Overview

Given the advanced state of digital technology and social media, one would think that the Democratic and Republican Parties would be reasonably well-matched in terms of their technology uptake and sophistication. But as past presidential campaigns have shown, this is not the case. So what explains this odd disparity? Political scientists have shown that Republicans effectively used the strategy of party building and networking to gain campaign and electoral advantage throughout the twentieth century. In Prototype Politics, Daniel Kreiss argues that contemporary campaigning has entered a new technology-intensive era that the Democratic Party has engaged to not only gain traction against the Republicans, but to shape the new electoral context and define what electoral participation means in the twenty-first century. Prototype Politics provides an analytical framework for understanding why and how campaigns are newly technology-intensive, and why digital media, data, and analytics are at the forefront of contemporary electoral dynamics. The book discusses the importance of infrastructure, the contexts within which technological innovation happens, and how the collective making of prototypes shapes parties and their technological futures. Drawing on an innovative dataset of the professional careers of 628 presidential campaign staffers working in technology from 2004-2012 and interviews with campaign elites on both sides of the aisle, Prototype Politics details how and why the Democrats invested more in technology, were able to attract staffers with specialized expertise to work in electoral politics, and founded an array of firms to diffuse technological innovations down ballot and across election cycles. Taken together, this book shows how the differences between the major party campaigns on display in 2012 were shaped by their institutional histories since 2004, as well as that of their extended network of allied organizations. In the process, this book argues that scholars need to understand how technological development around politics happens in time and how the dynamics on display during presidential cycles are the outcomes of longer processes.

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9780199350247

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Reviews

It's said that architecture is politics in stone. Daniel Kreiss shows that the database architecture of technology-intensive campaigning is politics in code. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand innovation in the infrastructure of America's political parties. --David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life In this important book Daniel Kreiss argues that we have entered a 'technology-intensive' era of presidential campaigning-one requiring fluid networks of experts and novices, transforming national parties into 'databases, ' and evoking the socially-embedded politics of a century ago. Skillfully combining data and interpretation, Kreiss traces these changes to the way two decades of electoral outcomes were differentially understood by the Democratic and Republican parties. --Michael X. Delli Carpini, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

It's said that architecture is politics in stone. Daniel Kreiss shows that the database architecture of technology-intensive campaigning is politics in code. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand innovation in the infrastructure of America's political parties. --David Stark, author of The Sense of Dissonance: Accounts of Worth in Economic Life In this important book Daniel Kreiss argues that we have entered a new era of presidential campaigning: one in which the innovative use of integrated databases, computational analytics, and information and communication technologies is paramount; that requires new and fluid networks of experts and novices; that is transforming the national political parties-albeit at different rates-into databases; and that harkens back to the socially-embedded and personalized politics of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Weaving together archival research, fieldwork, depth interviews, and data on the career paths of over 600 campaign staffers, Kreiss convincingly shows that this transformation is not determined by technological change or the innovations of a single campaign, but rather by how election successes and failures over the past two decades were differentially interpreted and reacted to by the Democratic and Republican Parties. --Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean, Annenberg School for Communicat Weaving together archival research, fieldwork, depth interviews, and data on the career paths of over 600 campaign staffers, Kreiss convincingly shows that this transformation is not determined by technological change or the innovations of a single campaign, but rather by how election successes and failures over the past two decades were differentially interpreted and reacted to by the Democratic and Republican Parties. --Michael X. Delli Carpini, Dean, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania

Author Information

Daniel Kreiss is Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an affiliate faculty fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.

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