By Dr. Steve
Patten
If there was
any doubt, the 2015 general election campaign confirmed the arrival of the era
of database politics. All of Canada’s major parties now rely on massive
databases, data analytics and predictive modeling, and data-driven
microtargeting to maximize their opportunities for electoral success. More than
ever before, parties are able to derive intelligence on the electorate from polling
and data mining, and this research informs party strategy, including the
crafting of messages that are likely to win the support of key segments of the
electorate.
But, parties have also built their own voter databases, sometimes
called voter management systems, and these databases are used to identify those
individuals who are likely supporters or could be persuaded to become
supporters. The process of targeted communication designed to influence and
mobilize identified voters is known as microtargeting.
The backbone
of party databases is the electronic voters list – containing the name,
address, gender, and date of birth of each eligible voter – provided by
Elections Canada. The parties merge this list with their membership and donor
records, and then employ a range of techniques to gather and input information
on voters’ cultural background, occupation, policy concerns, and more. The
Conservatives led the pack with the development of their database, the
Constituent Information Management System (CIMS), in 2004. In the 2006 and 2008
general election the CIMS database was effectively employed in battleground
constituencies where a centrally coordinated voter contact programs were used
to identify and get supporters to the polls.
By 2011 all
three major parties had roughly similar databases, but the Conservative
database contained considerably more personal information on voters, and it was
employed most effectively. Thus, as they prepared for the 2015 election, the
NDP and Liberals overhauled their databases, known as Populus and Liberalist,
and invested heavily in training local campaign teams to collect and employ
data in voter persuasion and mobilization. Both parties develop in-house
analytics operations, with the Liberals spending three times what they had
invested in in data and data analytics in 2011.
As an
illustration, the Liberal Party’s 2015 central analytics team employed their
research to develop a predictive model that identified the personal
characteristics of voters who were, first, highly likely to vote and, second,
highly likely to vote Liberal. The analytics team employed this model to
construct a six-tier ranking system that guided the voter identification and
get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts of local campaigns. In one Alberta-based battleground
constituency the local campaign team found that there was a 60% chance that a
visit or telephone call to a tier 1 voter would result in the campaign
identifying a supporter they would want to mobilize on election day. The
corresponding results for tier 2 and 3 were in the 35-40% range, and numbers
dropped off after that. Thus, the decision was made to focus the canvass
campaign on households with tier 1 through 3 voters.
Using an app
designed for smart phones and tablets, Liberal canvassers were provided with
the addresses (or telephone numbers) of the tier 1-3 voters they were to
contact. After speaking with the voter, the canvasser would then use this app
to input information about this voter, including whether or not they indicated
support for the Liberal candidate. Once uploaded to the central Liberalist
database, this information would be available to guide future communication
with that voter.
The
Liberalist software’s functionality includes a capacity to generate letters to
be mailed to voters or send email or text blasts to specific groups of voters.
Most campaigns used these functions to intensify their GOTV efforts, but they
were also used for fundraising and persuasion. Canvassers in some local
campaigns were armed with a variety of centrally produced issue cards, and
information extracted from Liberalist determined which card they would leave
with the voter.
Although
Canada’s parties are still learning how to make the most of their databases and
voter management software, there is no doubt that microtargeting has made for
more efficient GTOV efforts, and even influenced the results in some
battleground constituencies. As the scope and detail of the information in
databases expands, and parties become more proficient at employing microtargeting
in voter persuasion, highly personalized targeted campaign messages will rival
the importance of the messaging of the national campaign and leaders tour,
making campaign communications less and less transparent. In fact, data-driven
microtargeting shifts the focus of partisan campaigns from the work of public
persuasion and the building of a national consensus toward what could be
described as manipulative exercises in private persuasion. Concerns have also
been raised about the fact that party databases are not governed by either of
Canada’s two core privacy laws. The loss of transparency, the manipulative
character of targeted persuasion, and privacy concerns suggest data-driven
microtargeting is not making a positive contribution to Canadian democracy.
This blog
post was initially prepared for a post-election analysis project sponsored jointly
by UBC Press and Samara. The complete collection is available online:
http://www.ubcpress.ca/CanadianElectionAnalysis2015/
This and
related posts are available on Samara’s Blog:
http://www.samaracanada.com/samarablog?category=political-news
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