Digital Campaigning and the 2019 European Parliament Elections: Can the European Union Harness the Participatory and Transnational Potential of Social Media?

The European Union has long suffered from a democratic deficit. Aware of the critiques, EU officials have proposed electoral reforms but despite their best efforts (see the introduction of the direct election of the President of the European Commission), voter turnout continues to decline and perceptions of a distant and unaccountable “Brussels” are widespread. At the same time, at the national level of EU’s Member States and across the Atlantic, digital campaigning is clearly on the rise. More and more political parties invest funds in the professionalization of their digital outreach. Even governmental institutions use social media channels to get out the vote and inform the citizens about the upcoming elections. This paper investigates the extent to which the digital campaigning strategies used to prepare the upcoming EP elections of 2019 are technology-intensive and innovative (Kreiss 2017). The underlying idea is that social media holds a transnational and participatory promise (Bossetta, Dutceac Segesten and Trenz 2017) that the EU could mine and utilize to its advantage in order to solve its democratic deficit problem. I use a combination of qualitative interviews and a network analysis of social media connections to illuminate the answers to these questions. Using my access to insiders in the social media and digital campaigning offices of the European Commission and the European Parliament, as well as of the main European parties represented in the EP, I will conduct interviews in mid-January 2018 with 12 representatives of the digital strategy offices of the institutions mentioned above. Using the accounts of my respondents as the starting nodes, I also perform a social network analysis of the connections made by these digital professionals using harvested data from Twitter and LinkedIn. The findings of the paper bear upon ideas of online citizen mobilization and democratic representation at the supranational level.