What Drives Party Expenditure in Digital Referendum Campaigns? Comparative Evidence from Europe

The global referendum proliferation visible since the start of the 1990’s has often been linked to a civil dissatisfaction with representative democracy, but another strand of literature has instead pointed to political agency (i.e. referendums are triggered mainly by political actors and parties with the goal to strengthen their own position) to explain this phenomenon. As this intentional behavior extends to referendum campaigns through which these actors look to influence voter behavior in their favor, a preliminary question yet to be addressed in the literature rises to the fore: to what extent do political parties actively engage in referendum campaigns? A precise quantitative indicator for this can be attained by looking at the referendum campaign finance of the parties, which forms a solid basis for explaining the level of this engagement. This paper approaches this question with a focus on digital referendum campaigns, acknowledging that social media platforms act as powerful instruments for shaping public opinion and voter behavior. At the same time, while contemporary studies on political finance in electoral campaigns have equally embraced this notion, a similar perspective is still missing when it comes to direct democracy. The study attempts to bridge this knowledge gap by using data-scraping techniques to develop a novel dataset based on META's Ad Library which maps the concrete financial behavior of parties in 13 national referendums in 11 European countries since 2018. Additionally, through multilevel analysis, it will look to single out factors that might explain variation, such as political finance regulations (public funding, spending restrictions), the context of the referendum (topic, legal nature, contestation, presence and expenditure of other campaigning actors, electoral overlap) and characteristics of the parties themselves (income, issue ownership).