This little dissertation aimed to compare French conservative and British sensationalistic communication practices during political campaigning through an analysis of the political communication history in both countries, a reminder of fundamental political communication notions and a focus on the modern use of digital communication over last presidential elections. Then, the objective was to understand the influence of fake news, targeted ads and social medias on the communication methods used by the politicians through a comparison of different studies conducted on this topic and an analysis of a focus group debate between five millennials of both French and British nationalities.

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Acknowledgements

A huge thanks To Julia, Théo, Ray, Céline and Bryan for having consented to

participate in my focus group.

A huge thanks to my supervisor Nicolas Péchenart for his good advices and his help

along my dissertation.

SUMMARY

Introduction ... 4

II. Literature Review ... 8

A. Fundamental notions of political communication ... 9

The influence of political communication ... 10

Democracy and strategic communication ... 12

What is digital political communication all about? ... 13

B. French digital communication among electoral campaigns ... 16

The political conservative communication French touch ... 16

The use of social medias along 2012 and 2017 presidential elections ... 18

Targeted advertising and fake news impact on French elections ... 22

C. British digital communication among electoral campaigns ... 27

British tabloids, spin doctors and sensationalistic communication ... 28

Social medias utilisation during Brexit, 2015 and 2017 general elections ... 30

The role of targeted advertising and fake news on British campaigning ... 34

D. Conclusion & hypothesis ... 40

III.

Field Research ... 42

A. Methodology ... 42

B. Objectives ... 44

C. Results ... 44

IV.

Strategic Recommendations ... 49

V. Appendices ... 53

Focus Group

... 53

VI.

Bibliography ... 65

Introduction

Political communication has been dramatically changed from the end of 20

century

with the democratisation of new communication technics and the launch of commercial

communication satellites. This digital revolution allowed the growth of mass media especially

in news, politics and advertising through new technologies as television, internet and mobile

phone. The fact of the matter is liberalisation of mass media have also triggered a rise of

competition which brought about intrusive press focusing on political personalities issues

from the late 70's. In reaction to this media political treatment, politicians decided to protect

themselves by handling and controlling their communication to show a preferred or rewarding

image. This period is embodied by the arrival of spin doctors and communication specialists

on candidate team's standing in political elections. For example, Jacques Séguéla, a French

figure of advertising have been known to running Mitterrand political campaign and led him

to victory in both 1981 and 1988. Similarly, Alastair Campbell, public spin doctor of Tony

Blair had been handling the labour prime minister communication and helped him to win

1997 UK general elections. Nowadays, this professionalization of communication is still

present but has evolved. Politicians and elections candidates have entered social medias in

order to perfect their political image and reach undecided people.

More recently, politicians have struggled to handle their communication and elections have

been overwhelmed by scandals and rumours provoking unexpected changes and opinion poll

errors. On one hand, during 2012 and 2017 French presidential elections, Dominik Strauss

Khan affair, Sarkozy-Gaddafi Gate or Penelope Gate have contributed in changing the future

of French election results. On the other hand, scandals during recent United Kingdom

elections didn't affect too much the results of polling. Causes are that scandals weren't as big

as those which happened along French elections and it is also due to a higher confidence from

citizens in political UK system.

These scandals come mostly from the expansion of investigation medias and whistle-blower

websites seeking out confidential, new leaks and secret information provided by anonymous

sources. For instance, Mediapart, a French Whistleblower website revealed some confidential

documents in several affairs concerning French major politicians reconsidering their

legitimacy to embody French people. This website is behind the revelation of secret

documents during 2012 presidential elections suggesting the sponsorship from the Libyan

dictator regime to Nicolas Sarkozy 2007 presidential campaign. If the traditional press didn't

take much over from these surprising revelations, social medias relayed this information

largely.

Digital communication and especially social medias seems to have established themselves as

a mandatory tool for citizens and politicians in order to communicate around political

subjects. Just like The United States 2016 Presidential Elections has showed to the world the

growing influence of social medias into major elections. Likewise, targeted advertising and

fake news have played a key role in shaping American elections and they have put in the

hearth of the debate the issue of ethics in digital communication.

Politicians find out the utility of using social medias tools to handle their image and convince

people to vote for them. Outside Europe, the most recent famous example was Donald Trump

twitter communication and its targeted advertising use during US presidential elections. The

actual president of United States recruited a digital communication team of 100 experts

targeting undecided people across US by sending them pro-trump news.

Most of politicians have succeed in mastering their political image by using new

communication technologies but some of them have also benefit from a large amount of fake

news shared by their militants. For example, it appears that people who were campaigning for

winner Donald Trump candidate have been much more active in sharing fake news likewise

campaigning on social medias during the primary campaign than Hilary Clinton supporters

did. During French presidential elections as well, extreme right-wing from Marine Le Pen

used a large amount of fake news shared on internet to deprive of credit other parties but

people were less receptive than American citizens.

An other strong recent change which aroused me interest for that dissertation topic is that

polls and national recognised press forecast have been failed in two major elections, vote for

Brexit and US elections. The fact of the matter is that people were more hesitating about their

vote than previous elections and a great quantity of them gave unsure information to pollsters.

These last-minute elections might also down to a particular media treatment inspired by

tabloids, social buzz and rumours which favoured last moment swings. Then, maybe the most

important issue which could partly explain polls failure and the blindness from traditional

press is the responsibility from Facebook hyper-personalized news feed along American

elections. According to Parmy Olson, a Forbes investigation journalist, this feed ¨prioritize

stories that have you nodding in agreement and shows your comments will give you a

constant stream of dopamine hits¨. Consequently, everyone is looking out for him and is not

able to see different arguments. It could possibly explain why the traditional press were

unanimous for a Clinton victory and might conducted some trump voters ashamed to tell the

truth to pollsters.

Otherwise, the recent and current context of political elections in UK and in France have been

underlined by a dominating use of digital communication from politicians but also several

actors like lobbies, whistle-blowers, militants, international press and electors. The main

reason is that social networks allow all those actors including citizens to communicate with

thousands of unique people after a click. Finally, this new technic of communication gives the

opportunity for every citizen without distinction to involve better in electoral campaigning.

But it remains likely expose to dangers more than traditional communication including paper

press and television. For instance, digital is more favourable to fake news because

information isn't regulated. Then, new technologies enable people to show different

behaviours because they feel protect behind their computer from judgements and politically

correct. For all these reasons, digital communication is definitely different from traditional

communication.

Consequently, digital communication is an inevitable issue when analysing and

comparing political campaigning practices. Nevertheless, it seems hard to define clearly

the real influence of digital communication and especially social medias on people's

political opinions during elections. Even if digital communication is easier than ever

before, it seems to pay up for relevancy and credibility with social medias personalised

feeds and fake news. Whilst digital communication doesn't have borders, its uses are

different regarding the country culture and political system.

That's why, I choose to compare two different political system countries in order to have

a largest view of digital communication practices. The parliamentary constitutional

monarchy in the United Kingdom and the semi-presidential republic in France.

Therefore, it is significant to wonder what is the impact of digital communication on UK

and French political campaigning

When comparing French and UK elections campaigning, it is important to highlight the

different process of elections in each country. In France, presidential elections call citizens to

a direct universal suffrage to elect the president who will name the prime minister. Then, the

legislatives elections will elect the parliament majority and would change the prime minister

and its government if the majority is different from the president party. This is called "la

cohabitation". The last French cohabitation dated back to 1997 when the right-wing president

Jacques Chirac has named the leftist Lionel Jospin as prime minister due to a left-wing

parliamentary majority. On the contrary, in United Kingdom, the general elections correspond

to the French legislatives elections where citizens are called to vote in a direct universal

suffrage as well to elect members of parliaments. If no parties collected the overall majority

which represents 326 seats, parties have to form a coalition. Then, the prime minister is

named by the commons and the size of its party is constitutionally irrelevant. Recently in UK,

during 2010 and 2017 general elections, votes have resulted in hung parliament.

To begin with, the first section will focus on fundamental practices of political

communication in order to bring an overall contextualisation to the dissertation. Then, the

second and third section will respectively analyse the French and UK political communication

and campaigning characteristics. The objective here will be to bring some tendencies out.

Finally, the last section will aim to confront these two country practices in order to evaluate

the role of digital communication on political campaigning and draw some hypothesis.

This first part would be a recap of all major political communication authors' theories with an

analysis of last decade principal elections to give support to the theoretical analysis. Then, the

second part will consist in bringing answers to hypothesis by confronting them with a

qualitative study among English and French citizens politically involved or not.

II.

Literature Review

This literature review aims to define better the purpose of this dissertation and

contextualize the problem. First of all, to succeed in doing this study, I will compare major

political communication authors and theoreticians in order to have a full understanding of the

topic. I will answer to these following questions. What is political communication and where

does it come from? Does political communication is a threat or reinforcement to Democracy?

What is digital communication and how can we measure its political impact? Secondly, I will

go in the heart of the subject with an analysis of both French and Britain political

communication among last electoral campaigns with the help of articles and books. This

comparison will aim to confirm the assumption that digital communication practices and its

influence on public opinion are different among these two countries. To do that, I would

highlight the role of digital communication, its actors and its several types of use through

examples in order to measure how it has been shaped general UK and presidential French

elections. From this review, I would try to draw new hypothesis in order to have a more

complete and deeper answer.

Fundamental notions of political communication

First, let's do a quick overview of obvious questions to contextualise the political

communication. What is Political communication? It is difficult to provide a clear definition

of these terms because both political and communication refers to a broad variety of

explanations. Denton and Woodward

have given a definition for political communication

which is "pure discussion about the allocation of public resources (revenues), official

authorities (legal, executive and legislative power) and official sanctions". This definition

focuses particularly on the political system whereas political actors don't always

communicate on rational political issues. They are also using collective imaginary, symbols

and emotions to influence public opinion and constitute their political image. Otherwise, this

analysis remains limited despite its quality because it doesn't deal with actors who are

involved in the political communication process. According to Pippa Norris

who purposes a

more encompassing definition, "Political communications is an interactive process concerning

the transmission of information among politicians, the news media and the public". This

definition shows that political communication is interactive because it plays with a lot of

different actors and can either go downwards from authorities to citizens, upwards from

public opinion to governments or in a horizontal way among politicians.

The second question that could help to understand in an historic way this notion would be

Where does political communication come from? It seems obvious to say that political

communication was born at the beginning of humanity when people have begun to live in

society which needed rules and therefore, a political system. Indeed, according to Aristotle

"Man is by nature a social animal", that's why humans communicate amongst themselves.

The allegory of the cave from the philosopher and politician Plato

gives also an answer to

that question. As a reminder, Plato tells a story of prisoners who have always been living in

an underground cave unenlightened. The prisoners do not know that they are in jail. Then

Plato supposes that a prisoner is forced to get out from the cave and to see the sunlight. After

a while, he got accustomed and he is able to reason about it. Then when the free prisoner

would return to the cave and will attempt to convince the others prisoners that the world

outside is superior to the cave, others won't trust him and might be ready to kill anyone who

Denton and Woodward, Political communication in America, 1990

Pippa Norris, Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 2004

Plato, The Republic book VII. Penguin group inc. pp. 365-401, 514a-520a

tried to get them out of their cave. Hannah Arendt

who defends the political interpretation of

this allegory suggests that "Plato wanted to apply his own theory of ideas to politics".

Anyway, it is clear that Plato uses this metaphor to convey a message with the help of rhetoric

in order to influence the Athens citizen way of thinking. Therefore, political communication

has been existed from first human disagreements in society and by deduction, political ideas

is inherent to communication because they have to be discussed to exist in society.

The influence of political communication

As Hannah Arendt have been suggested in her reading of Plato's cave allegory, the

aim of the philosopher is to enlighten Athenians about his ideas in order to save democracy

from ignorance and sophists, teachers who were using rhetoric techniques only to deceive.

Thus, it is easy to deduce that political communication first purpose is a matter of influence.

During 20

century, three main schools of thoughts have justified the influence of political

communication one after the other. First of all, there have been pre-war theories of mass

propaganda. Studies regarding mass communication in the 1920's and 1930's have point out

the growing reach of newspapers on public opinion. Walter Lippman in his first essay named

Public Opinion

supposed that "the growth in circulation of the popular press, developments

in advertising and the new media of moving pictures had decisively changed the ability of

leaders to manipulate the public opinion." The apparition of mass propaganda match with a

new way of manufacture of consent and made more reachable the art of persuasion. The

effects of mass communication were seen as harmful for democracies just as Lippman has

predicted. Indeed, these premonitions come true with the use of posters and broad anti-semitic

propaganda by authoritarian regimes. Nevertheless, this time also proved the efficacy of

medias to sway public opinion for preserving democracy. For instance, the BBC radio

belonging to the British government was actively involved on political resistance

communication by broadcasting some propaganda messages from Charles de Gaulle and

Winston Churchill. Then, UK government came up with a diversity of slogans displayed on

posters to reinforce patriotism. This period has seen the use of a large array of medias with

posters, comic books, cartoons, radio, movies, animation, magazines and leaflets.

Miguel Abensour, Against the Sovereignty of Philosophy over Politics: Arendt's reading of Plato's cave

allegory

Public opinion, Water Lippman, 1922

Figure 1: Creative posters and slogans in UK during WW2

An other theory, the theories of partisan reinforcement from Columbia University has

challenged the effect of mass propaganda. Paul Lazarsfeld demonstrated by using modern

techniques of panel surveys that the main impact of 1940 American electoral campaign was

reinforcement not change, as "partisans were strengthened in their voting choice". In 1997,

the polls fail to predict the victory of UK Labour and this event conducts to reconsider

Lazarsfeld studies based on panel surveys. This fact announces the arrival of a new theory

called cognitive, agenda-setting and persuasion effects trying to explain why Tony Blair,

leader of Labour party won the elections. The idea is that political communication enables

people to make a more reasoned choice and even changing their vote. Scholars account for

this trend by highlighting three ways of media influence during Blair elections. First of all, the

agenda setting which prioritise the political schedule and call for civic engagement. Then, the

political persuasion which is use my medias and politicians to convince people of a candidate

or party program.

This theory is by far the most relevant today to understand poll's error and explain the

influence of political communication on people's vote. Now that we have delimited on what

political communication could influence, it is logical regarding the subject which compare

French and British democratic systems, to understand the link between democracy and

strategic communication.

https://uk.pinterest.com/explore/ww2-propaganda-posters/

Democracy and strategic communication

According to Cambridge dictionary website, Democracy is "a system of government

based on this belief, in which power is either held by elective representatives or directly by

the people themselves"

. Nevertheless, this belief is impossible to literally exist because

representatives never represent every parts of the population. That's why government tend to

be democratic as much as possible with different systems but they can't be entirely

democratic. In order to reach the more equality of representation between people, it must be

more than one leader and powers have to be separated. The French Lumieres time during the

century was a great period of thinking and new political ideas concerning how does a

better and more equal government could work. One of the major idea which came up was to

separate the owner of each power. The first who advances this future base of democracy

called Montesquieu

saying in 1748 "It is necessary from the very nature of things that power

should be a check to power. This is achieved through the separation of the executive,

legislative and judicial powers of government".

However, democracy is not only a matter a political system, it is also bounded with

communication between people and gathering different opinions to make the most

representative decision. So the main question would be How the use of strategic

communication can influence democracy? Denton and Woodward

said "that the crucial

factor that makes communication political is not the source of the message, but its content and

purpose." This quote shows that communication needed to be consider as a political level

because if it is not controlled, she would easily become a treat to the Democracy.

Last century use of bad propaganda by Nazis has shown the dangers of communication and its

wrong impact on politics. That's the reason why communication has been turned professional

from the end of 20

century with the arrival of spin doctors into politician team. The best way

to tackle negative propaganda is to do positive propaganda. Alexis de Tocqueville

stated "it

is easier for the world to accept a simple lie than a complex truth". This sentence explains the

reasons why propaganda is so much efficient and why the political strategic communication

tended to be simple. This is why modern politicians have been surrounded by communication

http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/democracy

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1748. Chapter 1, Forms of Government.

Denton and Woodward, Political communication in America, 1990

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America, 1835

experts using the same methods, simple slogans and catchy sentences than mass media

propaganda in order to restore the balance.

Therefore, communication helps democracy to slightly exist if there are at least two different

communications against the other, generally mass media and politicians. On the contrary, if

the strengths of communication come from the same source, then it would become a real

threat for the democracy and the representation of people.

What is digital political communication all about?

Digital political communication is a new way used by people to communicate around

politics. It is including the use of news technologies, phones, tablets and computers in order to

communicate with others on social medias and websites linked more or less with politics.

Then, digital communication allowed a big change which enables people to become their own

politics medias for the others. This can have dangerous outcomes because people tend to less

check and compare their sources than journalists due to the fact that official medias have to

keep their objectivity reputation if they still want to be read.

For example, a representative study

led between the 12

January and 8

February 2016 on

4654 members of Pew Research Center's American Trends Pannel highlighted the lack of

comparing practices in their information treatment. The response to their study points out that

"a majority (64%) get news on just one, most commonly Facebook. About a quarter (26%)

gets news on two of those sites. Just one-in-ten get news on three or more". An other study

comparing the social medias news use during the same period shows that Facebook is the

most used by U.S adults and is by far the most used to get news.

http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/26/news-use-across-social-media-platforms-2016/

Figure 1: Most social media news consumers only get news on one site

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Title: Digital communication in French and UK political elections. Fake news, targeted ads and social medias
Grade: 13
Author: Raphael Saint Bris (Author)
Publication Year: 2017
Pages: 66
Catalog Number: V387212
ISBN (eBook): 9783668618343
ISBN (Book): 9783668618350
Language: English
Tags: fake news targeted ads social medias political communication british elections french elections digital communication

Digital communication in French and UK political elections. Fake news, targeted ads and social medias

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