Data and Targeting in Canadian Politics: Are Provincial Parties Taking Advantage of the Latest Political Technology?

University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository

Graduate Studies The Vault: Electronic Theses and Dissertations

2017-12-18 Data and Targeting in Canadian Politics: Are Provincial Parties Taking Advantage of the Latest Political Technology?

Carlile, Christopher

Carlile, C. (2017). Data and Targeting in Canadian Politics: Are Provincial Parties Taking Advantage of the Latest Political Technology? (Unpublished master's thesis). University of Calgary, Calgary, AB. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/106230 master thesis

University of Calgary graduate students retain copyright ownership and moral rights for their thesis. You may use this material in any way that is permitted by the Copyright Act or through licensing that has been assigned to the document. For uses that are not allowable under copyright legislation or licensing, you are required to seek permission. Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY

Data and Targeting in Canadian Politics: Are Provincial Parties Taking Advantage of the Latest Political Technology?

Christopher N. Carlile

A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS

GRADUATE PROGRAM IN POLITICAL SCIENCE

CALGARY, ALBERTA

DECEMBER, 2017

Abstract

Recent decades have seen dramatic advances in information and communication technology, allowing political campaigns to refine data and target voters in unprecedented ways. However, many of the most sophisticated targeting techniques are absent from Canadian politics. This thesis asks: to what extent are Canadian provincial political parties using advanced database assisted targeting and analytics, and what factors may be affecting their ability to do so? To answer this question, this thesis first determines the most advanced capabilities of data and targeting in political campaigns by analysing the most sophisticated example seen to date: the 2012 Obama for America Presidential Campaign. This thesis then interviews personnel from four different Canadian provincial political parties: The BC Liberal Party, the Alberta New

Democratic Party, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party, and the Ontario

Progressive Conservative Party. These case study interviews explore the extent of

Canadian parties’ database and targeting operations, as well as what factors may be stopping them from using data driven targeting to its fullest extent. These interviews show that the two major factors inhibiting advanced data driven targeting campaigns in

Canada are a lack of sufficient data due to privacy law, and the small scale of single member plurality election campaigns. The most significant finding is that Canadian privacy law prohibits companies from selling private data necessary to create the databases that fuel the most advanced targeting techniques. Therefore, as long as

Canadian privacy law remains this way, it is unlikely that Canadian politics will see the most advanced database assisted targeting and analytics in campaigns.

Preface

This thesis is original, unpublished, independent work by Chris Carlile. The interviews in Chapters four and five are covered by study ID REB15-1773, issued by the

University of Calgary Conjoint Faculties Research Ethics Board for the project: “The use of Databases in Election Campaigns: how are Canadian campaigns taking advantage of advance databasing techniques that have been used by notable campaigns in the US, such as the Obama 2012 Presidential campaign?” The information in this thesis comes from academic and current affairs research, as well as from interviews with personnel from Canadian provincial political parties.

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... i Preface ...... ii Table of Contents ...... iii Chapter 1: Introduction ...... 1 Methods, Definitions and Assumptions ...... 6 Chapter 2: A History of Campaigning ...... 12 Election Campaigns in Context ...... 15 Chapter 3: Obama for America 2012...... 17 Emails and Messaging ...... 18 The Air War: Targeting Political Advertising ...... 19 Creating the Database ...... 20 The Ground War ...... 21 Social Media Tools ...... 23 Online Advertising ...... 24 Effects of Obama for America ...... 27 Chapter 4: Canadian Provincial Political Party Case Studies ...... 29 The Parties ...... 29 The Databases ...... 32 The Information ...... 37 Chapter 5: Data and Targeting in Canadian Parties ...... 40 Supporter Scores and Voter Contact ...... 40 Polling ...... 45 Canada Post Mail ...... 47 Online Targeting Tools ...... 50 Comparative Analysis ...... 57 Chapter 6: Democratic Implications of Advanced Election Targeting ...... 63 The Data Revolution ...... 63 Integrity of the Process ...... 65 The use of Personal Data ...... 66 Data, Analytics, and Party Functions ...... 67

iii

Deteriorating Public Discourse ...... 70 Chapter 7: Conclusion ...... 74 Bibliography ...... 79 Appendix ...... 84

Chapter 1: Introduction

Recent advances in technology create an unprecedented ability to gather and analyze information on the electorate, changing the way election campaigns function in

North American democracy. Advanced computers and the internet enable the digitization of data that was previously stored on paper, meaning that it can be analyzed and manipulated faster than ever before.1 Computers are now powerful enough and widely accessible enough to allow almost any campaign to conduct advanced data mining, analytics, and targeting. This capability has changed how political parties run election campaigns. Campaigns now have enough information on the electorate to target people at the individual level, based on consumer preferences and partisan identifiers gathered from a wide variety of information sources. Overall, data and analytics are increasing the efficiency of almost every aspect of the election campaign.

These advanced targeting techniques are being widely used by high profile campaigns in the United States, with the most notable being the Obama for America

2012 presidential election campaign. There is much discussion about these data fueled innovations in American campaigns, but it remains to be seen if Canadian campaigns are making the same advances. This begs the question: to what extent are Canadian political parties utilizing database assisted targeting and analytics to run their election campaigns and what are the factors that affect their ability to do this?

1 Judith S. Trent, Robert V. Friedenbert, and Robert E. Denton Jr., Political Campaign Communications: Principles and Practices, Seventh edition (Plymouth, UK: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011), 79.

After consulting the literature and considering observations of various election campaigns, three reasonable hypotheses stand out. Firstly, Canadian campaigns could lack the necessary expertise required to run the most advanced data driven targeting campaigns. The Obama 2012 Presidential campaign hired an analytics department consisting of 54 people, many of whom were analytics engineers taken straight from the technology industry.2 Canadian campaigns have not set up a similar operation, which could explain why this type of campaigning has yet to surface in this country. Secondly, large US campaigns like Obama for America 2012 spent large sums of money developing specialized tools and applications for their databases.3 Given their relatively small size and resource base, it is reasonable to consider that Canadian campaigns may not have the money to develop similar, cutting edge tools. Thirdly, Canadian campaigns operate on a smaller scale than US campaigns. Even if presidential campaigns are omitted because of their unique size and scope, US congressional districts average over 700,000 people, whereas Canadian electoral districts trend closer to 111,000 – and can be several times smaller than this at the provincial level.4 This smaller population size could mean that data intensive campaigns are less effective in

Canada. These hypotheses lead to a possible conclusion that Canadian campaigns are simply behind those in the US, meaning Canada could see these innovations in the

2 Gabriel Burt, “My Time at Obama for America,” Tech in Motion (blog) August 27, 2013, http://www.techinmotionevents.com/blog/post/2013/08/27/my-time-at-obama-for-america. 3 “Inside the Cave: An In-Depth Look at the Digital, Technology and Analytics Operations of Obama for America,” Engage Research, Dec 21, 2012 http://chrislittleton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Inside-Obama-Cave.pdf, 54. 4 Kristin D. Burnett, “Congressional Apportionment,” US Census Bureau, November 2011, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-08.pdf; “The Representation Formula,” Elections Canada December 19, 2011, http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=cir/red/form&document=index&lang=e.

2 coming years as populations increase, expertise spreads, and Canadian campaigns have more time to invest resources in new tools.

One development that could help this is the growth of technology companies like

Amazon Web Services, Facebook, and Nationbuilder. These services make advanced data analysis capabilities cheaper and easier to acquire. Therefore, if the necessary technology is becoming easier to use and obtain, then Canadian campaigns will shortly see a rise in data driven targeting.

Chapter two of this thesis puts these technological changes in context by giving a brief history of how technology has evolved in campaigns in North America. This allows a better understanding of how the latest advances in modern campaigning technology compare to historical changes. It also reveals that targeting is not a new concept in election campaigning, but that it has changed over the years with technology. Modern changes in campaign targeting and data analysis techniques are not having a fundamentally revolutionary affect on campaigning, but are making traditional campaigning techniques more efficient.5

With technological changes in proper context, chapter three analyses innovations from the 2012 Obama for America presidential campaign. This analysis reveals some of the most sophisticated data and targeting techniques that have been successfully applied to election campaigning. The purpose of analysing this campaign is not to

5 Chris Carlile, “Digital Election: The use of New Databasing and Communication Technology in Election Campaigns” (Honours Thesis, University of Calgary, 2013): 6.

3 compare it directly to Canadian provincial election campaigns, but to demonstrate what is possible in the field.

The 2012 Obama campaign is central to this subject because it set the bar for many of the advanced targeting and analytics techniques that are being used today.

This campaign is one of the best available demonstrations of what technology is capable of in campaigns. The Obama campaign created its own analytics department to refine every aspect of its operations. Its in-depth knowledge on voters enabled large scale A/B testing of mobilization and fundraising emails. This means that the campaign made several variations of emails and tested them on a small sample of their supporters before sending them out to the national list. Its analytics effort also allowed television advertising to be targeted more precisely than ever before. Its database integrated with social media, allowing the campaign to feed social network information about its supporters directly into the electoral database. The Obama campaign’s analytics department helped make almost every aspect of the 2012 campaign more efficient.

Chapters four and five analyse the findings from interviews with campaign personnel and party staff from four provincial political parties in three Canadian provinces: The British Columbia (BC) Liberal Party, the Alberta Progressive

Conservative (PC) Party, the Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP), and the Ontario

Progressive Conservative Party. These parties were asked questions about their databases to discover: which database program they use; how they procured their database; how they populate their databases with voter information; and how they use that data to target voters. They were also asked about different tools available in

Canada to assist with targeting and analytics in election campaigns, such as social

4 media websites, or online database providers. These interviews reveal that many of the more complex data and targeting techniques used by Obama for America, and other US campaigns are not present in Canada.

Chapter six moves beyond the applications of modern data in Election campaigns and examines the potential negative effects of data and targeting technology on the democratic process. Advances in analytics and targeting have broader implications in the areas of data security, personal privacy, and democratic integrity.

The mass computerization of electoral data and the extent to which political parties can gather and analyse it has the potential to threaten voter privacy. The ability to target specific individuals with election messaging risks excluding groups that may be a low priority to political parties, like those who do not frequently vote. As the precision targeting capability of election campaigns increases, so does the potential for exclusion and misuse of people’s information. An analysis of the capabilities of advanced data driven targeting in campaigns would not be complete without an assessment of the impact that these tools have on democracy.

The technology now exists for smaller campaigns to use analytics and targeting tools that were formerly reserved for large, well-equipped campaigns. Campaigns in

Canada are using new tools like Nationbuilder and Facebook to target voters and integrate their databases with social media. However, these case studies suggest that

Canadian provincial political parties have not constructed individualized voter databases that are comparable to what is possible in the field.6 The reason for this is not

6 Hoong Neoh, interview by Chris Carlile, September 22, 2015.

5 necessarily a lack of funding or expertise, as originally hypothesized. None of the parties interviewed named financing as a barrier to using data in their campaigns.

Similarly, the staff and campaign personnel interviewed were aware of the latest targeting techniques and how to execute them, meaning Canada does not necessarily lack expertise.7 The electoral system does appear to be a factor because small scale, local ridings do not have the resources or the need for a sophisticated data driven targeting campaign.8 The interviews conducted for this thesis suggest that Canadian provincial political parties are not using the latest database assisted targeting and analytics techniques to the fullest extent possible in the field because privacy law limits the availability of individual voter data, and because applying these techniques to

Canada’s decentralized, province-wide campaigns can prove difficult.

Methods, Definitions and Assumptions

This thesis addresses why there has not been a mass use of individual level data analysis and targeting in Canada, despite increasing availability of advanced campaigning technology. The analysis begins by hypothesizing three possible factors that could explain why Canada has not seen the same level of advanced data driven campaigning. Firstly, Canadian parties may not have the money to develop sophisticated data analysis campaigns because Canadian provincial campaigns have access to limited financial resources, and in some cases, have strict spending regulations. Secondly, Canadian provinces have both lower provincial populations and smaller electoral districts than their US counterparts, meaning highly specific targeting

7 Neoh, interview. 8 Carl Carlson (Psuedo), interview by Chris Carlile, September 14, 2015.

6 could be both ineffective and impractical in Canada. Thirdly, there could be a lack of expertise in Canada necessary to execute an advanced data driven campaign. If the knowledge required to properly execute the latest campaigning techniques has not proliferated into Canada yet, then that would explain why new techniques have not taken hold.9 Interviews with Canadian party staff and volunteers shed light on their level of expertise and determine whether data driven campaigning is still developing in

Canada, or if there are other factors limiting its growth.

This thesis begins with a brief look at how election campaigns have used data and targeting over past decades to put today’s capabilities in a better context. The 2012

Obama for America campaign is examined through academic literature, newspaper articles, and through materials that the campaign or its staff have published.

Developments in the field since the Obama campaign are analysed primarily through academic literature and through newspaper articles. It is important to reiterate that this analysis is not intended to be a comparison between Canadian provincial election campaigns and US presidential election campaigns. The 2012 Obama campaign is analysed only because it is considered the most technologically sophisticated campaign to date. I abstract the core elements of the campaign and the technology utilized to create a template against which to compare Canadian parties. Once the capabilities of technology in election campaigns have been established, Canadian provincial political parties are examined to determine how and to what extent this technology is being used in Canada.

9 Sean Gallagher, “Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech,” Ars Technica, Nov 14, 2012. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built-to-win-deep-inside-obamas-campaign-tech/.

To explore the technologies being used in Canada, current and former employees of consequential political parties from BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and Ontario were contacted for an interview. The definition of a consequential political party used here is a party that either currently holds power, or has held power since the early 1990’s when technology advanced to a point where campaigns began using electronic records, computers, and databases.10 Individuals from the following parties consented to participate in this study: the BC Liberal Party, the Alberta PC Party, the

Alberta NDP, and the Ontario PC Party. Quebec was excluded because of language barriers, while the Territories and Maritime provinces were excluded because their smaller populations make analytics operations less likely to be effective.

Individuals were recruited for these interviews through a combination of email outreach to their respective parties, and personal network referrals. The first step to acquiring interviews was outreach through personal network contacts. These included former campaign members, and employees of political parties. Once this was in motion, emails were sent to the general party email addresses of major political parties in the provinces selected for this research. After initial contact and agreeing to participate in this research, the parties selected an employee they felt was suitable for the interview.

For interview subjects not currently employed by a political party, an interview was set up once they agreed to participate. For a full list of interview subjects and their positions, please refer to the appendix.

10 William Cross, Political Parties, (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 119.

Given the small number of individuals interviewed and political parties represented, this thesis does not study a representative sample of political parties in

Canada. Rather, a case study approach featuring in-depth interviews is used to explore how political parties and campaigns are using databases in Canada. Political are usually secretive about their data practices, so it is rare to find this topic discussed in detail through secondary sources. This secrecy explains the low response rate of these interview requests, while simultaneously suggesting that this subject is important to parties, because they would not be as reluctant to discuss the subject if it were inconsequential. It is difficult to get parties to discuss their data operations because they consider them highly proprietary, meaning great care and confidentiality is required to get them to discuss this subject in detail.

Interviews are the primary method for gathering original data for this thesis because they provide unique insights into political party data operations that other research methods cannot. Interviews provide the most current possible information, and give insight into the mindset of the people running party data operations in Canada.11

They are useful for testing the original hypothesis and for gathering information for a qualitative analysis.12 Interviewees were asked about the data and analytics operations of their respective parties. This process resulted in a collection of qualitative data for a comparative analysis, specifically focused on exploring the sophistication of Canadian

11 Julia F. Lynch, “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals,” in Interview Research in Political Science, ed. Layna Mosley (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013), 37. 12 Lynch, “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals,” 34.

9 political parties, and on exploring what factors may be holding them back from adopting the most advanced data and targeting techniques in the field.13

This thesis assumes that political parties may be viewed as single point, rational actors that are primarily concerned with winning elections. As such, interviewing employees and volunteers of these parties gives insight into their behavior, and why they employ the tactics that they do. Provincial political parties were chosen for this study because there is a larger and more diverse pool to research from, providing more data for this study and increasing the likelihood of finding significant results. Federal parties were reluctant to share information because the research for this thesis coincided with the lead-up to the 2015 Canadian general election. Therefore, any mention of Canadian political parties in this thesis refers to provincial, not federal parties. Furthermore, these parties were chosen because they have databases that are sophisticated enough to warrant an analysis, and because they consented to give information for this thesis.

The case studies included here are used to provide an initial account of how provincial political parties and campaigns are using databases and comparing this use to against the template discussed in Chapter three. Talking to party employees, campaign managers, and political consultants gives sufficiently detailed information to give insight into what database and targeting techniques are being used in Canada and why. A case study analysis is an effective way of gathering information to explore this understudied subject.14

13 Lynch, “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals,” 35-36. 14 Lynch, “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals,” 32.

Discussing election campaigning necessitates specialized terminology. Targeting is the process of appealing to specific groups, regions, or individuals, rather than crafting a campaign message that is designed to generally appeal to the whole electorate. Analytics is the use of data analysis techniques to refine electoral data.

Election campaigns consist of an air war and a ground war. The air war refers to widespread, broadcast advertising, such as television or radio. The ground war refers to the work of volunteers in each riding canvassing for support through door-knocking or phoning. Similarly, campaigns in Canada’s single member plurality electoral system have central campaigns and local campaigns. Central campaigns are responsible for the air war, and they oversee the campaign in all parts of the province, while local campaigns are those that individual candidates run in their respective ridings. In elections, certain ridings or regions may be referred to as battleground or swing areas, meaning that the margin of victory in that riding is small enough to make the result highly variable. On Election Day, campaigns execute what is known as a get out the vote (GOTV) campaign, where they attempt to mobilize as many of their supporters as possible to cast a ballot. On Election Day, campaign volunteers known as scrutineers are legally allowed to supervise each polling station and give a report to their respective parties detailing which voters have cast a ballot. Understanding these definitions is important to understanding the role of databases in election campaigns.

These interviews yielded results that conflicted with the original hypotheses of this thesis. These hypotheses assumed that US style data driven targeting campaigns are inevitable in Canada, but this is not the case. This is perhaps the most interesting result of this thesis. As long as privacy laws remain strict on sharing public data,

Canadian politics may never see the same sort of highly targeted, data driven campaigns that US politics does. Canadian campaigns are influenced greatly by the institutional and legal structure in which they exist.

Chapter 2: A History of Campaigning

This chapter gives a brief overview of how historical changes in technology have affected election campaigns in North America. Advances in communication technology are a key driver of change in campaigning techniques. Communication technology is integral to data and targeting because the type of technology available dictates the ways in which voters can be targeted. Advances in technology allow different types of communication that can be framed in terms of broadcasting and narrowcasting.

Broadcasting is the practice of standardizing campaign messaging and bringing it to as large an audience as possible. Narrowcasting is the practice of using information and feedback to tailor messages to a specific audience.15 As new technology like television or the internet is developed, it forces parties to shape their campaigns differently to accommodate different forms of communication. Similarly, it forces them to continually evaluate how they allocate their resources to these new techniques and where they believe they can get the most votes for every dollar they spend.

Communication is at the centre of political campaigns and mass persuasion of the electorate is their goal. While historical changes in enfranchisement and technology have altered the methods of mass persuasion, they have not changed persuasion itself

15 David M. Farrell and Paul Webb, “Political Parties as Campaign Organizations,” In Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies, ed. Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 108-9.

12 as the goal of campaigning.16 In the early days of North American democracy, when the franchise was small, campaigns gathered political support through handshakes among elites. As the franchise expanded, professional campaign managers, pollsters, and mass media became the norm.17 Campaigns in the early history of the United States had no real national character to them, but as communication and transportation improved with new technology, the scope of campaigning expanded. Railway made rapid state-to-state travel possible. Radio made it possible to broadcast and record speeches, extending the reach of campaigns and heightening their dramatic appeal.

Airplanes enabled easy travel around the country. Television further enhanced the dramatic appeal of campaigning and arguably made communication more complex and effective. The popularization of public opinion polling further contributed to the professionalization of elections. 18 In summary, each of these changes increased the scope of election campaigns by making communication faster and easier, while also expanding the variety of techniques available. Recently, computers and the internet triggered another significant change in campaigning because of the unprecedented speed of communication and level of data processing that they allow.19 As technology improves, campaigns become more complex and sophisticated, but the effectiveness of new technologies depends on how well they are applied.

Radio and television made it possible to reach a large number of people with a single message. Once television was popularized, political advertising entered the

16 Matthew J. Burbank, Ronald J. Hrebenar, and Robert C. Benedict, Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns (Boulder, London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008), 127. 17 Burbank, Hrebenar, and Benedict, Parties, Interest Groups and Political Campaigns, 127. 18 Trent, Friedenbert, and Denton Jr., Political Campaign Communications, 76-77. 19 Carlile, “Digital Election,” 6-7.

13 broadcast era. It became possible to reach millions of voters with a broadly appealing message through three major networks, which collectively controlled ninety-five percent of the news audience.20 This change made campaign communication become more professionalized, with candidates trained for media appearances.21 As television evolved, the market share spread across a large number of local networks. This allowed limited targeting of television advertising to networks in specific regions. By advertising to certain networks at certain times of day, campaigns could target different demographic groups and tailor their messages to audiences of a few hundred thousand, as opposed to millions.22

Communication technology and targeting ability changed again as advances in technology paved the way for the personal computer and the internet. Computers had a significant impact on election campaigns because they allowed faster data processing, the automation of many traditional tasks, and a web based capability when coupled with the internet.23 The internet allows campaigns to refine targeting even more by advertising to websites that serve relatively small groups of people, like special interests.24 Finally, the development of social media websites, mobile smart phones, and geolocation technology allows people to be targeted very specifically, even at the individual level.25 The precision and data processing ability of new technology changed

20 Darrell M. West, Air Wars: Television Advertising and Social Media in Election Campaigns: 1952-2012, (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC: Sage Publications, CQ Press. 2014), 5-6. 21 Farrell and Webb, “Political Parties as Campaign Organizations,” 2000. 22 West, Air Wars, 5. 23 Trent, Friedenbert, and Denton Jr., Political Campaign Communications, 79. 24 West, Air Wars, 6. 25 West, Air Wars, 7-8.

14 election campaigning by revolutionizing the way people communicate with each other and allowing an unprecedented level of targeting.

The internet is instrumental in opening a new arena for targeted advertising because of the level of precision it offers. Campaigns were cautious when first making use of the internet. The 2000 presidential election saw almost no online advertising. The

2004 presidential election saw innovations such as video and fundraising ads, as well as ads coordinated with candidates’ news appearances.26 Innovations continued in

2008, with candidates using online ads to drive up event attendance and to circulate issue specific petitions. New tools like ad networks surfaced, allowing advertisers to advertise to users on any website within the network if they meet the targeting criteria.27

Growth continued in 2012 with campaigns targeting users based on their browser history, their location, and even specific events that they are attending.28 As technology improves, so does the precision and effectiveness of targeting, allowing campaigns to target voters in new and innovative ways.

Election Campaigns in Context

Winning government is the goal of almost every serious election campaign, meaning that campaigns must evaluate all their operations, including data and targeting, in terms of how many votes are earned per dollar spent.29 Using data analysis in

26 Daniel Kreiss and Lisa Barnard, “A Research Agenda for Online Political Advertising: Surveying campaign practices 2000-2012,” International Journal of Communication. (January 1, 2013): 2052. 27 Michael Cornfield and Kate Kaye, “Online Political Advertising,” In Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications, ed. Costas Panagopoulos. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009): 168-70. 28 Kreiss and Barnard, “A Research Agenda for Online Political Advertising,” 2056. 29 John Sides and Lynn Vavreck, “Obama’s not so Big Data,” Pacific Standard, Jan 21, 2014, https://psmag.com/social-justice/obamas-big-data-inconclusive-results-political-campaigns-72687.

15 election campaigns proves most useful by making campaign operations more efficient.

Instead of spending money contacting a random sample of voting age adults, campaigns can use data to find specific people who are more likely to vote, or are more likely to be receptive to the campaign’s message. Instead of blindly contacting undecided voters, campaigns have a way to determine who is most likely to be a supporter. By contacting people who they already know are likely to be friendly, the campaign can identify more supporters per dollar spent on voter contact than they otherwise could have.30

Targeting certain segments of the population is not a new practice, but the ability to target people on an individual level is something that campaigns have never been able to do before on such a large scale.31 Campaigns are doing this by taking advantage of newly available computing and storage power. Although public data has been available for decades through sources like the census, it has only recently become useful because of the development of computers to store and manipulate it.32

Advances in the ability of election campaigns to analyse voter data are worth studying because of their potential to change the way that people receive information in western democracy. As technology continues to improve, targeting tools will become more accessible for campaigns and these techniques will proliferate across the campaign industry.

30 David W. Nickerson and Todd Rogers, “Political Campaigns and Big Data,” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, No. 2 (Spring 2014): 65. 31 Nickerson and Rogers, “Political Campaigns and Big Data,” 65. 32 Nickerson and Roger, “Political Campaigns and Big Data,” 52.

Chapter 3: Obama for America 2012

The campaign that is widely considered to be the most sophisticated example of how new database and targeting technology can be used in elections is the Obama for

America 2012 presidential campaign. Before analyzing why Canadian political parties are not using the most sophisticated data and analytics techniques, an understanding of what these techniques are and what resources are needed to implement them is required. This chapter explores how one of the most sophisticated campaign’s in history used data and analytics in its daily operations. This campaign was unique in that it developed its own, in-house analytics department consisting of fifty-four people managing over fifty terabytes of data.33 The goal was to quantify and measure every aspect of the campaign.34 The Obama team used data and technology to reach people and win votes in unprecedented ways through tools like television, social media, and mobile devices. This analysis reveals that the purpose of data in election campaigns is to make every aspect of the campaign more efficient. While a sophisticated data and analytics operation can be a powerful tool, it cannot win an election campaign on its own and is most useful in close races. Analyzing the 2012 Obama campaign gives a clear picture of the capabilities and applications of data and analytics in election campaigns.

33 Burt, “My Time at Obama for America.” 34 Sasha Issenberg, “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Voters: Part 2,” MIT Technology Review. December 19, 2012, http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508836/how-obama-used-big- data-to-rally-voters-part-1/.

Emails and Messaging

One of the ways the Obama campaign utilized its wealth of information on voters was through A/B testing on different campaign tactics and messaging. Before sending messages out to their supporters nationally, the campaign tests different versions on a smaller sample to determine which one is most effective. Traditionally, campaigns rely on focus groups to test how their messages and policies will resonate with the population. A problem with this technique however, is that focus groups are, by definition, a small sample of all voters. Since the Obama campaign team had access to accurate and in-depth data on their supporters, they could expand the sample size to larger portions of the electorate without losing track of who they were contacting, making their tests more accurate and less distorted than focus groups.35

The Obama campaign’s fundraising and mobilization emails are an example of how this rigorous testing process was used to determine which messages are most effective to send out nationally. On June 26, 2012, the campaign team tested thirteen different subject lines for a fundraising email by sending each of them out to a sample of supporters. The winning subject line, ‘I will be outspent’, played off Mitt Romney’s fundraising advantage at the time and raised almost 2.2 million dollars more when sent out nationally than was projected with the lowest performing subject line.36,37

The campaign also built models to understand subscriber behavior. By analyzing feedback they received from their emails, they found useful correlations. For example,

35 Issenberg, “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Individual votes.” 36 Joshua Green, “The Science Behind those Obama Campaign E-Mails,” Bloomberg Businessweek: Politics & Policy, November 29, 2012, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those-obama- campaign-e-mails. 37 Carlile, “Digital Election,” 14.

18 they found that asking people for a percentage of their highest previous donation was more effective than asking for a specific number.38 However, they also discovered that even successful emails become less effective over time, so there is a constant need to test new content.39

The Air War: Targeting Political Advertising

The wealth of information available on voters enables campaigns to more effectively target traditional campaigning methods, like television advertising. Recent work has matched advertisement tracking data with viewer surveys to give campaigns a better idea of what kind of individuals are actually watching each ad.40 This allows campaigns to target television advertising to local channels with the most persuadable audiences, making presidential campaigns behave more strategically when buying their advertisements.41

The Obama campaign made its television ad buying more efficient by developing a program called Optimizer to combine its own supporters’ data with television viewer data.42 The campaign team first collected data about their supporters’ television viewing habits, then calculated how many target voters were watching certain programs at certain times. They would then advertise on whichever programs they felt would reach

38 Sarah Lai Stirland, “How Analytics Made Obama’s Campaign Communications More Efficient,” Tech President, December 3, 2012. http://techpresident.com/news/23214/how-analytics-made-obamas-campaign- communications-more-efficient. 39 Green, “The Science Behind those Obama Campaign E-Mails.”; Carlile, “Digital Election,” 14. 40 Travis Ridout, Michael Franz, and Erika Fowler, “Advances in the Study of Political Advertising,” Journal of Political Marketing 13, no. 3 (July 2014): 189-90. 41 Travis Ridout et al., “Separation by Television Program: Understanding the Targeting of Political Advertising in Presidential Elections,” Political Communication 29, no 1. (Jan 2012): 1-2. 42 Jim Rutenberg, “Secret of the Obama Victory? Rerun Watchers, for one Thing,” New York Times, Nov 12, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/politics/obama-data-system-targeted-tv-viewers-for-support.html?_r=0.

19 the most targets at the best cost.43 This information showed that important places for

Obama to advertise included local news programs, late night shows, early morning shows, and sitcom reruns - especially those featuring a primarily black cast.44 The

Obama campaign team estimates that Optimizer made their ad buying ten to twenty percent more effective, meaning they spent less money per ad and bought advertising on programs that they would not have otherwise.45

Creating the Database

The Obama campaign team did not have to fight primary elections in 2012, so they used the time that they had before the presidential election to gather information on voters and build custom tools to help them win the election. The tool that drove much of the Obama campaign’s data and targeting capabilities is called Narwhal, which synchronized data from different sources on the campaign and compiled it to create complete profiles of supporters with scores to show support level.46 Throughout the campaign, the Obama analytics team regularly made 8,000 to 9,000 phone calls per night to update their information and models to keep these profiles and supporter scores accurate.47 Narwhal ran off of Amazon Web Services’ cloud computing servers and was a single data store for every app on the campaign, enabling the campaign to quickly develop and integrate new apps as needed.48

43 “Inside the Cave,” 24. 44 Ridout, Franz, and Fowler, “Advances in the Study of Political Advertising,” 189-90. 45 “Inside the Cave,” 90. 46 “Inside the Cave,” 54. 47 “Inside the Cave,” 22. 48 Gallagher, “Built to Win.”

Amazon Web Services is worth analysing as an example of how advances in technology are making advanced statistical analysis techniques more accessible to election campaigns. The Obama campaign hosted close to 200 applications on

Amazon. Using a third party to host their IT tools meant that the campaign team could customize, secure, and expand their tools as needed, without having to worry about prohibitive overhead costs. An operation like this would have been considerably more expensive if the Obama campaign had to buy all the servers and hardware itself.49

While the Obama team used tools like these to run a campaign of unprecedented sophistication, this kind of campaigning has a number of barriers to entry. Firstly, state of the art campaign tools are time consuming to build and refine. Development of

Narwhal and its related apps started in 2011 and the campaign team stated that they likely would not have had the time to build them if Obama had to fight a primary race.50

Secondly, only election campaigns of sufficient size and scope can hope to use these tools effectively, as they are unlikely to be worth the expense to a smaller race. Finally, campaigns must have access to a sufficient amount of data before they can see a benefit. Despite this advantage, development of the in-house tools that the campaign used was tightly scheduled. These barriers show possible reasons as to why similar technologies have not surfaced in Canadian elections.

The Ground War

Having such precise data on supporters enabled Obama’s campaign to utilize volunteers in ways that campaigns traditionally would not be able to. For example,

49 Amazon, “AWS Case Study: Obama for America 2012,” Amazon Web Services, Accessed Nov 12, 2015 https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/obama/ (site discontinued). 50 Gallagher, “Built to Win.”

21 research shows that people are more likely to be persuaded to vote for a candidate if they are contacted by real campaign volunteers, rather than if they see a television ad, or are contacted by a paid professional. However, campaigns can be reluctant to let volunteers engage in one-on-one persuasion efforts because of the risk that the volunteer could have an unfavourable interaction with voters, and therefore a negative effect on support.51 The depth of information the Obama campaign had on its supporters gave them the confidence to let volunteers attempt 500,000 scripted phone calls to people who were identified as persuadable. Rather than the simple voter identification or mobilization calls that volunteers are typically trusted with, these were persuasion phone calls aimed at convincing people to vote for Obama. The result was that voters called by volunteers became more likely to become Obama supporters than those who were not.52 These results encouraged the Obama campaign team to use volunteer persuasion on a larger scale, sending trained volunteers to doorknock or phone call with the goal of changing minds.53

There are other ways to utilize volunteers as tools for persuasion. Campaigns can have volunteers call people that they may already have a connection with, like old friends or co-workers, to increase the chance that the voter contacted will cast a ballot.

Volunteers can also ask the people that they contact about the logistics of voting – when they will go and how they will get there – because research shows that thinking about this increases people’s likelihood of voting.54

51 Issenberg, “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Individual votes.” 52 Issenberg, “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Individual votes.” 53 Issenberg, “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Individual votes.” 54 Charles Duhigg, “Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to get out the vote,” The New York Times, October 13, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/us/politics/campaigns-mine-personal-lives-to-get-out-vote.html.

With precise data about volunteers and prospective voters, campaigns can tailor call lists to the volunteers who are calling them. Research shows that people may be more receptive to election messaging if they are called by volunteers of a similar age, gender, ethnic group, or region.55 However, these techniques are often luxuries for even the most organized campaigns. It is usually a struggle for campaigns to find enough volunteers to complete their calling, so while carefully assigning lists to specific volunteers could theoretically increase the likelihood that a contacted voter will become a supporter, it is unrealistic in practice.56

Social Media Tools

The Obama campaign’s database proved useful at taking social media information and using it to supplement voter information. His team scored 50,000 twitter accounts by political affiliation to determine which accounts may be friendly. They then looked at the number of tweets and followers that each account had in order to rank their influence. Finally, they targeted the most influential accounts with direct messages, asking people to get involved.57 This helped expand Obama’s volunteer ranks and build influence.

A similar technique can be used to extract data from Facebook. By using text analysis tools, campaigns can collect user profiles from public Facebook groups or pages. The campaign can then mine public individual profiles for information that they

55 Rasmus Kleiss Nielsen, Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 151. 56 Nielsen, Ground Wars, 151. 57 “Inside the Cave,” 56.

23 have posted about themselves, like location or political affiliation.58 This can be useful for reaching young people, or other demographics that could be hard to reach by more traditional means.59 Both the Obama and Mitt Romney campaigns used similar techniques by having their supporters sign into their campaign websites with a

Facebook account. Once a supporter does this, the campaign’s website then uses data mining tools to compare the supporter’s friends list with the campaign’s own database. It will then find people on that supporter’s friends list who are a high contact priority, such as voters in a highly-contested state, and suggest that the supporter contact them over

Facebook.60 By interfacing social networking data with campaign databases, campaigns can use social networks to either expand their supporter roles or to help direct their supporters to contact high priority or persuadable voters.

Online Advertising61

Online advertising played a role in the Obama campaign’s efforts to target voters using the internet. This style of advertising can be highly personalized and individually targeted using an online marketing technique called hyper targeting.62 In the period just before the popularization of the internet, television ads were the most efficient way of reaching a large number of people with an advertisement. Since consumers viewed multiple ads in one commercial sitting, advertisers competed to make the most creative ad to get the most attention. Now, the most important aspect of advertising has shifted

58 David Wills, and Stewart Reeves, “Facebook as a Political Weapon: Information in Social Networks,” Palgrave MacMillan 4, No. 2 (2009): 268. 59 Wills and Reeves, “Facebook as a Political Weapon,” 269 60 Duhigg, “Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to get out the vote,” 61 Carlile, “Digital Election,” 16-18. 62 Philip N. Howard, “Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy,” Annals of the America Academy of Political and Social Science 597, no. 1 (2005): 166-67.

24 away from creative design, to media buying - finding the best place to put an advertisement by knowing which groups or individuals are most effective to target.63

The data necessary to do this is gathered through tracking cookies, originally invented in 1994.64 Cookies allow online retailers to differentiate between visitors by placing a small text file on their computer that retailer websites can identify, allowing them to recognize when one customer is purchasing multiple products.65 Retailers are able to use cookies to track where visitors click, what they purchase, what they place in their shopping carts, and which pages they visit on the website. Most importantly, cookies are placed on to a visitor’s computer without asking permission, meaning that the transfer of data from the visitor to the website is seamless and internet users do not have the opportunity to withhold information about their online activity.66

Online companies and advertisers analyze this data in detail to divide their audience into specific groups to determine who will be most receptive to their advertisements and who will not. This technique has become so sophisticated that advertisers can not only target specific groups and demographics, but can target specific individuals based on their preferences. By networking servers between websites in ad networks, advertisers are able to track an individual’s activity across multiple websites within the server, collect information about their activity, and store it in a central database.67 They can then mine this data and offer sales and discounts to

63 Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining your Identity and your Worth, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 3-4. 64 Turow, The Daily You, 47-48. 65 Turow, The Daily You, 47-48. 66 Turow, The Daily You, 48. 67 Turow, The Daily You, 59-60.

25 specific people who they have determined are more likely to take advantage of the offer.68 Advertisers now have the ability to place ads in precisely the right place, to exactly the right person, to maximize their effectiveness.

The 2012 Obama campaign made extensive use of online advertising, becoming the first election campaign in history to spend more than 100 million dollars on it.69 The campaign’s online advertising was broader than some of the individual based cookie advertisements described above. The campaign targeted swing states specifically and flooded certain websites with a high volume of advertisements, effectively making them poster-boards for the campaign.70 These ads were designed to funnel people on to

Obama’s website, first asking them to sign up and give their information, then taking them straight to a donations page to give money.71

Although the Obama campaign team was not as precise as some commercial retailers when targeting people online, they took a more precise approach when targeting ads to mobile devices. They targeted people in specific neighborhoods in battleground states, particularly identifying young, female, and Hispanic voters as most worthwhile groups to target based on their data analysis.72 Unlike advertisements through email, these were not geared towards gathering donations, but towards getting out the vote for Obama’s campaign.73 This evidence shows that online advertising is

68 Turow, The Daily You, 105-106. 69 “Inside the Cave,” 80. 70 “Inside the Cave,” 82. 71 “Inside the Cave,” 82. 72 Christopher Heine, “Here’s One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama Digital Team Claims medium helped overcome Romney’s October Surge,” Adweek, December 18, 2012, http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-one-advertiser-who-swears-mobile-ads-work-obama-146044 (site discontinued). 73 Heine, “Here’s One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work.”

26 being avidly used in election campaigns, but is not yet as highly refined as that of the commercial world.

Effects of Obama for America

The Obama 2012 presidential campaign demonstrated the extent to which data analytics can be used to streamline a campaign. It inspired other political parties, candidates, and private companies to replicate and improve on its operation. Private organizations invested billions of dollars in this field on both the left and right sides of the political spectrum in a kind of political arms race.74 These firms gathered enough data to create a profile on every single voting age American. They used information from almost every available source: social media accounts; consumer purchases; credit card history; voter registries; demographic data; and more. A Republican firm called i360 puts this information into an algorithm that assigns each voter a score on a scale from zero to one-hundred, with zero being the most partisan democrat, and one- hundred being the most partisan republican.75 This information can then be used to help political campaigns with their targeting efforts because it allows them to profile and target voters without having to spend time and money contacting them first.

The 2012 Obama for America campaign shows that the main purpose of a database is to make the campaign more efficient and cost effective. The campaign’s organizers argue that the analytics techniques that they used increased their share of the vote by up to two percent, showing that data cannot win an election campaign on its own. Despite this limitation, an effective analytics effort can be decisive in close races

74 Andrew Rice, “How Far Can Political Technology Reach?” National Journal, July 18, 2014, https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/72705/how-far-can-political-technology-reach. 75 Rice, “How Far Can Political Technology Reach?”

27 where one or two percent of the electorate can make the difference between winning and losing.76 This analysis shows that the most advanced election campaigns can use social media data to target potential voters on popular mediums like Twitter and

Facebook. Television viewership data can be used to more effectively target television ads. Similarly, information about people’s browsing history can be used to more effectively target online and mobile ads. All types of data, including past voting history and consumer data can be collected and used to create a supporter score, profiling the expected affiliation of every voting age person in the electorate. Obama for America’s ground-breaking analytics effort, and the subsequent innovations that it inspired, demonstrates the latest techniques that are possible when new technology is applied to election campaigning. With a clear idea of the capabilities of technology in campaigning, this analysis can turn to Canadian parties and begin to answer the question of why campaigns in Canada have not utilized many of the same techniques.

76 Sides and Vavreck, “Obama’s Not-So-Big Data.”

Chapter 4: Canadian Provincial Political Party Case Studies

The basis for this analysis is a series of interviews with employees from four

Canadian political parties: the BC Liberal party, the Alberta NDP, the Alberta PC party, and the Ontario PC party. The campaign personnel interviewed range from central party database managers, to local campaign managers, to political consultants who have worked on a variety of campaigns. These interviews explore how Canadian parties are using their databases to target voters, what information is available to them, and provide insight into the reasons Canadian parties are using certain targeting techniques over others. Overall, this study suggests that Canadian parties are using databases to effectively streamline their campaign operations, but the constraints of a single member plurality electoral system, and a lack of robust voter data prevents Canadian parties from using data in some of the most sophisticated ways possible in the field.

The Parties

Until recently, the Alberta Progressive Conservative Party was the longest governing political party in Canada, holding power from August 1971 to May 2015.77 It makes a good case study for this research because it was transitioning to a new database in the year leading up to the 2015 election. Although the party lost the 2015 election and captured only ten out of eighty-seven seats in the legislature, the new database that it implemented and the plans that it had in place for it are still worth examining.78 The information for this section was gathered from two interviews. One

77 “Distribution of Seats by Party 1905-2015,” Elections Alberta, Accessed Dec 10, 2015, http://www.elections.ab.ca/reports/statistics/distribution-of-seats-by-party/. 78 Mark Fiselier, interview by Chris Carlile, September 14, 2015.

29 with Mark Fiselier, the information technology manager for the Alberta PC Party during the 2015 election and in the year leading up to it. The other with Robert Robertson, a deputy campaign manager for a local PC campaign in the 2015 election who chose not to have his real name used. The database that the Alberta PC Party purchased for the

2015 election is called Candidate Cloud, and the database that they used previously is called the Alberta Contact Database (ABCD), which is a copy of the Constituent

Information Management System (CIMS) designed by the federal Conservative Party of

Canada.79 Since these interviews took place, the PC party approved a merger with the

Wildrose Party and is now part of the United Conservative Party.

The BC Liberal Party held government from 2001 to 2017, and currently serves as official opposition to an NDP-Green Party coalition.80 The information for this section was gathered through two interviews, one with Hoong Neoh, the data manager for the

BC Liberal party, and another with Aaron Anderson, who chose not to have his real name revealed. Anderson is an avid political volunteer who has managed several constituency campaigns for the BC Liberal Party. The database that the BC Liberal

Party uses is called BCLwin.81

The Ontario PC Party is currently the official opposition to the Liberal government, winning twenty-eight out of one-hundred-seven available seats in the June

2014 election.82 The information from this section is gathered from an interview with

Carl Carlson, a campaign manager during the 2014 election who chose not to have his

79 Robert Robertson (pseudo), interview by Chris Carlile, October 3, 2015. 80 Justin McElroy, “B.C. Green Party Agrees to Support NDP,” CBC News British Columbia, May 29, 2017 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ndp-green-agreement-1.4136539. 81 Neoh, interview. 82 “Ontario Votes 2014,” CBC News Canada, June 13, 2014, http://www.cbc.ca/elections/ontariovotes2014/.

30 real name used.83 The Ontario PC Party is also using CIMS, therefore some of the information about CIMS is also taken from the interview with Robert Robertson, who has experience using this database through ABCD.

The Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) recently won its first majority in Alberta history in May 2015, taking fifty-four out of eighty-seven seats. They make an interesting case study for this project because they were traditionally a third party in the Alberta legislature, with fewer resources to put towards initiatives like a complex voter database. Having formed government for the first time so recently, the Alberta NDP provide useful insight into what kind of database capabilities a lower profile political party can afford to pilot. This also provides insight into what innovations Alberta’s NDP is planning in the future now that they are a governing party and will likely have more donation resources to commit to a data operation. The information for this party was gathered from an interview with John Johnson, who uses the NDP database in his capacity as an employee for the Alberta NDP. He chose to remain anonymous. The

NDP’s electoral database is called NDP Vote, but they also use a separate database for memberships and donations, as well as Nationbuilder for social media and web hosting.84

Additionally, information in this thesis about the utility of data driven targeting in

Canadian elections is from an interview with William White. White is a campaigning veteran and campaign database designer who has experience working with parties across Canada over the past two decades. White chose not to have his real name used.

83 Carl Carlson (Psuedo), interview by Chris Carlile, September 14, 2015. 84 John Johnson, (Psuedo), interview by Chris Carlile, Nov 3, 2015.

Most recently, he volunteered in the Alberta 2015 election, but he has also worked for the Saskatchewan Party and the Ontario PC Party.85 This interview provides a broader perspective on how data and supporter scores can be used to target voters in Canadian elections.

The Databases

This section explores the character and evolution of the databases included in this study as a first step to assessing how parties use them in their campaigns. It reveals how Canadian parties developed their databases, what they use them for, and what features they have prioritized as their databases have developed.

Candidate Cloud is a cloud based database that the Alberta PC Party purchased from the company Salesforce. This database was built specifically for the Alberta PC

Party, with party staff working closely with Salesforce support staff to develop it.86 The data within Candidate Cloud consists primarily of membership data, fundraising data, and the electoral list provided by Elections Alberta during each election period.87

Candidate Cloud is an upgrade for the Alberta PC Party because it unifies all their data under one system. Before this, they used ABCD to keep track of their electoral data, as well as a separate Microsoft Access database for membership and fundraising data, so it was difficult to coordinate the two.88

Much of the Alberta PC party’s electoral data is from the 2015 election cycle and the party’s 2014 leadership race, however Candidate Cloud contains tracking data

85 William White (Psuedo), interview by Chris Carlile, October 14, 2015. 86 Fiselier, interview. 87 Fiselier, interview. 88 Fiselier, interview.

32 dating back to 2004.89 The electoral data is gathered from the electors list provided by

Elections Alberta, as well as the party’s own voter contact operations. Primarily, this information is cleaned by contacting voters through phone, email, or doorknocking.90

Additional sources, such as the Canada Post move and death lists are used to keep the data up to date.91 In addition to this, the Alberta PC Party had plans to integrate

Statistics Canada demographic data into their database for reference checking, as well as social media data from Twitter and Facebook, but they were unable to integrate these features before the 2015 election.92

Candidate cloud allows the Alberta PC Party to do several things that it could not under its old databases. One of its most useful tools is the ability to serve as an email platform capable of tracking the open rate of party emails, as well as where recipients click inside the email.93 This allows the party to send emails to supporters and track who engages with particular issues. With this information, they can then begin sorting their supporters in to categories based on the issues that they engage with. This capability is somewhat limited by the fact that Candidate Cloud has no ability to serve as a data capture tool. While it can track if and where a person clicks inside an email, it does not automatically know the context of this email, nor can it lead to a separate page to gather additional data and feed it back into Candidate Cloud.94 In theory, Candidate Cloud can

89 Robertson, interview. 90 Fiselier, interview. 91 Robertson, interview. 92 Fiselier, interview. 93 Fiselier, interview. 94 Robertson, interview.

33 be effective at tracking issues through email, but it was not ready to do this effectively during the 2015 election.95

The cloud based capability of Candidate Cloud allows easier data entry by volunteers than ABCD did. ABCD was a virtual desktop system, so it required technical expertise to install properly and meant that volunteers could only access it at the campaign office. However, Candidate Cloud allows campaigns to set up microsites, which gives users a restricted level of access to the system from any location and allows volunteers to enter data from their own devices without having access to all the information stored in the database.96 Similarly, Candidate Cloud has a mobile feature operated out of a device’s mobile browser that can be used from anywhere. Robertson’s campaign piloted this feature in the field and claims that it was effective for scrutineering at polling stations, but that it was not ready to be used effectively as a mobile canvassing tool, like what the Obama or Romney campaigns used in 2012.97

The BC Liberal Party used BCLwin during the 2013 election have been using it for over 10 years, in various forms.98 The BC Liberals had the expertise to design and build this database themselves, giving them the flexibility to modify it to their needs over time.99 Since its creation, BCLwin transformed as technology improved, moving from a basic Access database, to a fully online database with a defined front and back-end interface.100 BCLwin is populated with the data from electors list, provided by Elections

95 Robertson, interview. 96 Fiselier, interview. 97 Robertson, interview. 98 Neoh, interview. 99 Neoh, interview. 100 Neoh, interview.

BC, as well as with phone records that the party purchases separately to combine with electoral data. Phone information is not available on the BC electors list.101 Some social media data is integrated into BCLwin, but this is used for communications purposes, rather than for data and targeting.102 The BC Liberal Party uses a variety of methods to keep its database clean, including direct voter contact and paid calling.103

The Ontario PC Party used CIMS for the past 15 years, and the database contains information dating back to the early 1990’s.104 Like other political parties in

Canada, the main source of data for CIMS is the electors list, provided by Elections

Ontario. Their data is cleaned by both the central party and local campaigns through voter contact in the form of doorknocking, volunteer phone calling, and paid calling through third party companies.105 The central purpose of CIMS has stayed the same over the 15 years – CIMS tracks supporters and helps local campaigns identify possible voters. Over the years, some new features have been added to the database, such as email capability.106

The Alberta NDP’s electoral database is NDP Vote, which is directly comparable to CIMS, Candidate Cloud, or BCLwin. NDP Vote tracks supporters and non-supporters from election to election. It is a proprietary database that the NDP designed themselves and have used for the past 20 years, updating it and adding new functions over time.107

They use a separate database to keep track of members and donors, which was built

101 Neoh, interview. 102 Neoh, interview. 103 Neoh, interview. 104 Carlson, interview. 105 Carlson, interview. 106 Carlson, interview. 107 Johnson, interview.

35 for them using outside help. Finally, the NDP use Nationbuilder as a web posting platform and to link the party’s supporters to their respective social media profiles. They periodically merge this data with the data in NDP Vote.108 Of the NDP’s three databases, this analysis is primarily concerned with NDP Vote since it is the most comparable to the other case studies.

Like other political parties in Canada, the primary source for electoral data in

NDP Vote is the electors list, provided by Elections Alberta during each election period.

The NDP also occasionally purchase phone lists to supplement this information.109 They clean their database primarily through voter contact during elections. As this is an expensive and volunteer intensive activity, elections are usually the only time their databases are cleaned this way. Between elections, the NDP hire a senior data person to administer the system.110 The major change that NDP Vote has undergone in the last

20 years is an increase in capability and sophistication. The database started out as simple as an excel spreadsheet, but has since grown to include more functions, better search criteria, and more refined regional targeting capabilities.111

With an understanding of the databases used by the parties in question, this analysis can now turn to the voter data that populates these systems and how each party uses this information.

108 Johnson, interview. 109 Johnson, interview. 110 Johnson, interview. 111 Johnson, interview.

The Information

From these interviews, it is clear that political parties in Canada mainly rely on electoral agencies to get the information that populates their databases. Electors lists provide parties with people’s names and addresses. In addition, the Alberta electors list also contains phone numbers.112 Parties receive this information once the writ period for an election is declared. Additionally, parties are entitled to send scrutineers to polling stations to record which voters cast a ballot.113 This information is also available to parties after the election.114 If parties are diligent about collecting this information, they can develop a complete list of those who have voted in each election. An accurate list of everyone who votes in each election is particularly helpful to the targeting efforts of

Canadian political parties because it means that they spend less time engaging people who typically do not vote and more time persuading those who do. While the electors lists contain enough information for political parties to find and engage specific supporters, they do not provide enough information to facilitate the advanced individual targeting and analytics that state of the art campaigns are capable of.

To supplement the basic level of information provided by the electors lists, political parties add publicly available demographic information to their databases from sources such as the Census or Statistics Canada. Once parties input people’s individual addresses and postal codes, they can layer the census data on top of that to get a clearer picture of the characteristics of people in specific ridings or polls.115 By doing

112 Alberta Election Act, Revised Statutes of Alberta 2000, Chapter E-1. 113 British Columbia Election Act, Revised Statutes of British Columbia, Chapter 106, p4, d1. 114 Fiselier, interview. 115 Robin Levinson King, “What Canada’s Parties Know About you,” The Toronto Star, September 23, 2015, https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/09/23/what-canadas-political-parties-know-about-you.html.

37 this, parties expand their targeting capabilities to specific demographic groups and geographic areas. Census data is accurate down to the postal code level, meaning political parties looking to target their efforts can focus on specific postal codes that they feel will contain the most sympathetic voters.116 Census data can help parties target more effectively, however this data is limited in that it is not accurate to the individual level, meaning that parties cannot assume census generalizations are true for any specific voters they contact within each riding.

Finally, to supplement the data that they receive from election agencies, political parties buy up-to-date phone information from places such as the White Pages.117 This information is particularly important to parties because direct voter contact is the only way that they can acquire specific personal individual information from people.118

Phoning is the most efficient way to contact voters and determine their political affiliations, so parties will use either volunteer or paid calling to do this.

The parties interviewed for this thesis come from a diverse ideological background and history of time in government. From these interviews, it is clear that political parties in Canada have been earnestly developing their databases for at least ten years. The voter information contained in party databases is primarily from each party’s respective electoral agency, and is supplemented with publicly available data from government agencies. The bulk of specific individual voter data comes from direct voter contact, meaning that parties do not have highly specific information for a large

116 “Census Profile – Postal Code,” Statistics Canada, accessed Oct 9, 2015, http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census- recensement/2011/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E. 117 Robertson, interview. 118 White, interview.

38 part of the electorate. With an understanding of how Canadian party databases are structured, a comparative analysis is possible.

Chapter 5: Data and Targeting in Canadian Parties

Having established the main ways that political parties gather information on voters, the different ways that they use this information can be examined. When parties target voters, they usually seek to directly interact with them by contacting them through phone, mail, doorknocking, social media, or email. More broadly, parties can target groups of people either geographically, by prioritizing certain electoral districts, or demographically, using any demographic information that they have available. Some parties analyze their historical data and assign supporter scores to each of their voters to assist with targeting. However, targeting through data analysis or social media is too labour intensive for local campaigns and is best left to central party campaigns to execute on a province-wide scale. A major revelation of this analysis is that purchasing private data in Canada is effectively impossible due to privacy laws, revealing the reason that Canadian campaigns have not developed data and targeting operations comparable to the most advanced campaigns in the field.

Supporter Scores and Voter Contact

The Alberta PC Party’s Candidate Cloud has a supporter score feature that helps direct its voter contact operations by rating how supportive voters are a scale of zero to one-hundred, based on the party’s interactions with them. The supporter score algorithm analyses past contact data and comes up with two predictions: one for which party each voter is most likely to vote for, and another for which party each voter may be leaning towards supporting. These two predictions are not necessarily the same. For example, if a person voted Liberal in the last election, the algorithm may predict that

40 they will vote Liberal again. However, if that person has a recent favourable interaction with the PC party, it may simultaneously predict that they are leaning PC. This way, it can give the party a picture of what its current support looks like, as well as the voters who can be most easily persuaded.119

The Alberta PC party’s old database, ABCD, has a similar feature that calculates a supporter score by assigning a weighted value to past interactions with voters. Recent and in-person interactions are given a higher weight, while older or non-personal interactions are given a lower weight. ABCD then assigned each voter a current support score based on recent interactions, and lifetime support score based on all historical contact data. Supporters are assigned a positive number and non-supporters are assigned a negative one, with a higher value indicating a stronger affiliation.

A supporter score is particularly useful for directing voter contact operations and assessing the usefulness of older data. A supporter score gives the party an indicator of how accurate their older tracking data is by factoring it in by weight. This means that the party does not have to rely solely on new contacts each election because it has a statistically sound way of incorporating older voter contact data.120 Instead of having to call undecided voters blind, the party can call those who have higher supporter scores and therefore a higher likelihood of voting favourably. This makes direct voter contact and GOTV operations more efficient by getting parties more votes per dollar spent on voter contact.

119 Fiselier, interview. 120 Robertson, interview.

For example, Robertson’s campaign used Candidate Cloud’s supporter score to direct their GOTV calling in the Alberta 2015 Election. They decided to conduct GOTV calling on all supporters who had a score higher than approximately seventy percent.121

They decided to do this because they did not have enough time during the campaign to contact all their past supporters again to confirm their affiliation. They relied on the supporter score to give them information about those they could not contact previously, making the reach of their GOTV operation broader than it would have otherwise been.

When combined with Election Day Scrutineering, the supporter score feature can give a campaign a better idea of who is voting. As scrutineers submit polling station data throughout Election Day, the campaign can see what percentage of the people voting are supporters or non-supporters.122 This gives the campaign an evolving snapshot of their supporter turnout throughout the day. If a high percentage of the campaign’s supporters are turning out to vote, then the GOTV effort is likely going well, but if a low supporter turnout is happening, it gives the campaign time to increase their efforts later in the day.

William White provided more insight into Candidate Cloud’s supporter score, as well as on the general usefulness of supporter algorithms for voter identification.

Candidate Cloud’s supporter score was not ready until later in the 2015 campaign.

Once it was online, White tested it with an automated call to supporters identified by this algorithm in target ridings. The results were promising enough that the party expanded this effort into other ridings.123 White stated that he is generally skeptical of relying on

121 Robertson, interview. 122 Robertson, interview. 123 White, interview.

42 algorithms to identify supporters because they are data intensive to set up. If a campaign has enough information on their electorate to make a support algorithm useful, they likely have a good idea of who their supporters are anyway. However, he says that algorithms are good for simplifying large amounts of data and finding accessible voters to contact.124 Campaigns need to be practical when using supporter scores and always assess whether allowing the algorithm to choose their targets for them will result in a net increase in identified supporters.125

The Alberta NDP would not say whether they use a supporter score, but stated that when it comes to voter targeting, they tend to focus on ridings that they have the highest chance of winning.126 Before the election campaign, the NDP central campaign will focus on calling different ridings across the province to get an idea of their level of support. Then, they target their resources to ridings that have high levels of support, but low levels of voter turnout, thus allocating their limited resources to ridings where they have the most votes to gain.127 Beyond the ridings that it is directly focusing its resources on, the central party does little to involve itself in local riding campaigns, favouring a more decentralized approach.128 Local campaigns that have few resources, or do not have a good chance of winning, focus mainly on getting their candidate to the doors to connect with people and collect information about supporters that can be used in the next election.129 Better equipped NDP campaigns will use a wider variety of

124 White, interview. 125 White, interview. 126 Johnson, interview. 127 Johnson, interview. 128 Johnson, interview. 129 Johnson, interview.

43 campaigning techniques, including micro targeting, to maximize their chances of victory.130

The BC Liberal party did not comment about whether they use an algorithm to assign supporter scores, but did say that they identify their voters by categories of supporters, non-supporters, and undecideds.131 According to Anderson, individual profiling is difficult in Canada because of the lack of available individual data.132 To create a profile of any given person in Canada, parties must physically contact that person and ask for their information. By contrast, parties and consulting companies in the US can purchase relevant data and create a robust profile of individuals before ever contacting them.133 BC Liberal campaigns focus their targeting efforts on previously identified supporters. A campaign manager will start by re-contacting voters previously identified as supporters, then move to contacting people who are likely supporters, finally contacting undecided voters.134

From the BC Liberal central party perspective, Neoh states that they have experimented with a variety of analytics techniques in an effort to put more science behind their database operations.135 However, given the size of the BC electorate and the level of data availability in Canada, it is difficult to get down to the granular level.136

They experimented with a variety of A/B testing to make their data analysis more precise. They also use publicly available data sources, like the census, to overlay

130 Johnson, interview. 131 Aaron Anderson (Pseudo), interview by Chris Carlile, September 1, 2015. 132 Anderson, interview. 133 Anderson, interview. 134 Anderson, interview. 135 Neoh, interview. 136 Neoh, interview.

44 demographic information on to their electoral data to make it more precise. However,

Neoh emphasizes that parties must be careful when trying to implement more sophisticated data analysis techniques into their electoral operations to avoid spending too much time and money on state of the art analysis techniques and not enough on actually identifying supporters. Neoh stated that even though there is not enough data available in Canada to reliably target at the individual level in the same way that campaigns can in the US, there is still enough data to identify individual supporters and contact them to vote on Election Day. Overall, the strongest indicator of how people are going to vote is how they have voted in previous elections, so this is what the party cares about the most.137

Concerning supporter scores and the effectiveness of algorithms in identifying supporters, White stated that the major obstacle is the difficulty of purchasing data on voters in Canada. White states that it is effectively impossible to purchase data on voters in this country because privacy legislation prevents its sale.138 Given that vast amounts of voter data are what makes supporter scores a useful tool in the US, the limited availability of data in Canada limits their development here. Although algorithms can be useful if they have good data backing them up and if they are used correctly,

White argues that it is still better for campaigns to rely on direct voter contact.139

Polling

Public opinion polling plays an integral role in how parties in Canada develop their messaging and target voters. Central parties and even some highly contested local

137 Neoh, interview. 138 White, interview. 139 White, interview.

45 campaigns use polling to determine which issues to use when targeting people.140

Polling can reveal to parties the issues that people care about most, or the parts of their platform that are most palatable to the electorate. Parties can also use the information gained from polls to divide people into sub groups and determine which issues particular groups care about.141 This information is then used to target specific messages, like sending health care messaging to seniors, or education messaging to new parents. Similarly, parties can use this information to target other types of messaging, like media advertisements. Knowledge of which groups care about particular issues, combined with viewership data, can help direct media advertising to programs that will most effectively reach high priority groups.142 More broadly, polls help parties tune their overall messaging to be most appealing to the general public, without diverging from what the party donors and activists care about.143 While polling does not allow targeting on an individual level, it is vital to parties because it allows them to get a snapshot of demographic groups and pressing issues.144

Polling enables more accurate targeting at the riding level, which is integral to the strategies of competitive Canadian political parties. Only a certain number of ridings will be competitive for any given party during an election campaign. Some ridings will either be so low support that a victory is highly unlikely, or so high support that defeat is almost inconceivable. Parties strive to find the ridings where the election is close

140 Cross, Political Parties, 115. 141 Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, “Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns: Introduction,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 69, no. 5 (2005): 639. 142 “Inside the Cave,” 90. 143 Jacobs and Shapiro, “Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns,” 640. 144 Cross, Political Parties, 118.

46 enough for a well-run campaign to sway the outcome in their favour.145 It is vital for parties to avoid using their limited resources fighting an inevitable loss, or inflating a landslide win. Polling, combined with analysis of past election results, is how parties determine which ridings they are most competitive in.146 This is important because finding the right ridings to target with central campaign resources can be integral to the outcome of an election.

Canada Post Mail

One of the best tools that political parties in Canada have for targeting voters is

Canada Post. This is because all parties have access to voter names and addresses through the electors lists, so they can contact voters by mail without having to add any additional data. Parties can use Canada Post to target voters through either addressed direct mail, or through unaddressed ad-mail.

Canada post has a tool that simplifies unaddressed ad-mail distribution called the

Canada Post Precision Targeter. This interface helps users target unaddressed ad-mail by letting them choose the area that they would like to deliver to, as well as the type of recipient that they want for their mailing. It allows users to choose whether they want their mailing to target households, apartments, farms or businesses. Then, it allows users to refine their desired audience using Canada Census categories.147 From there, users can choose the delivery area that they want. Political parties can target as specifically as individual postal walks, or they can use the custom mapping tool to draw

145 Cross, Political Parties, 127. 146 Cross, Political Parties, 109. 147 “Canada Post Precision Targeter,” Canada Post, Accessed December 20, 2015, https://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/mc/app/tpo/pym/targeting.jsf.

47 out the boundaries of a specific riding. Once they have chosen the delivery area and search criteria, the Precision Targeter tells them which postal walks most closely match the criteria and allows them to choose which ones to send the mailing to.148 This tool is an example of how new technology is making targeting easier and more accessible in politics because even someone with little to no knowledge of statistics can target a mailing to multiple census demographics.

Addressed mail through Canada Post is useful for political parties to individually target voters. When combined with other information, political parties can use direct mail to target individuals who they know have already voted for them, or donated to them in the past. If parties are diligent in keeping track of what issues their supporters engage them on, they can use direct mail to engage individual people specifically on the issues that they each care about most.149 For example, parties can send health care messaging to voters who have indicated that they care about healthcare. Direct mail can also be targeted using supporter identification data. For example, parties can send

GOTV mail to supporters encouraging them to vote, while sending negative messaging to non-supporters to discourage them from voting for an opposing party.150 Direct mail is a powerful engagement and fundraising tool that political parties can use without much difficulty, however it has some drawbacks.

When Carl Carlson was asked about using Canada Post to micro target with the

Ontario PC’s, he said that the level of voter targeting that a local campaign manager

148 “Canada Post Precision Targeter,” Canada Post, Accessed December 20, 2015, https://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/mc/app/tpo/pym/targeting.jsf. 149 Anderson, interview. 150 Anderson, interview.

48 engages in is minimal.151 He stated that task is better suited to those who work at the central party level. Even if there are 20,000 people across Ontario who care about a specific issue, there may only be 100-200 who live in any given constituency.152

Although CIMS is capable of targeting people individually by direct mail, this is not pervasively done at the local level. It is an inefficient use of resources for a local campaign manager to spend time and money contacting such a small group with issue specific messaging, since the potential effect on the result for a large riding will be negligible.153

CIMS specializes in targeting voters in ways that facilitate direct voter contact.

For example, when printing a list of prospective voters to phone call or doorknock, CIMS can filter out those who have already been identified so that the campaign does not waste time contacting them again.154 This increases the efficiency of the campaign’s voter contact efforts.

Although direct mail is a tool that is available to everyone, it requires parties to have additional reliable data about people’s voting intentions and policy preferences to make it effective. Just having the names and addresses of voters is not enough to target them individually because there is no way to tell the difference between them. Parties need to have previously gathered and kept track of information on voters before direct mail becomes truly useful.155 Identifying which supporters can be successfully prompted to donate, volunteer, or vote because of a direct mail piece takes time and money.

151 Carlson, interview. 152 Carlson, interview. 153 Carlson, interview. 154 Carlson, interview. 155 Anderson, interview.

Furthermore, direct mail is significantly more expensive than unaddressed ad-mail. Bulk direct mail costs a minimum of forty-six cents per piece, with costs going up for pieces that are larger than average, or that need special handling.156 By contrast, unaddressed admail costs just under sixteen cents per piece.157 If parties need to include a business reply feature to allow supporters to mail back without paying for postage this can cost an additional eighty-four cents per returned mailing.158 Regardless of its limitations however, Canada Post is one of the simplest and most accessible ways for political parties in Canada to target voters.

Online Targeting Tools

Canadian political parties can target voters using the internet through a combination of email, social media, or online advertising. Email is useful for parties to stay in touch with their members and supporters by engaging them on issues or asking them for donations. Social media provides a user-friendly way for parties to communicate with their supporters, plan events, or even advertise to people based on their self-selected preferences. The internet enables any party to engage in specific targeting without having to invest in overhead costs, like a robust database.

For the Alberta PC party, Candidate Cloud’s email capability was designed to be a central part of its targeting ability because of its ability to sort supporters by the issues that they respond to. The email feature was also capable of sending out surveys to

156 “Canada Post Personalized Mail,” Canada Post, Accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/supportdocuments/cppm_pricesheet-e.pdf. 157 “Canada Post Personalized Mail,” Canada Post, Accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/supportdocuments/cppm_pricesheet-e.pdf. 158 “Canada Post Business Reply,” Canada Post, Accessed Dec 10, 2015, https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/supportdocuments/brm_pricesheet-e.pdf.

50 supporters to help the party determine who will engage with them about certain issues.

The Alberta PC party had plans to execute a fundraising strategy using Candidate

Cloud’s email feature by sending tailored fundraising pieces based on the issues that they know their supporters care about, but they did not have time to implement this before the 2015 election.159

The other political parties in this study have similar email features and strategies built into their databases. The Ontario PC party and the BC Liberal party are both capable of much the same email tracking that Candidate Cloud is, including issues tracking and the ability to monitor how many emails are opened and where people have clicked within them.160 Similarly, the Alberta NDP has an email engagement strategy that mainly focuses on fundraising. However, they use Nationbuilder to run their email operation, rather than adapting their electoral database to include this feature.161 This could either be because they view Nationbuilder as the superior tool, or because they have not yet had the opportunity to integrate email capability into their electoral database. The ability to track emails to supporters and feed their responses back into a database is standard in election campaigning.

A traditionally useful way for campaigns to take advantage of email is by using it as a tool to mine information from their supporters. Campaigns can use email messages to direct people to a survey where they provide the party with issue information, in the form of survey responses, and with their personal contact information. William White noted that social media is becoming more popular for this kind of information mining

159 Fiselier, interview. 160 Neoh, interview; Carlson, interview. 161 Johnson, interview.

51 than email, but a limiting factor is the difficulty of connecting a social media profile to a real voter’s profile in a voter database.162 There is some software available that tries to do this. Nationbuilder, for example, is good at tracking online interaction and connecting with people via email or social media, but the downside for Canadian campaigns is that it is not very useful for traditional doorknocking or GOTV campaigns.163 White states that there is really no database in Canada that has done a good job of combining traditional voter identification campaigns with social media tracking.164

Online advertising through websites like Facebook and Google is a user friendly and cost-effective way for campaigns to target voters using the internet. Google advertises to people based on what they search, while Facebook advertises based on the information that people publish about themselves in their profiles. When using

Google ads, political parties can advertise their websites to people living in specific areas and searching for specific terms. Google can currently advertise to a region as small as a city, or within a twenty-five-kilometre radius of an address, making it a useful tool for parties to drive people to their websites on a larger scale.165

Facebook ads work similarly by targeting users based on their demographic information, region, or self-selected likes and dislikes. When buying Facebook ads, users have various criteria that they may use to determine their target audience, including: age, gender, geography, interests, and behavior within the social network.166

162 White, interview. 163 White, interview. 164 White, interview. 165 “Google AdWords Express,” Google, Accessed December 10, 2015, http://www.google.ca/adwords/express/. 166 “Facebook for Business: Choose Your Ad Audience,” Facebook, Accessed December 10, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-choose-audience/.

Political parties can also take advantage of Facebook’s extensive collection of data to expand the reach of their own supporter lists through a tool called custom audiences.

First, parties upload a list of their supporters’ email addresses to Facebook. Then

Facebook analyses the characteristics of this list based on what it already knows about those users. Finally, Facebook will generate a recommended audience of people who have characteristics similar to those already on the party’s supporter list.167 Facebook is continually innovating the way it advertises to users, making it a useful tool for campaigns who wish to use micro targeting in an election.

Robertson’s campaign experimented with social media targeting on Facebook and Google during the 2015 Alberta Election. At the local riding level, Robertson argues that the advertising was not worth the money that his campaign spent on it because there was no way to target Facebook ads more specifically than a city.168 They could not be targeted geographically, or by postal code, so there was no way of knowing whether the ad’s recipients could actually vote for the local candidate or not.169 From the central campaign perspective, social media advertising can be effective because they benefit from reaching voters from across the province, but this was not the case at the local riding level during the 2015 election.

Since the 2015 Alberta election however, Facebook has launched a way to make their advertising more specific than the city level. Its advertising tool now allows advertisers to market to Facebook users within a radius as small as one kilometer,

167 “Facebook for Business: Create a Custom Audience,” Facebook, Accessed December 10, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-custom-audiences/. 168 Robertson, interview. 169 Robertson, interview.

53 meaning it can restrict advertising to an area the size of an electoral district.170 When asked about this feature, Robertson stated that this capability is an improvement, but is still limited by the way technology tracks users. When Facebook advertises to a certain radius it is advertising to devices in that area, not necessarily people who live and vote there.171 If people are checking Facebook on their phones while at work, they could be receiving ads for that area even though that is not the riding that they live in.

Additionally, IP addresses in corporate environments are often hosted on out of province servers, meaning that Facebook ads would miss users on these servers.172

Despite the limitations of Facebook’s geographic targeting, this feature shows the continued evolution of online advertising and its increasing relevance to geographically based political campaigns.

In November 2015, Facebook launched a targeting tool called “political influencer,” which allows campaigns target only politically active users. This gives campaigns the ability to know that their ads are reaching people who regularly vote and stay engaged, further increasing the value that campaigns get in return for money spent on online advertising.173 The proliferation of online advertising techniques like these show that it is becoming easier for smaller election campaigns to take advantage of individualized, data driven targeting.

170 “Facebook for Business: Choose Your Ad Audience,” Facebook, Accessed December 10, 2015, https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-choose-audience/. 171 Robertson, interview. 172 Robertson, interview. 173 Sean J. Miller, “New Facebook Tool Allows Mail-Style Targeting,” Campaigns and Elections, November 11, 2015. http://campaignsandelections.com/campaign-insider/2575/new-facebook-tool-allows-mail-style-targeting.

Several interview subjects talked about Nationbuilder as a useful tool to direct and record online communication. Nationbuilder is a company that specializes in providing political campaigns and non-profit associations with a tool to host their websites and coordinate their communications. Clients use Nationbuilder by purchasing an online account and logging in through a web browser. Nationbuilder is an ideal subject for this thesis because its stated purpose is to bring tools that are usually reserved for big, multi-million-dollar campaigns to smaller campaigns that would not be able to use them otherwise. 174 It is an example of how new technology enables election campaigns to target voters in ways that they could not previously. Nationbuilder is one of the best known and most widely used new database platforms that have come to

Canada in recent years. Any campaign can pay for a Nationbuilder account to host their website, manage doorknocking and phone calling, or keep track of communication to their supporters through a variety of platforms, including social media.

The interview subjects in this thesis who have used Nationbuilder for their campaigns include the Alberta NDP central campaign, as well as William White and

Robert Robertson in local campaigns. White states that Nationbuilder is somewhat unique because of how effectively it merges social media data into a voter database.175

By simply knowing the email addresses of their supporters, campaigns can use

Nationbuilder to connect to a voter’s picture, biography, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts.176 Nationbuilder takes this capability even further by allowing campaigns to

174 Alex Fitzpatrick, “Nationbuilder Lets Any Campaign – Yes, Even Yours – Build a Following,” Mashable March 27, 2012 http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/nationbuilder/#ey18O0wpySqA. 175 White, interview. 176 Fitzpatrick, “Nationbuilder Lets Any Campaign Build a Following.”

55 track the online activity of their supporters. Campaigns can import and track any voters who mention them on Twitter, or like them on Facebook, and match those voters to their respective Nationbuilder profiles.177

At first glance, Nationbuilder appears to have an advantage over other databases because of its social media tracking ability, but it still has limitations when it comes to operating in Canada. Chiefly, Nationbuilder is not optimized for doorknocking or for running the province wide Election Day GOTV effort necessary in Canada.178 For example, it is hard to maintain a unified record of each supporter in Nationbuilder because the constant addition of new social media data results in duplicates of people’s profiles. This makes things like printing a doorknocking list problematic because they do not always print off with relevant information.179 Furthermore, Nationbuilder has trouble coordinating a province-wide GOTV effort between a central campaign and multiple local campaigns. While it is capable of tracking bingo sheet entries, it is only designed to do this on a small scale. Once there are several dozen ridings simultaneously inputting data and trying to coordinate with a central campaign, Nationbuilder becomes impractical. It was not designed to have multiple users trying to input and administrate data at once.180 Despite these limitations, it is still a useful communications platform and allows campaigns to use data in ways that they may not have been able to otherwise; it is a real-world example of how new technology is changing the nature of election campaigns.

177 Fitzpatrick, “Nationbuilder Lets Any Campaign Build a Following.” 178 White, interview. 179 Robertson, interview. 180 Robertson, interview.

Comparative Analysis

Overall, the way that the political parties studied in this thesis gather and use their electoral information is quite similar. Regardless of region, or position on the political spectrum, their databases all facilitate identifying supporters and then directly contacting those supporters to convince them to vote on Election Day. These parties all gather the information in their databases from the same places: electors’ lists, phone directories, census data, and direct voter contact. When it comes to targeting, none of them have sufficiently detailed information to conduct large scale individual targeting on the electorate. Canadian parties tend to favour targeting specific ridings based on past election results, or on targeting known supporters that they have more detailed information on. These parties started constructing their databases between ten and twenty years ago, adding newer features as technology advanced, like cloud based computing, or email integration. These similarities reveal the standard way that

Canadian political parties use their databases, enabling further analysis of why they target the way that they do and why they favour certain methods over others.

A notable difference between the parties in this thesis is that each of them appear to have a different method of assigning supporter scores to the voters in their databases. The Alberta PC party even changed the way that they calculate these scores when they transitioned from ABCD to Candidate Cloud.181 The fact that parties are reluctant to discuss supporter scores prevents a detailed comparative analysis of this topic. However, their reluctance to discuss supporter scores, and the fact that there does not appear to be a consensus on how to calculate them implies that parties in

181 Robertson, interview.

Canada have not yet determined the most effective way of incorporating them into their databases.

The Alberta NDP and PC parties provide an interesting contrast because they choose to manage their data differently, with the NDP maintaining three separate databases, rather than consolidating everything into one like the PC Party. There are advantages and disadvantages to synchronizing political database operations in one system. Having all information in one database streamlines data access and means that there is less potential for errors or duplication of information than there is when coordinating two or three different databases.182 For example, the Alberta PC party showed that they prefer the synchronized option when they merged all their data into

Candidate Cloud, however using different databases allows the NDP to better take advantage of the strengths of each system. For example, Nationbuilder is one of the most sophisticated communication databases available to political parties in Canada, but it is less useful for traditional supporter identification and GOTV campaigns.183 Using

NDP Vote and Nationbuilder simultaneously gives the Alberta NDP access to both a sophisticated voter contact database, and a sophisticated social media and communications database without having to compromise between the two capabilities.

By contrast, the Alberta PC party bought Candidate Cloud with the vision that it would do both tasks well, but when they tried to implement the system during the 2015 election campaign, it was not yet fully functional. Candidate Cloud’s email integration was not ready for the election, and its supporter score feature was not ready until mid-

182 Robertson, interview. 183 Robertson, interview.

58 way through the campaign.184 The Alberta PC’s were supposed to have an all-purpose database, capable of managing both online interactions and direct voter contact, however Candidate Cloud did not effectively fill this role when deployed in the 2015 election.185 Candidate Cloud’s trouble does not prove that using multiple databases is more efficient than using a single system, but does show that custom building an all- purpose database is a difficult undertaking that takes time to perfect.

By purchasing a Nationbuilder account, the NDP can use an advanced electronic communications platform, without having to pay the up-front costs of building or purchasing their own system like the Alberta PC Party did. This is an example of how the proliferation of new technology is allowing campaigns to more effectively use their data in than they could before. Before the 2015 election, the Alberta NDP were the smallest political party in the Legislature, so a sophisticated communications and social media database would have likely been out of reach for them if it were not for a platform like Nationbuilder. The increased accessibility of advanced database technology means that even a small opposition party in a province of four million people can use advanced election tools like Nationbuilder.

Two unexpected results of these interviews are the facts that Canadian parties purchase very little data on voters and do limited targeting on social media. When asked about this topic, Anderson and White both stated that purchasing data for political purposes in Canada is effectively impossible.186 While parties can purchase data such as phone numbers, they cannot purchase data from private sources like magazine

184 Robertson, interview. 185 Robertson, interview. 186 Anderson, interview.

59 subscription lists because privacy legislation prohibits private companies and non-profit associations from disclosing their information to other entities without consent. This limitation exists across jurisdictions in Canada.187 This means that political parties in

Canada effectively cannot create the same kind of detailed individual databases that are common in the US – they must rely on the less detailed information that they get from their respective Elections Agencies and from their own voter contact.

Lack of available data is a direct reason why parties in Canada are not engaging in widespread, individual targeting like parties and consulting companies in the US are.188 The only way that parties in Canada can gather detailed, individualized information themselves is by directly contacting voters. However, this is an impractical way for parties to gather information because doing it on a large scale is logistically challenging and diverts resources away from necessary voter identification.189 Similarly, there is less public data available in Canada than there is in the US. Depending on the

State, US public records include detailed information about voting history and partisan voter registration at all levels of government.190 This level of information is not available in Canada. These obstacle means that Canadian politics will likely not see highly specific individual targeting on a large scale unless privacy law in Canada changes.

One of the ways that political parties can execute highly individualized targeting is through social media, which is why it is surprising that parties have not invested more

187 Personal Information Protection Act, Statues of Alberta 2003, Chapter P-6.5; Personal Information Protection Act, Statues of British Columbia 2003, Chapter 63; Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Statues of Canada 2000, Chapter 5. 188 White, interview. 189 Neoh, interview. 190 Kreiss and Howard, New Challenges to political Privacy, 1040.

60 resources in integrating their databases with social media. The Alberta NDP appear to actively do this with Nationbuilder, but it does not seem to be a priority for the other parties. This study does not specifically focus on social media and the subjects interviewed did not have in-depth knowledge of their parties’ social media operations, so further investigation would be necessary to confirm these observations and find a definitive reason for this anomaly.

More generally, the decentralized nature of single member plurality campaigns limits the effectiveness of individual targeting. The local campaign managers from BC,

Ontario, and Alberta suggest that local riding campaigns are not large enough to make individualized targeting worthwhile, nor do they have the resources to try.191 While social media advertising is becoming specific enough to target individual ridings, campaign managers do not feel enough votes would be earned targeting this way to justify the expense at the local level.192

Canadian political parties are constantly exploring and evaluating new ways to use data to streamline their election operations, however the limited availability of voters’ personal information in Canada prevents widespread individual targeting. This is the reason that Canadian parties have less sophisticated data operations than the most advanced campaigns in the field. This is a significant finding because it means that

Canada is not simply lagging behind the most sophisticated campaigns, but that as long as data availability remains limited, Canada will not see highly specific data analysis and targeting in election campaigns.

191 Carlson, interview; Robertson, interview. 192 Robertson, interview.

Despite this limitation, Canadian parties still find efficient ways of targeting voters. They use tools like Canada Post to target by mail, they use email or social media to target voters online, and they use doorknocking and phone calling to target voters by directly contacting them. Additionally, all the parties in this thesis target specific ridings based on levels of support and past election results. Platforms like

Nationbuilder allow Canadian parties to access a sophisticated database that they likely would not have been able to if they had to develop it themselves. Local campaigns generally do not find individual targeting to be worth the investment, but central campaigns will use it any way that they feel increases their share of the votes in a cost- effective way. Regardless of limitations specific to Canada, new technologies and new ways of targeting are becoming more mainstream in Canadian politics, opening new analytics possibilities for even the smallest Canadian political parties. Given the increasing reach of new data and analytics technology, it is necessary to examine the affects that these changes will have on democracy and on the role of political parties.

Chapter 6: Democratic Implications of Advanced Election Targeting

This chapter gives a high-level summary of the impacts that the latest database and targeting capabilities are having on Canada, western democracy, and the roles of political parties. Advanced databases and new technology are improving parties’ ability to target and keep track of people, which has implications for the way they fulfill their basic democratic roles. Although Canadian parties are unable to purchase private data on voters, citizen privacy is at risk due to a lack of regulation dealing with political party data operations. Some research shows that voters are beginning to have less faith in the integrity of the democratic process because of pervasive targeting. Improved targeting means that parties are better able to reach out to and mobilize their citizens.

However, the democratic process could be harmed by the ability for parties to exclude less influential segments of the population from their messaging, like the poor or undereducated. However, this risk is mitigated by the fact that no amount of targeting or voter exclusion is perfect, because it is impossible to totally exclude specific people or viewpoints. Advanced data and targeting capabilities bring potential risks to democracy and voter privacy, however the level of substantive democratic harm done by large scale data-analytics in politics is questionable, and more research is required to determine whether these risks will develop further.

The Data Revolution

In Canada, the majority of party information comes from electors lists, which are administered by each province’s respective election agency and given to parties during election periods. These lists contain voters’ first and last name, as well as civic and

63 mailing address.193 Parties also have access to basic demographic data released by

Statistics Canada. In the US, campaigns can supplement their databases with information gathered from credit card purchases, grocery store purchase records, and just about any other source of information they can legally purchase.

In the US, there are concerns about online personal data being acquired by political parties without explicit citizen consent. Much of the data gathered online by cookies and spyware is technically anonymous when sold, with identifiers like name and email address removed, which is not problematic on its own. However, it is easy for companies like i360, mentioned in Chapter Three, to acquire this anonymous data and cross reference it with databases that already have personal identifiers to develop a complete profile of the individuals that they are targeting.194 One method they use to do this is asking people to reveal their personal information through surveys. Advertisers incentivize people by offering them a coupon, or a chance to win a prize in exchange for entering their personal information. Once people identify themselves, they are connected to the wealth of information the company has already purchased on them.195

By giving away basic personal information for a survey, or just by accessing certain websites online, people are unknowingly connecting themselves to a significant amount of personal and political data.196 Since Canadian political parties cannot purchase this level of private data, this argument does not apply to them, however the broader privacy

193 Colin J. Bennett, and Robin M. Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection: a Comparative Analysis,” Linden Consulting Privacy and Policy Advisors, (March 2012) 12-13. 194 Carlile, “Digital Election,” 21 195 Carlile, “Digital Election,” 21. 196 Joseph Turow, The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining your Identity and your Worth, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011), 79.

64 concern of widespread availability of data is still worth mentioning in the context of this thesis.

Integrity of the Process

Because of increased levels of targeting in election campaigns, one group of scholars did a survey to determine public thoughts about tailored political advertising.

They found that eighty-six percent of Americans surveyed do not want tailored political advertising and that they would be less likely to vote for a candidate using this.197 Their findings were similar for Facebook advertisements targeted based on profile information or friend networks. Seventy percent said that their likelihood of voting for a candidate would decrease if that candidate targeted them based on what their friends like on

Facebook.198

These findings are somewhat difficult to generalize into the broader universe of political advertising, because the nature of targeted advertising means that people do not necessarily know when they are being targeted with specific messaging. People receiving campaign messages like emails or online ads often have no way of knowing the extent of the analytics that went into targeting that message. Any communication an individual receives could have been broadcast to millions, or targeted to a very specific group. Regardless, this study shows that the direction that political campaign advertising is taking with respect to targeting may be diverging from the direction the

197 Joseph Turow et al., “Americans Roundly Reject Tailored Political Advertising,” Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania, (July 23, 2012) 3. 198 Turow et al, “Americans Roundly Reject Tailored Political Advertising,” 3.

65 public believes it should be taking, potentially eroding people’s trust in the campaign process.199

The use of Personal Data

Concerns about the use of personal data in elections are exacerbated by the fact that there is a lack of basic rules governing how political parties gather and use personal data in Canada. The Privacy Act and the Personal Information Protection and

Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) govern the responsible use of personal data for government organizations and private entities, respectively. Notably political parties are exempt from these acts because they are neither government, nor private sector entities.200 Similarly, they are exempt from antispam legislation and the do not call list.201

Additionally, the Privacy Commissioner has no jurisdiction over political parties and cannot investigate their actions.202 Political parties occupy an unregulated space when it comes to privacy legislation.203

There are some basic regulations that do apply to political parties. Provincial parties are subject to their respective Elections Acts, but the rules about data use in these acts only apply to the voter registration data that is given to parties on the electors lists.204 More specifically, Alberta, British Columbia, and Quebec are exempt from federal privacy laws because they have their own similar legislation, meaning that political parties operating only within these provinces answer to provincial law.

199 Turow et al, “Americans Roundly Reject Tailored Political Advertising,” 4. 200 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 18. 201 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 26. 202 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 33. 203 Chris Carlile, “Privacy? What Privacy? The Impact of Modern Data Analysis Capabilities on Canadian Privacy and Democracy.” (Term Paper, University of Calgary, 2014). 204 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 33.

Practically, political parties in these provinces are still exempt from privacy legislation for the same reason that they are federally, apart from British Columbia.205 British

Columbia’s latest privacy law, the Personal Information Protection Act, has a broader definition than the federal PIPEDA. This act applies to a wide range of organizations, including political parties in British Columbia.206 Notwithstanding this exception, there are few rules governing political party data usage in Canada.207 Although Canadian political parties are exempt from most privacy law, this legislation still limits the data that they can acquire because it stops private corporations and associations from giving data to political parties.208

Data, Analytics, and Party Functions

Having determined the different ways parties are using electoral data, and the rules that apply to them, this section turns to the impacts that advanced databases and targeting capabilities have on the basic functions of political parties. The framework for this analysis is Anthony King’s functions of political parties from in his article “Political

Parties in Western Democracies: Some Sceptical Reflections.”209 King identifies six basic functions of political parties: Structuring the vote; integration and mobilization; leadership recruitment; organization of government; policy formulation; and interest aggregation.210 The functions that are most impacted by the spread of data driven targeting campaigns are those that depend on a party’s ability to reach out to voters and

205 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 33. 206 Bennett and Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection,” 33. 207 Carlilie, “Privacy? What Privacy?” 6. 208 White, interview. 209 Anthony King, “Political Parties in Western Democracies: Some Sceptical Reflections,” Polity 2, no. 2 (Winter 1969). 210 King, “Political Parties in Western Democracies,” 120.

67 brand themselves. Interest aggregation, vote structuring, and integration and mobilization are most relevant to this analysis, whereas structuring government, policy formulation, and leadership recruitment remain largely unaffected by these advances and therefore do not warrant discussion here.

Political parties help structure the vote in elections by attaching their brand to candidates so people can use them as a heuristic, as well as by campaigning and attempting to persuade people to vote for their candidates.211 With more powerful technology and better data at their disposal, political parties are better able to structure the vote in their favour. This is because of the way that data and technology make party operations more efficient. With better data and more powerful technology supporting campaigning activities like doorknocking, phoning, and advertising, campaigns can reach a greater number of voters than they were able to without these tools. Good data means campaigns can reach people who are more likely to be receptive to their message or party, meaning they will convert more supporters than they would be able to using a less targeted approach. When parties have an increased ability to identify supporters, their ability to structure the vote in their favour is strengthened.

Parties integrate citizens and groups into the political order and mobilize them through various political activities, such as campaigning or fundraising. Through this activity, people are politically socialized and integrated into the political community through networks of activists.212 Parties are better able to integrate people into the political process and mobilize them because of access to individual data and advanced

211 King, “Political Parties in Western Democracies,” 121 212 King, “Political Parties in Western Democracies,” 123-124.

68 targeting tools. Advanced databases and new technology allow parties to quantify and measure the reach of their political activities, such as advertising, phoning, doorknocking, and social media activity. This level of detail enables them to find which activities are most effective at mobilizing voters and devote more resources to these areas. An example of this is when the Obama for America campaign built a phoning tool to allow surplus volunteers in highly supportive areas to make 500,000 persuasion phone calls into swing states. Another example of this is how the Obama campaign integrated their database with the social media accounts of their supporters, and encouraged supporters to reach out to people on their friends lists that the campaign had previously identified as persuadable. Both examples show how technology can be used to better integrate volunteers in to the political process, and how technology can facilitate political mobilization by helping volunteers encourage their friends to become active in the political process.

Parties aggregate interests by providing a structure conducive to converting the interests and demands of various groups into well articulated policy stances.213 Interest aggregation is a party function that may be hurt by increasing data and technological capability in election campaigns. Although parties still function as vehicles for interest articulation and policy implementation, better voter data allows parties to specifically target voter groups based on interest. Before the development of highly sophisticated databases, and individualized communication tools like social media, political parties were forced to broadcast their platforms and primarily communicate to voters through the filter of the mass media. Now, technology enables parties to directly narrowcast and

213 King, “Political Parties in Western Democracies,” 138.

69 target specific groups of single issue voters, such as those concerned with environmentalism or reproductive rights, with policies that may not be palatable to the general public.

Advanced data and targeting capabilities change the way that political parties function by increasing their ability to mobilize voters and volunteers, and by giving them better tools to advertise their brand. Of the party functions identified by Anthony King, vote structuring, interest aggregation, and integration and mobilization are affected by advanced data and technology, where as leadership recruitment, organization of government, and policy formulation are not. More efficient data driven voter outreach increases parties’ ability to structure the vote in their favour. Parties have a greater ability to integrate people into the political process and to mobilize their voters because new technology allows them to better manage their data, and to better understand which outreach techniques are most effective. Changes in technology and targeting capabilities are affecting the basic roles of political parties, but they do not amount to a fundamental change in the way that political parties function.

Deteriorating Public Discourse

Data analysis in politics can lead to a decrease in the quality of public discourse because of the ability to target individuals and groups by interest and limit the public discussion of controversial issues. Parties collect data so that they can more efficiently analyze the electorate and target groups that are more likely to be receptive to their message. However, this practice of segmenting voters is inherently exclusionary.214

214 Christopher Hunter, “Political Privacy and Online Politics: How E-Campaigning Threatens Voter Privacy,” First Monday 7, No 2 (Feb, 2002).

Parties use their data to find which voters are worth targeting and which are not. This raises concerns because groups of people who are consistently seen as not worth targeting may be excluded from the process. This is most likely to include populations with low voter turnout, like undereducated or low-income people, exacerbating the already diminished voice that these groups tend to have in politics.215

Systematically excluding certain groups of voters through excessive targeting is a possibility, but there are factors that mitigate this risk. Political parties use their databases to find the swing voters who are most likely to change their minds and contact these voters instead of ones who are already decided. However, the issues and concerns of swing voters are not necessarily different from those of decided voters.

Even if some groups are being excluded from party voter targeting efforts, their issues are not mutually exclusive from groups that are being more heavily targeted, so both groups still stand to benefit from targeted party policies.216

Furthermore, political party issue targeting is not accurate enough to provide a total exclusion. Party databases contain a large amount of information on voters, but they are not perfect. Voters consistently change their minds and may be reluctant to identify themselves with a particular party, so this limits the number of constituents that campaigns can totally exclude from their electoral operations.217

215 Philip N. Howard and Daniel Kreiss, “Political Parties and Voter Privacy: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and United States in Comparative Perspective,” First Monday 15, no 12 (December 6, 2010); Carlilie, “Privacy? What Privacy?” 13. 216 Peter Van Onselen, and Wayne Errington, “Electoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound?” Australian Journal of Political Science 39, No 2 (July 2004): 362. 217 Van Onselen and Errington, “Electoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound?” 362; Carlilie, “Privacy? What Privacy?” 13.

Another potential downside to segmenting and targeting is a reduction in the quality of public debate. As political parties gain increasingly clear information about the issues that voters care about most, they may be less willing to lead public debate by discussing substantive or controversial issues. Instead, they may take the safe option of discussing only issues that they know are acceptable to their desired electorate; they may merely reinforce the latent opinions of the electorate.218 Political elites can use party databases to manipulate the electorate by telling only people the things that they want to hear and hiding information that they know will be unfriendly.219 While the potential for campaigns to hide information through extensive microtargeting exists, new communication technology makes this difficult because any campaign controversy can go viral and be shared with the entire electorate.220 This means that campaigns still need to make sure their messaging is broadly appealing when they engage in targeting.

New data and targeting technology is likely not fundamentally affecting the role of political parties, or the integrity of the democratic process. Political party functions are changing slightly with capabilities brought on by technology, but parties are still fulfilling their basic roles. There are negative democratic consequences created by data driven individual targeting, however there is no consensus about the severity and effect of these consequences. Loss of privacy and control of personal information is an issue, but this is curtailed in Canada because privacy legislation prevents parties from purchasing massive stores of private data. Arguments that more data in elections

218 Daniel Kreiss, and Philip N. Howard, “New Challenges to Political Privacy: Lessons from the First U.S. Presidential Race in the Web 2.0 Era,” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 1044. 219 Howard and Kreiss, “Political Parties and Voter Privacy.” 220 Warren Kinsella, The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win, (Toronto, ON, CAN: Dundurn Group, 2007), 251.

72 reduces the quality of public debate are called into question by the increased scrutiny allowed by new communication technology. The existence of robust party databases makes it possible to exclude less valuable groups from democratic discourse and risks reducing the quality of public debate. However, parties are not capable of perfectly excluding groups with their targeting, nor are they able to perfectly shape the issues in their favour. Continuing debate about these topics shows that the detrimental effect of large scale political targeting on democracy is unclear and requires further research to determine more definitively.

Chapter 7: Conclusion

The case studies presented here suggest that Canadian provincial political parties are largely not taking advantage of the most sophisticated methods of voter targeting and analytics in election campaigns for two main reasons: privacy law prevents them from acquiring the data necessary to do so; and this level of targeting is impractical in small, local campaigns. These findings are significant because they show that Canadian parties are not lacking in sophistication or resources, as was originally hypothesised. If money, technology, or expertise were the main factors preventing mass targeting and data analytics, then these factors could be remedied and Canada would eventually see parties catch up to the top of the field. As it turns out, Canadian politics may never experience the level of mass targeting that technology allows as long as privacy laws prohibit the necessary data collection.

Notwithstanding these structural limitations, new technology allows top tier election campaigns to become more sophisticated, while simultaneously allowing smaller campaigns to adopt advanced campaigning techniques. Political parties and consulting companies in the US have acquired vast, highly individualized voter databases to use in their campaigns. In Canada, advanced targeting and communication techniques are becoming more accessible. Tools such as Facebook and Nationbuilder make it so smaller campaigns can use advanced tools with little experience or overhead investment. While Canada’s electoral system makes it more challenging for Canadian parties to take advantage of the latest targeting and data

74 analytics techniques, they are still using data and technology to make their operations more efficient in many of the same ways that advanced analytics campaigns are.

A brief examination of the history of technology in election campaigns shows that improving efficiency has been a consistent goal of campaign data analysis. Election campaigns revolve around communication, which is fundamentally affected by technology. The latest data and analytics practices being used in the most sophisticated campaigns today do not represent a revolution in the field of campaigning, rather they are simply more sophisticated ways to analyze and use information.

The Obama for America 2012 presidential campaign provides a template that shows the most sophisticated analytics campaigns use data and technology to systematically make their operations more efficient. The Obama campaign’s analytics department used data to streamline their volunteer calling and voter contact operations.

They used television and online browsing data to determine the most effective spots to place ads. They used social media to reach out and advertise to voters in different ways. They refined their mass stores of data on voters into supporter scores, allowing them to target voter outreach to people who are more likely to be receptive to their message. This campaign pioneered many new targeting techniques in the areas of email, social media, online advertising, and television advertising. Although the analytics department made Obama for America one of the most efficiently run campaigns in recent memory, it is important to remember that advanced analytics and targeting can only marginally increase a campaign’s vote share, meaning that these techniques cannot win an election campaign on their own.

There has been constant innovation in the field of election campaigning since the

2012 presidential election. Consulting firms used this time to build databases with information on every voting age American in order to give campaigns the clearest possible picture of the electorate. In Canada however, this level of detail is impossible to accumulate because of the limits of Canadian privacy law. Corporations and other entities cannot use their data for reasons other than it was collected for without the consent of their subscribers.

Canadian political parties are using some of the latest data and analytics techniques to the extent that they can given the limited data available. Parties in

Canada prefer to focus their election efforts on direct voter contact to identify the greatest number of supporters possible and mobilize them to vote on Election Day.

They make use of more sophisticated targeting techniques like supporter scores and social media advertising when they feel it is valuable, but they are careful not to lose sight of the fact that elections are won and lost on identifying supporters and getting them out to vote. Canadian Parties prefer to focus on targeting swing ridings, where their campaigning efforts will have the most impact on the result of the election campaign.

Despite limits on data collection in Canada, parties have sophisticated tools that they can use to target the electorate. Facebook and Google can target voters online based on their demographics, search history, and personal preferences. Nationbuilder can track online communication and social media data and integrate this into its own voter contact database. Canada Post’s Precision Targeter allows any campaign to target mail using census data. The parties interviewed in this thesis are still

76 experimenting with techniques like supporter score algorithms, and integrating social media information into their databases, although they have yet to find the most efficient ways of doing this.

The size of Canada’s single member plurality electoral districts is an obstacle to executing highly specific targeting and analytics. While central party campaigns practice precision targeting to the extent that they feel it is worthwhile, the local campaign volunteers interviewed state that these techniques are not useful at the riding level.

Local riding campaigns do not have the time or resources to focus on specialized micro targeting and even if they did, these techniques have limited effectiveness at such a small scale.

The capabilities of advanced targeting and analytics naturally raise concerns about the potential for new technology to harm the democratic process. There are concerns about the fact that Canadian parties, except for BC, are exempt from privacy legislation. Voters have no right to know the data that political parties have on them, or how it is being used. Despite this gap in the legislation, parties are somewhat limited by privacy laws because it is impossible for them to purchase private data, preventing the same mass voter databases seen in the US.

As election targeting becomes more sophisticated, the potential to exclude certain groups grows. Parties may be able to identify groups that do not typically vote and concentrate their platforms and election promises on groups that do. As parties learn more about the issues that voters care about most, they may favour reinforcing people’s existing opinions over leading public discourse and discussing controversial issues. While there are reasonable grounds for these concerns, it appears that election

77 targeting is not yet sophisticated enough to allow the systematic exclusion of groups or topics of debate – especially given the capabilities of modern communication technology.

Canadian political parties are not as advanced as the most sophisticated campaigns in the field of targeting, databases, and analytics. However, this is because of structural barriers caused by Canada’s privacy laws and electoral system, rather than lack of sophistication and resources. Further research on this topic may wish to examine the integration of social media data into election campaigns, as this appears underutilized by Canadian parties. Further research into how Canadian parties use supporter score algorithms would be valuable once parties are more willing to discuss these techniques. Study of federal political parties in Canada may reveal more sophisticated and larger targeting operations, although federal parties will face the same limitations as their provincial counterparts do in terms of privacy legislation and the impracticality of using specialized targeting in small electoral districts. As new technology becomes available, parties and campaigns will constantly innovate their targeting capabilities looking for an edge over their competition, meaning that this subject will remain an exciting area of study.

Bibliography

Alberta Election Act. Revised Statutes of Alberta 2000. Chapter E-1. Amazon. “AWS Case Study: Obama for America 2012.” Amazon Web Services, Accessed Nov 12, 2015. https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/obama/ (site discontinued). Anderson, Aaron (Pseudo). Interview by Chris Carlile. September 1, 2015. Bennett, Colin J. and Robin M. Bayley, “Canadian Federal Political Parties and Personal Privacy Protection: A Comparative Analysis.” Linden Consulting Privacy and Policy Advisors, (March 2012). British Columbia Elections Act. Revised Statures of British Columbia. Chapter 106, p4, d1. Burbank, Matthew J., Ronald J. Hrebenar, and Robert C. Benedict. Parties, Interest Groups, and Political Campaigns. Boulder, London: Paradigm Publishers, 2008. Burnett, Kristin D. “Congressional Apportionment,” US Census Bureau, November 2011, https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-08.pdf. Burt, Gabriel. “My Time at Obama for America.” Tech in Motion (blog) August 27, 2013. http://www.techinmotionevents.com/blog/post/2013/08/27/my-time-at-obama-for- america. “Canada Post Business Reply,” Canada Post, Accessed Dec 10, 2015, https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/supportdocuments/brm_pricesheet-e.pdf. “Canada Post Personalized Mail,” Canada Post, Accessed October 12, 2016, https://www.canadapost.ca/tools/pg/supportdocuments/cppm_pricesheet-e.pdf. “Canada Post Precision Targeter.” Canada Post, Accessed December 20, 2015. https://www.canadapost.ca/cpotools/mc/app/tpo/pym/targeting.jsf. Carlile, Chris. “Digital Election: The use of New Databasing and Communication Technology in Election Campaigns” Honours Thesis, University of Calgary, 2013. Carlile, Chris. “Privacy? What Privacy? The Impact of Modern Data Analysis Capabilities on Canadian Privacy and Democracy.” Term Paper, University of Calgary, 2014. Carlson, Carl (Pseudo). Interview by Chris Carlile. September 14, 2015. “Census Profile – Postal Code.” Statistics Canada, accessed Oct 9, 2015. http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/dp- pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E.

Cornfield, Michael, and Kate Kaye, “Online Political Advertising,” In Politicking Online: The Transformation of Election Campaign Communications, edited by Costas Panagopoulos, 163-78. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Cross, William. Political Parties. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004. “Distribution of Seats by Party 1905-2015.” Elections Alberta, Accessed Dec 10, 2015. http://www.elections.ab.ca/reports/statistics/distribution-of-seats-by-party/. Duhigg, Charles. “Campaigns Mine Personal Lives to get out the vote.” The New York Times. October 13, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/us/politics/campaigns-mine-personal-lives-to- get-out-vote.html. “Facebook for Business: Choose Your Ad Audience.” Facebook, Accessed December 10, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-choose- audience/. “Facebook for Business: Create a Custom Audience.” Facebook, Accessed December 10, 2015. https://www.facebook.com/business/learn/facebook-ads-custom- audiences/. “Google AdWords Express.” Google, Accessed December 10, 2015. http://www.google.ca/adwords/express/. Farrell, David M. and Paul Webb. “Political Parties as Campaign Organizations.” In Parties Without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies, edited by Russell J. Dalton, and Martin P. Wattenberg, 102-28. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Fiselier, Mark. Interview by Chris Carlile. September 14, 2015. Fitzpatrick, Alex. “Nationbuilder Lets Any Campaign – Yes, Even Yours – Build a Following.” Mashable March 27, 2012. http://mashable.com/2012/03/27/nationbuilder/#ey18O0wpySqA. Gallagher, Sean. “Built to Win: Deep Inside Obama’s Campaign Tech.” Ars Technica, Nov 14, 2012. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/11/built-to-win- deep-inside-obamas-campaign-tech/. “Google AdWords Express.” Google, Accessed December 10, 2015, http://www.google.ca/adwords/express/. Green, Joshua. “The Science Behind those Obama Campaign E-Mails.” Bloomberg Businessweek: Politics & Policy, November 29, 2012. http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-11-29/the-science-behind-those- obama-campaign-e-mails. Heine, Christopher. “Here’s One Advertiser Who Swears Mobile Ads Work: Obama Digital Team Claims medium helped overcome Romney’s October Surge.” Adweek,

December 18, 2012. http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/heres-one- advertiser-who-swears-mobile-ads-work-obama-146044 (site discontinued). Howard, Philip N. “Deep Democracy, Thin Citizenship: The Impact of Digital Media in Political Campaign Strategy,” Annals of the America Academy of Political and Social Science 597, no. 1 (2005): 153-170. Howard, Philip N., and Daniel Kreiss. “Political Parties and Voter Privacy: Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and United States in Comparative Perspective.” First Monday 15, no 12 (December 6, 2010). Hunter, Christopher. “Political Privacy and Online Politics: How E-Campaigning Threatens Voter Privacy.” First Monday 7, No 2 (Feb, 2002). “Inside the Cave: An In-Depth Look at the Digital, Technology and Analytics Operations of Obama for America.” Engage Research, Dec 21, 2012. http://chrislittleton.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Inside-Obama-Cave.pdf. Issenberg, Sasha. “How President Obama’s Campaigns used Big Data to Rally Voters: Part 2.” MIT Technology Review. December 19, 2012. http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/508836/how-obama-used-big-data- to-rally-voters-part-1/. Jacobs, Lawrence R. and Robert Y. Shapiro. “Polling Politics, Media, and Election Campaigns: Introduction,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 69, no. 5 (2005): 635-641. Johnson, John (Pseudo). Interview by Chris Carlile. Nov 3, 2015. King, Anthony. “Political Parties in Western Democracies: Some Sceptical Reflections.” Polity 2, no. 2 (Winter 1969): 111-141. King, Robin Levinson. “What Canada’s Parties Know About you.” The Toronto Star, September 23, 2015. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2015/09/23/what- canadas-political-parties-know-about-you.html. Kinsella, Warren. The War Room: Political Strategies for Business, NGOs, and Anyone Who Wants to Win. Toronto, ON, CAN: Dundurn Group, 2007. Kreiss, Daniel, and Lisa Barnard. “A Research Agenda for Online Political Advertising: Surveying campaign practices 2000-2012.” International Journal of Communication 7 (January 1, 2013): 2046-2066. Kreiss, Daniel, and Philip N. Howard. “New Challenges to Political Privacy: Lessons from the First U.S. Presidential Race in the Web 2.0 Era.” International Journal of Communication 4 (2010): 1032-1050. Lynch, Julia F. “Aligning Sampling Strategies with Analytic Goals.” In Interview Research in Political Science, edited by Layna Mosley, 31-44. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013.

McElroy, Justin. “B.C. Green Party Agrees to Support NDP.” CBC News British Columbia, May 29, 2017. http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/bc-ndp- green-agreement-1.4136539. Miller, Sean J. “New Facebook Tool Allows Mail-Style Targeting.” Campaigns and Elections, November 11, 2015. http://campaignsandelections.com/campaign- insider/2575/new-facebook-tool-allows-mail-style-targeting. Neoh, Hoong. Interview by Chris Carlile. September 22, 2015. Nickerson, David W., and Todd Rogers. “Political Campaigns and Big Data.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 28, No. 2 (Spring 2014): 51-73. Nielsen, Rasmus Kleiss. Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Campaigns. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2012. Personal Information Protection Act, Statues of Alberta 2003, Chapter P-6.5. Personal Information Protection Act, Statues of British Columbia 2003, Chapter 63. Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, Statues of Canada 2000, Chapter 5. “Ontario Votes 2014.” CBC News Canada, June 13, 2014. http://www.cbc.ca/elections/ontariovotes2014/. Rice, Andrew. “How Far Can Political Technology Reach?” National Journal, July 18, 2014. https://www.nationaljournal.com/s/72705/how-far-can-political-technology- reach. Ridout, Travis, Michael Franz, and Erika Fowler. “Advances in the Study of Political Advertising.” Journal of Political Marketing. Vol 13, no 3. (Jul 2014): 175-194 Ridout, Travis, Michael Franz, Kenneth Goldstein, and William Feltus. “Separation by Television Program: Understanding the Targeting of Political Advertising in Presidential Elections.” Political Communication 29, no 1. (Jan 2012): 1-23. Robertson, Robert (pseudo). Interview by Chris Carlile. October 3, 2015. Rutenberg, Jim. “Secret of the Obama Victory? Rerun Watchers, for one Thing.” New York Times. Nov 12, 2012. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/13/us/politics/obama- data-system-targeted-tv-viewers-for-support.html?_r=0.

Sides, John, and Lynn Vavreck. “Obama’s not so Big Data.” Pacific Standard, Jan 21, 2014. https://psmag.com/social-justice/obamas-big-data-inconclusive-results- political-campaigns-72687. Stirland, Sarah Lai. “How Analytics Made Obama’s campaign more Efficient.” Tech President. December 3, 2012. http://techpresident.com/news/23214/how-analytics- made-obamas-campaign-communications-more-efficient.

“The Representation Formula,” Elections Canada December 19, 2011, http://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=res&dir=cir/red/form&document=inde x&lang=e. Trent, Judith S., Robert V. Friedenbert, and Robert E. Denton Jr., Political Campaign Communications: Principles and Practices, Seventh edition. Plymouth, UK: Roman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011. Turow, Joseph, Michael X. Delli Carpini, Nora A. Draper, and Rowan Howard -Williams. “Americans Roundly Reject Tailored Political Advertising.” Annenberg School for Communications, University of Pennsylvania. (July 23, 2012). Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining your Identity and your Worth. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Turow, Joseph. The Daily You: How the New Advertising Industry is Defining your Identity and your Worth. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2011. Van Onselen, Peter, and Wayne Errington. “Electoral Databases: Big Brother or Democracy Unbound?” Australian Journal of Political Science 39, No 2 (July 2004): 362. West, Darrell M. Air Wars: Television Advertising and Social Media in Election Campaigns: 1952-2012. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC.: Sage Publications, CQ Press, 2014. White, William (Pseudo). Interview by Chris Carlile. October 14, 2015. Wills, David, and Stewart Reeves, “Facebook as a Political Weapon: Information in Social Networks.” Palgrave MacMillan 4, No. 2 (2009): 265-281.

Appendix

This appendix contains a list of political parties contact for interviews, and a list of individuals interviewed.

Parties contacted seeking qualified individuals for interview

BC Liberal Party Alberta NDP Alberta PC Party Saskatchewan Party Saskatchewan NDP Manitoba PC Party Manitoba NDP Ontario Liberal Party Ontario PC Party Ontario NDP

Individuals interviewed Aaron Anderson (Psuedo), local Campaign Manager, BC Liberal Party Carl Carlson (Psuedo), local Campaign Manager, Ontario PC Party Hoong Neoh, Data Manager, BC Liberal Party John Johnson (Psuedo), Regional Organizer, Alberta NDP Mark Fiselier, Data Manager, Alberta PC Party Robert Robertson (Psuedo), local Deputy Campaign Manager, Alberta PC Party William White (Psuedo), Political Consultant