The Problems with Social Media Affordances and Digital Political Campaigning

Social media platforms open up new methods of candidate messaging, voter contact, and data acquisition. Currently, affordances is a popular concept used to study the relationship between political campaigns and how they use social media platforms. Scholars argue that since platforms have different designs, they offer different affordances that affect how campaigns use social media. This chapter evaluates each premise of the affordances argument and shows how it can lead to inaccuracies that are problematic for research. Ultimately, I argue that subtracting the concept of affordances results in a more precise framework to study political campaigning through structure and agency. Exactly how digital campaigning practices take shape will depend on the electoral system, platform structures, and how political actors decide to leverage platform structures to achieve their goals within a given electoral system.