Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy. Oxford University Press, 2016.

Reigning theoretical perspectives suggest that the Democratic and
Republican Parties should be reasonably well-matched in terms of their
uptake of technology, data, and analytics. But as past presidential
campaigns have shown, and the 2016 race thus far confirms, this is not
the case. So what explains this odd disparity?

Prototype Politics reveals and explains the differences in the
Democratic and Republican parties' ability to wield technology for
electoral ends through a mixed-methods and historical approach that
focuses on innovation, infrastructure, and institutions. The book argues
that contemporary campaigning and political communication has entered a
new technology-intensive era that the Democratic Party has engaged to
not only gain traction against the Republicans, but to shape what
political expression and 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 analysis of the careers of 629 presidential
campaign staffers from 2004-2012, as well as interviews with party
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 outcome of longer processes.

From the blurbs:

"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