Monitoring digital election campaigns: Assessing the transparency ecosystem in the United Kingdom
| Published date | 01 February 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231156084 |
| Author | Katharine Dommett,Sam Power |
| Date | 01 February 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957231156084
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(1) 119 –139
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02633957231156084
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Monitoring digital election
campaigns: Assessing the
transparency ecosystem
in the United Kingdom
Katharine Dommett
University of Sheffield, UK
Sam Power
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
Digital election campaigning has undergone increased levels of scrutiny in recent years, with
numerous calls for improved transparency. One key innovation has been the creation of
online advertising archives offered by social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, and
Snapchat. In this article, we compare what we know about digital campaigning in the United
Kingdom from official election returns and Facebook and Google’s online advertising archives.
We analyse whether both transparency sources provide agreed standards of completeness,
consistency, accuracy, and accessibility. We find that – despite the United Kingdom having an
effectively world-leading transparency regime – this is not the case. We therefore consider
a number of potential reforms to increase knowledge of the workings of campaigns at the
national level.
Keywords
British politics, online campaigning, political advertising, political finance, transparency
Received: 22th March 2022; Revised version received: 16th December 2022; Accepted: 16th December 2022
Introduction
In recent years, there has been significant attention devoted to the question of how digital
technology is used in election campaigns. To date, consideration has been given to the
potential for (and the existence of) digitally mediated foreign interference, voter
Corresponding author:
Sam Power, Department of Politics, University of Sussex, Freeman F41B, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QE, UK.
Email: s.d.power@sussex.ac.uk
1156084POL0010.1177/02633957231156084PoliticsDommett and Power
research-article2023
Article
120 Politics 44(1)
suppression, misinformation, and microtargeting (Gorton, 2016; Howard et al., 2018;
Jamieson, 2013; Nickerson and Rogers, 2014). While some scholars have argued that
these diagnoses represent ‘moral panics’ that distract from more important structural
transformations in the online world (Jungherr and Schroeder, 2021; see also Miller and
Vaccari, 2020), there is nevertheless considerable interest in responding to these trends,
with numerous policy proposals for digital campaign reform at national and international
levels (European Commission, 2021; The Electoral Commission, 2018; Senate (Honest
Ads Act)).
Against this backdrop, we focus on a prevailing tendency to propose transparency as a
means of mitigating concerning trends. Proposed by policymakers (Dommett, 2020),
platform companies (Leerssen et al., 2019), and civil society groups (Privacy International,
n.d.), transparency intuitively appears to be a ‘self-evident good’ (Etzioni, 2010: 389),
and yet it is less clear what new forms of transparency are desired and where existing
resources fall down. This line of questioning is vital to minimise unintended effects
(Cucciniello et al., 2016; Fenster, 2015; Grimmelikhuijsen and Meijer, 2014; Meijer,
2013: 431; Portes et al., 2020; Worthy, 2010) and ensure effective transparency reform.
While some existing analyses have begun to examine the deficiencies of particular trans-
parency initiatives (i.e. electoral records (Dommett and Power, 2019) or advertising
archives (Edelson et al., 2018)), within this article, we make the case for a more holistic
approach that considers the strengths and limitations of the transparency ecosystem. This
approach seeks to recognise the distribution of power beyond state authorities to non-
state actors and notes that information from multiple, not singular actors is key to under-
standing phenomena such as digital campaigning.
In line with this rationale, within this article, we evaluate the strength and limitations
of existing transparency resources by asking: ‘what can we know about digital campaign-
ing from currently available transparency sources within the UK?’ This question enables
us, at the micro level, to unpick the dynamics of digital electoral transparency encoun-
tered in the United Kingdom and to recommend improvements that could be made to the
transparency ecosystem. However, at a second more macro level, this analysis leads us to
argue for a more holistic approach to transparency and leads us to reflect on the require-
ments for this form of multi-actor approach.
Case study
This article utilises a case study of the UK General Election 2019. The United Kingdom
offers an informative case because the principle of electoral transparency is entrenched
within existing institutional structures and systems of oversight. Indeed, the Electoral
Commission (n.d.), created via the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act
(2000) (hereafter PPERA), works to ‘promote public confidence in the democratic pro-
cess and ensure its integrity (no date), and its work is seen to be world leading in this
space (Power, 2020: 130). While other countries such as Canada and the USA possess
similar characteristics (Committee on Standards in Public Life, 2021), we discuss the
United Kingdom as an instrumental case study, in which ‘a particular case is examined
mainly to provide insight into an issue, or to redraw a generalization’ (Stake, 2008: 121).
National elections in the United Kingdom are conducted under a first-past-the-post
electoral system. As a result of this, national politics is dominated by two parties: the
Conservatives and Labour. They have largely alternated as the party of government since
the Second World War, though with periodic episodes of coalition government
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