direction and guidance as well as dia-logue and openness. So, there seems to be moreof a dialectic relationship between centrifugaland centripetal dynamics, rather than a sheermove towards decentralization. The extent towhich top-down and bottom-up dynamics com-plemented each other is apparent in Russo’scomments:

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There has been a lot of chatter about themodel that the Obama campaignemployed which was, on the surface, verybottom-up, very grassroots-driven, butwhen you really look critically at it, eventhough they were putting a lot of responsi-bility in the hands of their supporters, theywere ultimately directing those tasks andthey were driving that process so that sup-porters were channeling their energiestowards something that would yield thegoals that the Obama campaign was look-ing for. [. . .] It’s kind of shepherding indi-viduals through the process.

What on the surface appears to be spontaneousself-organization powered by new media isbetter understood as a relationship where thecampaign has not renounced the idea of exer-cising influence altogether, but is finding newways to achieve such a purpose though a blendof institutional and entrepreneurial modes ofengagement in collective action. A similarnotion can be found in Lira’s argument that, asa result of changes in communication and orga-nization dynamics, campaigns should substituteguidance for control in their message opera-tions: “When you are guiding something youare not controlling it, you have people who arefollowing you willingly to that message.” Thus,our analysis of the Obama campaign indicatesthat the intersection between political dynamicsand Internet technologies is breeding hybridorganizational structures that blend top-downand bottom-up ideal types, promote the cou-pling of horizontal and vertical relationships,and in the process enable campaigns to developmessage-distribution apparatuses that offer theadvantages of both mass scale and personalcontact, while careful guidance enhanced bydatabase techniques helps minimize the costs ofdiminished message control. These arrange-ments can be seen as steps towards reducing thetransaction costs caused by information over-supply that Nielsen (2009) identifies as sourcesof various communication and organizationdysfunctions.

However, the balance between empoweringsupporters and maintaining control over thestrategy and key tactics was not achieved once

and for all by the Obama campaign. Oneepisode during the presidential race showedthat tensions can arise when the top-down andbottom-up paradigms are integrated. In lateJune 2008, a group was formed on Obama’sonline volunteer-networking platform to protestagainst the Senator’s decision to vote in favorof expanding the Foreign Intelligence Surveil-lance Act (FISA), which deals with physicaland electronic surveillance to prevent terrorism.The group quickly grew to about 24,000 mem-bers and became the largest on Obama’splatform. That a tool designed by a campaignshould be used to voice criticism against thecandidate was a natural consequence ofObama’s emphasis on citizen empowermentand grassroots campaigning so that, as claimedby Rospars, supporters of the Democratic nomi-nee considered his online platform “a publicutility that they could use to express their sup-port.” That they employed it to express dissentrather than support was, however, a potentiallydisruptive corollary of Obama’s hybrid organi-zational model. The campaign chose to respondby openly acknowledging the legitimacy of thegroup’s presence on Obama’s volunteer net-work, and the candidate addressed the onlinedissenters in a message in which, while notchanging his stance on FISA, he openly wel-comed his supporters’ efforts to influence hisdecision and the development of the law. Whilethis unusual choice by the Obama campaignpartially muted the controversy, campaigns thatpromote a certain degree of bottom-up empow-erment are poised to encounter similar chal-lenges and must devise responses that, whilereaffirming the candidate’s position and rela-tive autonomy from pressures from below, donot overly contradict the movement-like orga-nizational principles on which supporters trustthe campaign to be rooted.

Obama’s hybrid model, which, as we sawearlier, came into being as a result of the inter-play of various contextual, strategic, and orga-nizational conditions, is regarded by ourinterviewees as the most effective and innova-tive in the 2008 campaign. However, it was notthe only organizational model that could beobserved in the Presidential contest. On the onehand, as was previously mentioned, McCain’s

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campaign employed a more traditional, lessflexible, command-and-control structure thatemphasized relatively unidirectional uses of thenew media, aimed at distributing carefully con-trolled messages to targeted audiences and atinfluencing mass media coverage of the candi-date. In this respect, McCain’s Internet strategyderived from, and was consistent with, broaderdecisions about the overall campaign strategyand organizational structure. However, thesechoices are seen by most of our interviewees ashaving impeded, more than any possible lack oftechnical expertise and resources, McCain’sability to harness the new media to build a net-work of supporters, mobilize his voters, andraise funds.

While the McCain campaign was quite cen-tralized, controlled, and institutional—bothoffline and online—the election featured atleast one other campaign that is relevant for thisdiscussion, the Ron Paul primary campaign.Paul’s organization employed Internet tools togive its supporters complete freedom to cam-paign on behalf of its candidate, with so littleinput from the staff that Justine Lam calls eventhe Dean campaign a top-down operation com-pared to Paul’s bottom-up model, which she sodescribes:

We had a very decentralized approach, wedid not take the top-down route [. . .].There were some things that we asked[supporters] to do, like spread the wordand make a donation, and find a MeetUpgroup in your area, but other than that wedid not give them too much direction fromthe campaign [. . .]. People would call usand would have a lot of ideas about thingswe could do, and we would tell them,“Yeah, that’s great, we can’t actually tellyou what to do because of the federalelection campaign regulation, but youshould feel free to use your creativity andmoney and time and energy and every-thing you know to spread the word,” andthey took that message and did that exactthing, and they knew they should not relyon us for everything and be more indepen-dent, more free I guess to experiment. Ithink that’s the beauty of it and that’s

what allowed us to harness the energy todo things online and offline.

Paul’s campaign choice to not control itsonline volunteers by any means, apart from rareconference calls, helped him attract a signifi-cant following online, mostly composed oflibertarians who were ideologically inclinedtowards these decentralized and autonomousforms of political engagement. This bottom-upmodel benefitted Paul’s campaign in that itssupporters spontaneously organized large fund-raising drives that collected about $35 millionin the presidential cycle, including two one-daydrives that raised $4.2 million and $6 million,respectively. However, even Lam acknowl-edges that such a fully entrepreneurial organi-zational model had its downsides: “You lose theability to run a top-down organization, which Ithink is still crucial for a campaign because youneed to tell people what to do; especiallytowards the end, in the last few months, youneed to have people organized and you need tolet them know what they should do.”

We can conclude from this juxtaposition thatthe adoption and the effectiveness of a hybridmodel such as that developed by the Obamacampaign are contingent on various other stra-tegic and organizational choices, which canlead to various positions in the top-down/bottom-up continuum. Other models, such asMcCain’s relatively institutional structuringand Paul’s purely entrepreneurial approach,were also enacted, but their results, and theirimpact on the effectiveness of Internet tools,were no match for those enjoyed by the Demo-cratic nominee.

DISCUSSION

Before assessing the implications of ourfindings, we must acknowledge the main limi-tations of this study, which are related to itsobject as well as its methodology, that is, to itsbeing a qualitative case study of a single coun-try in an exceptional election.

In terms of the content and focus of thisresearch, the 2008 U.S. presidential race isclearly a deviant case by comparison with other

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elections both diachronically and synchroni-cally. As we wrote in the first paragraph, thecampaign was unique and unprecedented inmany ways, and thus our findings are not easilygeneralized to other elections or political sys-tems. However, in a fast-evolving domain suchas Internet politics, every significant innovationat first bears the semblance of an exception,only to become the rule shortly after. Oneshould be reminded that “before Dean and the‘Deaniacs,’ Internet campaigning was widelyregarded as dead and buried” (Chadwick, 2006,p. 144). While many analysts did not changethat assessment even after 2004, the innova-tions introduced by the Dean campaign werereplicated, adapted, and perfected by most can-didates in 2008. As online electioneering is afluid environment, where change and learningconstantly occur through emulation and trial-and-error, research must be able to comprehendthe discontinuities introduced by path-breakingpolitical actors and exceptional events in orderto then develop broader generalizations.

With respect to methodology, any qualitativeapproach such as the one employed in thisstudy bears well-known shortcomings, mostnotably the lack of hypothesis-testing capabilityand limited external validity. These downsides,however, are compensated by the ability ofqualitative techniques to provide a richer,thicker description of the phenomena that arestudied. Specifically, qualitative interviewsallowed us to reconstruct the operating philoso-phies of elite political actors that are particu-larly well placed to steer the course of Internetcampaigning. Consequently, while any general-ization across either time or space from thiscase study would be unwarranted, the insightsthat we could draw from intensely engagingwith the meso level of e-campaigning could nothave been achieved through statistical methods.

One final cautionary note is that interviewingcampaign professionals and operatives mightintroduce biases that could affect the validity ofour data. The most obvious one is that oursources, particularly consultants, might not bewilling to reveal their “trade secrets,” especiallywhen they think that they are valuable to theirclients and unknown to their competitors. Inconducting the interviews, we strived to avoid

such bias by openly emphasizing the researchnature of our endeavor, by asking professionalsto focus less on the techniques they employedand more on their contextual limitations andorganizational consequences, and by refrainingfrom probing consultants about the specifics ofhow online tools were built and perfected, espe-cially in regard to fundraising, which is arguablythe topic most likely to elicit elusive responses.A related potential source of bias lies in the pos-sibility that consultants and operatives intention-ally understate the power of e-campaigning toolsin order to boost their legitimacy by implyingthat their candidate’s success or failure wassomehow inescapable. While this might par-tially contradict the expectation that consultantstend to “oversell their goods” due to theirvested interest in advancing the tools they pro-duce, we cannot rule out the possibility that,because political collective action is enhancedby the ability to create movement-like dynam-ics, those who believe they possess the recipefor eliciting them might publicly disguise itunderneath the pretense of seemingly unstoppa-ble tides that would have occurred with or with-out the new media.

Ambiguity is, however, an inherent difficultyin assessing the dynamics of hybrid organiza-tions which leave their footprints in differentrealms of collective action. The more complexorganizations become, the more room there iswithin them for differences between elites’ andparticipants’ views and the greater the leaders’leeway to strategically present specific facets oftheir organizations to different audiences(Flanagin et al., 2006, p. 44). As Nielsen (2009)has shown, users might develop views and hab-its that are remarkably different from thosedescribed by the producers of online campaign-ing tools.

While the sheer possibility of these biaseswarrants caution and demands further scrutinyof our findings through different methodolo-gies, three considerations encourage us to trustthe internal validity of our results. First, ratherthan being taken at face value, all the state-ments reported in this study were carefullyscrutinized through comparison with otherinterviewees’ viewpoints, theory, and empiricalevidence from previous studies. Second, as

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readers can appreciate by comparing the assess-ments reported in Table 2 and the interviewquestionnaires reported in the Appendix, ourfindings stemmed from the answers providedby the consultants and operatives that we con-versed with, rather than being in any way builtin, or embedded, in the questions that we askedto elicit their reflections. For instance, on thesubject of organizational models, we promptedour sources to reflect about the apparent trade-off between control and empowerment, butnothing in our questions suggested that thisconundrum could be solved through a hybridarrangement that could reconcile these twoopposites: This idea came entirely from ourinformants, although it confirmed our expecta-tions and various insights from the literature.Third, most interviewees, both consultants andoperatives,3 Republican and Democratic, win-ning and losing, involved in the primary and inthe general election, working in new mediaunits and in other campaign departments, pro-vided remarkably similar accounts of thephenomena we investigated. None of the state-ments reported in Table 2 was agreed on by lessthan 23 out of 31 interviewees, and the averagenumber of informants who supported a state-ment was almost 26; even when agreement on acertain issue was less than unanimous, it wasmostly because some of our sources had notassessed it during our conversation, rather thanbecause they disagreed with it.

Our findings have significant implicationsfor election campaigns, political organizations,and citizen participation, which we now brieflydiscuss. First, this study has shown that there iswidespread agreement across party lines in U.S.politics about the main dynamics that shapeInternet campaigning. The growth of an autono-mous class of consultants and operativesspecialized in new media strategy and tacticscan be expected to lead to increasingly stan-dardized e-campaigning methods andapproaches, but at the same time the incessanttechnological innovations and changes in theexpectations and behaviors of the public willcontinue to benefit those innovators whoachieve a competitive advantage in this arenathrough a combination of careful observation ofprevious experiences, big-picture strategizing,

and incremental experimentations. As all theseaspects are constantly evolving, no study at thispoint can say a definitive word on the develop-ments of Internet politics, and thus futureresearch will need to constantly reassess theseissues based on the innovations introduced ineach campaign cycle.

The second aspect that emerges from thisstudy, however, is that success in online cam-paigning is by no means simply a matter ofadopting the newest (or costliest) tools avail-able, or of uncritically reproducing and repack-aging platforms that were helpful to othercandidates. The effectiveness of Internet appli-cations depends on contextual factors, such asthe personality and message of the candidateand the ability to elicit a strong grassrootsresponse from a large enough portion of theelectorate. When these forces are already inplace, the new media can efficiently channelsuch energies toward electoral and politicalgoals; by contrast, when these preconditions areabsent, the impact of online tools can beexpected to be marginal. One implication ofthese findings is that a one-size-fits-allapproach to e-campaigning by political actors isgenerally unwarranted. Although in 2008 mostcandidates adopted a similar set of online tools,the outcomes of their efforts depended on con-textual and organizational factors. WhileObama’s success can be expected to encourageimitation in the United States and elsewhere,the impact of these efforts will depend on atleast three sets of preconditions: (a) the candi-date’s leadership and inspirational skills, (b) theresonance of the campaign message with asufficiently large and active portion of the elec-torate, and (c) the campaign’s strategic prioriti-zation of on-the-ground, grassroots campaignactivities. As these findings illuminate intra-institutional dynamics, they can be integratedwith the work of scholars who are investigatinghow different institutional arrangements affectonline campaigning (Anstead & Chadwick,2008).

Furthermore, our conclusions imply thatthere might be unequal microlevel incentivesfor different candidates and campaigns—and,possibly, parties—to develop and prioritizeonline communication. For politicians who

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cannot inspire a large, movement-like follow-ing among supporters, or who do not find itcost-effective to significantly rely on personalvoter contact and build the on-the-ground orga-nization that it requires, it would be irrational toheavily rely on Internet electioneering. Whatremains to be seen is whether the competitiveadvantages that can be reaped from effectivenew media campaigning will turn out to belarge enough to spur a process of natural selec-tion by which candidates and campaigns that donot fulfill the conditions highlighted in thisstudy will progressively be winnowed out ofthe competitive field. These are intriguing ques-tions, on which we encourage future research.

A third finding of this study is that, as theInternet opens up new avenues for citizenengagement and empowerment, political orga-nizations develop innovative hybrid arrange-ments to respond to the challenges that arise asa result of the changing relationship betweenleaders and followers. In the 2004 presidentialrace, Dean developed the prototype of an appar-ently directionless bottom-up campaign thatrelied solely, or nearly so, on Internet-enhancedvolunteer participation; by contrast, the Bushcampaign provided the model for a top-down,metric-driven, command-and-control operation.In 2008, the Obama organization devisedapproaches, tools, and practices that combinedelements of both models, relinquishing controlwhile maintaining guidance, encouraging self-direction while exercising power, enabling cre-ativity while assuring purpose and accountabil-ity. Whether such a hybrid structure can bereplicated and perfected is, again, a question forfuture research, but our findings clearly confirmthe point made by other scholars that “althoughorganizations are adopting more entrepreneur-ial modes of interacting . . . they are not neces-sarily giving up institutional modes” (Flanaginet al., 2006, p. 49). In the past, online politicshas often been caricatured as the realm of spon-taneity, self-affirmation, and uncompromisingindividual freedom, while the evidence pre-sented here reminds us that a campaign is aninterdependent “socio-technical network” (Foot& Schneider, 2006, p. 18) that arises with a spe-cific purpose, the pursuit of which requires strat-egy, structure, organization, and compliance.

While the development of e-campaigning offersincreasing opportunities for citizens to partici-pate in the political process on their own termsand at their discretion, it also provides campaign-ers with tools that enable efficient data-assistedguidance of purposeful supporters. Although theformal bureaucratic hierarchies and command-and-control procedures of yesteryear might notbe fully reproducible in online political organiza-tions, they can be replaced by softer and subtlermechanisms rather than simply giving way tospontaneity and self-assertion. Campaigns andpolitics still require balancing individual and col-lective prerogatives, which the Internet offersnew avenues to reconcile.

Our findings regarding the consensus amongconsultants and operatives about the effective-ness of Obama’s hybrid organizational modellead us to hypothesize that future campaigns willlikely try to adopt similar models. However, ourstudy also pointed out that the feasibility and suc-cess of the hybrid arrangements we described arecontingent on the contextual factors identifiedabove and breed challenges as well as opportuni-ties for campaigns, as the FISA incident showed.As online electioneering professionals and opera-tives recognize the constraints and the risks, aswell as the advantages, of the hybrid modeldeveloped by the Obama campaign, the degree towhich they will imitate it will depend on whetheror not they anticipate that its benefits outweighits costs. It is by no means certain that campaignsin the future will strike a balance between controland participation similar to Obama’s, but it canbe expected that acknowledgment of the oppor-tunities arising from data-assisted guidance willreduce the perceived costs of relinquishing amodicum of control. As both Flanagin et al.(2006) and Chadwick (2007) point out, theextension and integration of different participa-tory repertoires and organizational arrangementsdoes not produce one dominant paradigm, but aplurality of solutions that can be creatively har-nessed and integrated by different politicalactors, or by the same political organization car-rying out different tasks and interacting with dif-ferent sectors of the public.

One final lesson to be learned from this studyis that the decisive factor in the trajectory ofcontemporary campaigns is not their sheer

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investment in new media tools, as online politi-cal technology is becoming commonplace to thepoint of being considered a “commodity” amongcampaign consultants and operatives. Thus,research needs to better comprehend the inter-play between political, strategic, organizational,and communication variables, and the extent towhich innovations in online campaigning enableelites and citizens to advance their causes andachieve their goals. That the literature on Internetpolitics is moving from assessing the contents ofcandidates’ and parties’ online operations toevaluating their wider organizational implica-tions is thus a welcome development, to whichthis study has sought to contribute.

NOTES

1. Data analyzed in this study will be made availableat Dataverse (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/jitp) begin-ning on November 1, 2010. The data will be providedimmediately for replication purposes upon request.

2. Only Ben Olson explicitly claimed that the McCaincampaign “definitely encouraged grassroots activity andbottom-up activity that is the cornerstone of any success-ful campaign” and did not acknowledge differences withthe Obama campaign on this score. By contrast, mostRepublican interviewees admitted that McCain’s organi-zation was less open and more controlled than Obama’s,although, understandably, their assessments tended to bemore nuanced than those by Democratic sources.

3. As was previously highlighted, on two issuesrelated to the magnitude of the effects of the Internet onpolitical dynamics and campaign organization, while mostconsultants expressed opinions similar to those voiced byoperatives, they were slightly more likely to qualify theirstatements by emphasizing areas in which online toolshave significant effects and transformational power. Thisfinding is not surprising in light of the fact that consultantshave a vested interested in promoting the products andstrategic advice they sell, while operatives tend to be moredetached from their field of expertise. However, thesedifferences amount to undertones rather than clear-cutcontrasts, as the numbers in Table 2 demonstrate.

REFERENCES

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Bimber, B. (2003). Information and American democracy:Technology in the evolution of political power.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Bimber, B., & Davis, R. (2003). Campaigning on line:The Internet in US elections. Oxford, England: OxfordUniversity Press.

Chadwick, A. (2006). Internet politics: States, citizens,and new communication technologies. New York, NY:Oxford University Press.

Chadwick, A. (2007). Digital network repertoires andorganizational hybridity. Political Communication,24(3), 283–301.

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Foot, K., & Schneider, S. (2006). Web campaigning.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

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APPENDIX

Questionnaire Design and Wording

The questionnaire consisted of three tiers ofquestions. The first tier included 10 questions,which were asked to all interviewees regardlessof their role in the campaign. Question orderand wording varied depending on the inter-viewee’s specific skills, as well as the contextand the development of the conversation, butcontent did not. Here are the questions as pre-pared for delivery:

1. Please describe your role in the campaignand the activities you oversaw.

2. What is the relationship between onlinecampaigning and external political reali-ties? Can the Internet drive political pro-cesses, or is it mostly a channel forexisting realities?

3. How do campaigns motivate their onlinesupporters? What factors are crucial inencouraging people to engage online andoffline? What difference do Internet toolsmake?

4. What role do factors such as party, candi-date, and message play in motivating indi-viduals for online and offlineparticipation? How did these aspects playout in the 2008 election?

5. Internet tools have been said to allow peo-ple to “organize without organization.”How do campaigns deal with the trade-offbetween structure and organization, onthe one hand, and grassroots, bottom-upownership of the campaign, on the other?

6. Online campaigning has been said to changethe economies of scale in fundraising,canvassing, and phone banking. Recently,campaigns have rediscovered the importanceof the ground game to win elections. Whatrole do you think the Internet has played inthis process?

7. Conventional wisdom claims that,because online users self-select the con-tents they are exposed to, little or no per-suasion can occur over the new media.Did your campaign accept this as a real-ity? How did it try to circumvent it?

8. According to various metrics, there was asignificant gap in online success betweenthe Obama and McCain campaigns andbetween Democratic and Republican candi-dates during the primaries. Do you agree?How do you explain these differences?

9. Do you think Republicans and Democratsface similar hurdles when trying toengage their supporters online?

10. Compared to 2004, did 2008 constitute aparadigm shift in online politics or just adeeper, more thorough replication of theparadigm of online engagement inaugu-rated in 2004?

The second tier included five questions that weretailored to the specific expertise and roles of oursources in the 2008 campaign. For example,Marshall Ganz was asked about the organiza-tional values and practices that he advised theObama campaign to adopt, Justin Germanyreceived questions about online video productionand distribution, Christian Ferry was quizzedabout the strategic role of the Internet in theMcCain campaign, and Sam Graham-Felsen wasasked about the process of content production inObama’s blogs. Those interviewees who did notperform a specialized role in the campaign, suchas Internet directors, online communicationsdirectors, and so on, received at least some of thefollowing general questions:

1. The Internet can be seen as a tool to dis-tribute information or as an environmentto enhance participation and organizepeople. How did these two dimensions

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play out in the campaign? Are there anytradeoffs between these two goals?

2. How did the campaign conceive of theonline audience, and how did it segment it?

3. The 2008 campaign saw an increasingrole for social-networking sites such asFacebook and external websites such asYouTube and Eventful. What was therelationship between the campaign Website and these external sites?

4. To what extent is the Internet now inte-grated with other campaign departments?Are there differences in the relationshipswith them? What is still to be done?

5. With the increasing role and effectivenessof Internet tools, one issue that becomesmore important is how to keep the infra-structure built during a campaign workingand growing between campaigns. Howhas that affected your work this time

around, and do you see signs that whatwas accomplished in 2008 will be pre-served for the next election cycles?

Finally, the third tier included five itemsreserved for follow-up enquiries and questionsthat addressed issues that were not featured inthe prepared questionnaire but had been raisedduring the conversation. This part of the inter-view was specifically designed to cast furtherlight on topics that the interviewee had raisedonly in passing, or on which he/she had shownsigns of having an interesting viewpoint or aunique perspective.

It is important to note that this article hasanalyzed only a portion of the data collectedduring the interviews. Thus, not all the answersto the questions detailed in this Appendix havebeen discussed in the article, but will be thebasis for further studies in the future.

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“Technology Is a Commodity”: The Internet in the 2008 United States Presidential Election

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