Risk governance and the evolution of European regulation on digital political campaigning

As the foreign threats to European security have escalated with the possibility of foreign interference in elections, the European and the national regulatory framework have transformed since 2015 in order to respond to the multiple challenges of mis/dis/mal/information. We adopt a novel framework for analysing regulation through risk analysis. We test this original framework of risk governance for digital political campaigning on a vast list of regulatory EU and national documents gathered by the DIGIEFFECT project through quantitative text analysis. More specifically we test how the identification of risks associated with digital campaigning, the risk assessment and risk management are all approached by the EU and by national regulation. We test whether the soft or hard governance tackle all aspects of risk governance in digital political campaigning. Our analysis identifies whether the regulatory frameworks have evolved to serve the interests of the regulators, the interests of the addressees of regulation or the interests of regular citizens. We hence contribute to the strand of literature about policy making and policy effectiveness in general.