DiCED has been successful in gaining Ethics Approval for its study of the upcoming U.S. election from the University of Manchester Ethics Committee. Researchers on the DiCED project were pleased to receive the green light for their study of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by UREC in June. We now begin to prepare in earnest for the fieldwork that will start in September.

The team will work with project partners Who Targets Me, YouGov, the University of Sheffield and New York University to implement their data collection plans designed to measure the impact of digital and ‘data driven’ campaigning on democracy.

One of the highlights of the study will be the innovative way in which we combine measures of individual attitudes with dynamic social media feed data. This will allow us to gain a greater understanding of what voters’ were exposed to in terms of digital campaign content, and how they responded and reacted to that content.

• Did what people saw online affect whether or not they voted and who they chose to vote for?
• And how did exposure to the new forms of advertising and online micro-messaging generated by campaigns affect the way they perceived the campaign and candidates?

These questions and more will be the focus for analysis as we gather data through the eight weeks leading up to election day on Tuesday November 3^rd. The DiCED series of election studies are set to continue until 2024, with comparable data being gathered in national elections upcoming in Germany, France, Poland and the UK.

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