Abstract

Political microtargeting is the subject of heated societal debate but not much is known about its effects, especially in non-US contexts. Microtargeting, used by political actors to send citizens tailored messages, could have the potential to overcome barriers that make generic political messages less effective. In this article, we present a small-scale field experiment, which serves as a case study to illustrate how microtargeting’s effects on citizens could be measured. The field experiment showed that receiving a microtargeted message via postal mail increased likelihood to vote for the microtargeting party, but this increase did not translate into actual votes.

摘要

政治微目标定位是激烈的社会辩论的主题，但对其影响知之甚少，尤其是在非美国背景下。政治行为者使用微目标向公民发送量身定制的信息，它有可能克服使通用政治信息效果不佳的障碍。在这篇文章中，我们提出了一个小规模的现场实验，作为案例研究来说明如何衡量微目标对公民的影响。实地实验表明，通过邮寄邮件接收微定向消息会增加投票给微定向党的可能性，但这种增加并未转化为实际投票。