Sunshine Hillygus on Internet and Campaigns

Prof. Sunshine Hillygus is presenting about her study of the persuadable voter here at SDP 2007. She has a book coming out with Princeton University Press shortly on her research. I asked her what the most surprising/biggest finding of her book is. She said that she is trying to get away from the question of “do campaigns matter?” to a more nuanced view of how the various actors (including voters and the candidates) are using new information in such a way that they change their minds, and one another’s minds, over the course of a campaign. She also alluded to the conclusion of the book, in which she is “sounding the alarm” about the hyper-targeting of voters based on the aggregation of new data elements and the used of these data to target individual voters in ways that raise privacy issues. I am eager to read the book!

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