| Summary: | How does one study a “social media election”? What does fieldwork during a “WhatsApp election” entail? Does researching a “data-driven campaign” demand new data collection techniques? Over the last decade, scholars of political communication in India have had to grapple with some of these questions as successive general elections in the country have come to be appended with prefixes (‘social media-’, ‘WhatsApp-’, ‘Big Data-’, ‘data-driven-’) that index the valence of technological innovations in the campaigning process. 3D hologram rallies, hashtag wars, deepfake videos, custom-made smartphone apps for party workers—in the last few years, the Indian electorate has seen it all. But, insofar as election campaigns in India have undergone a dramatic facelift, these technological gambits only represent the tip of the iceberg. In my forthcoming book, The Backstage of Democracy: India’s Election Campaigns and The People Who Manage Them, I argue that the rapid developments in the landscape of India’s political communication also represent the ascendant power of a new professional salariat class of technocrats who have emerged as the secret movers and shakers of political affairs (Sharma, 2024). Understanding India’s election campaigns, thus, demands studying shadowy actors like political consultants, spin doctors, pollsters, social media mercenaries, and ‘troll farm’ operators who increasingly provide services to political parties and politicians. Seen in this light, the task for contemporary scholars is not merely to ascertain how visible forms of political communication can be studied, but also how one might be able to analyze the hidden, behind-the-scenes organizational structure of modern election campaigns.
|
|---|