Voter databases, micro-targeting, and data protection law: can political parties campaign in Europe as they do in North America?

... Recent elections in the USA and Canada have raised to public attention the general question of how political parties and candidates process and analyse personal data on individual voters. The conventional wisdom in both countries, whether accurate or not, is that the modern political campaign needs to be ‘data driven’ to consolidate existing support and to find potential new voters and donors. The capture and consolidation of these data permit the construction of detailed profiles on individual voters and the ‘micro-targeting’ of increasingly precise messages to increasingly refined segments of the electorate, especially in marginal constituencies.1 Although there are huge differences between presidential systems such as the US and European parliamentary systems, there is evidence that parties in other countries are drawing lessons from the US experience and that similar techniques are gradually entering their politics.2 There is extensive cross-national communication about these techniques through the network of political and technical consultants, who are eager to tout the benefits of micro-targeting and data-driven campaigning, and to sell the range of software applications, for both database and mobile environments.