Digital Heuristics – Modeling Political Communication in Hybrid Media Environments

Proposal for Panel 5 “Digital Media and Politics”: This paper addresses the question of how we should model and explain communicative practices of political actors in digital communication environments. I will proceed in three steps. I start by sketching the theoretical puzzle that provides the background of my research question: On the one hand, in our modernized and individualized societies democratic authority hinges more and more on successful strategic communicative performance (e.g., Hajer 2009). Moreover, after the analytics turn (Chadwick/Stromer-Galley 2016), the question arises if parties can make use of the vast amount of newly accessible data to increase the efficacy of their communication (Howard 2005). On the other hand, political actors are confronted with an increasingly complex, dynamic and unpredictable communication environment characterized by communicative abundance (Blumler and Kavanagh 1999), a proliferation of channels for political communication and the fragmentation of audiences (Bennett and Iyengar 2010). Digitalization intensifies and accelerates these trends. New hybrid media systems emerge (Chadwick 2013), which challenge preexisting conditions for communication. In theoretical terms the puzzle is: How do political actors orient themselves in the dynamic and changing digital environment of political communication in terms of the strategies and practices they adopt and what consequences does this have? In the second step, I argue that the concept of social heuristics is the appropriate analytical lens through which we should observe actors behavior under those conditions. In political communication research the concept of heuristics has been employed mainly for the analysis of voting decisions of citizens (e.g., Lau and Redlawsk 2001). However, only few studies (e.g. Hersh 2015) use heuristics to study the behavior and communication of political elites. The basic idea is that social actors in complex and dynamic environments do not have full information of all relevant aspects of a situation and the implications of decision alternatives. Instead, they regularly have to rely on a selection of information available to them (Gigerenzer/Brighton 2009; Hertwig/Herzog 2009). My basic hypothesis is that this is also the case for political communicators in the digital environment despite the increasing availability of user related data (boyd/Crawford 2012). I assume that political actors use diverse kinds of heuristics that evolve through learning and experience in the encounter with specific digital communication environments. Against this backdrop, I will theoretically model how social heuristics for the digital communication environment could look like. Especially, I will apply the analytical framework to two phenomena of digital communication: Network media logics and algorithms (Klinger and Svensson 2015; Gillespie 2014). In the third step, I will apply the theoretical model to an analysis of interview material with online communication managers of major political parties in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Italy, in order to test and further explore my theoretical assumptions. The data stem from a collaborative comparative research project on social media and online communication in election campaigns. The results have implications for both the appropriate explanation and evaluation of political communication practices in the digital era.