Question

What happened, as it relates to data-driven marketing and decision making, in the 2016 presidential election? Why?

Answer 1

Ans. Indeed more technology is now used in and around elections than ever before, but 2016 exposed a monumental gap between expectations and the eventual outcome. It’s a tacit belief that some level of knowledge should inform policy, but it is also asserted that technology moves too fast for the government. It’s a good idea to keep in mind when you hear the need for regulation because something is too important to be left to the market.

Many blame the polls for not predicting the results, bemoaning that some 145 surveys got it wrong, overestimating Clinton’s chances by 3–4 percentage points. In the final weeks of election season, the gap between Trump and Clinton narrowed such that Clinton’s presumed lead could have been eclipsed by the stated margin of error of the polls. If the polls were to be believed in the first place, then one would have to consider that the election could have gone either way. Indeed a chapter on polling in “Trumped: The 2016 Election That Broke All the Rules“(Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) says that such a close margin of error suggests that the polls were in fact “identical.”While it is easy to blame the pollsters for not getting it exactly right, the people only have themselves to blame if they refused to consider data that suggested an outcome that didn’t conform to their preferences.

Data driven marketing

There is a pervasive assumption that elections can be won and lost on the basis of which candidate or party has the better data on the preferences and behaviour of the electorate. But there are myths and realities about data-driven elections. It is time to assess the actual implications of data-driven elections in the light of the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal, and to reconsider the broader terms of the international debate. Political micro-targeting, and the voter analytics upon which it is based, are essentially forms of surveillance. We know a lot about how surveillance harms democratic values. We know a lot less, however, about how surveillance spreads as a result of democratic practices – by the agents and organisations that encourage us to vote (or not vote).The balance between rights to privacy, and the rights of political actors to communicate with the electorate, is struck in different ways in different jurisdictions depending on a complex interplay of various legal, political, and cultural factors. Collectively, the articles in this collection signal the necessary questions for academics and regulators in the years ahead.