Abstract

This article compares political clientelism and datafied campaigning as two modes of relating politicians/parties and voters that are centred around voter surveillance. It contributes to the discussion on consequences of Big Data by showing similarities of datafied campaigns with a type of electoral politics that pre-dates the advent of mass media and is usually regarded as deficient. It thus departs from the predominant perspective on datafication and surveillance, which draws on Foucault, in order to identify the particular challenges that datafication poses in the realm of democratic electoral politics. They are related to four major aspects in which datafied campaigning resembles political clientelism, as opposed to the combination of ideology, issue-based campaigning and media appeal that characterized Western European party politics in the second half of the 20th century. It personalizes the relationship between politicians and voters with the help of intermediaries; it is based on an asymmetric and iterative monitoring of voters; it implies a strong particularism and an affinity with populist appeals; and it is ambivalent with regard to the volition of voters. The identification of these similarities renders general concerns about the consequences of datafied campaigning for democracy more concrete. It offers a mirror in which seemingly novel practices are revealed to have implications that are well known to be problematic for the quality of democracy.