A qualitative research on the use of big data in election campaigns of political parties in Turkey

Political parties have sought different ways to reach the voters since the first periods of political participation in the modern sense. The power of the radio was the first medium to be discovered for this purpose. Political leaders took advantage of this new tool to enter voters' living rooms. Political parties that had the opportunity to reach wider audiences with the emergence and rapid spread of television, had been pushed to more rigorous preparation for the campaign messages. This has accelerated the process of professionalization of election campaings. As a part of this process, a marketing-based approach has begun to dominate in election campaigns. Election campaigns, which are directly affected by the developments in communication technologies in terms of form and content, have undergone significant transformations too after the emergence of internet technology and especially Web 2.0. For political parties, those new mediums has necessitated that determining the most effective strategy, creating the most accurate messages and using these new channels in the most effective way in order to reach voters. In this study, the newest technology that transforms election campaigns within the development line of communication technologies, big data, has been analyzed by its usage in election campaigns, possible changes of this use in the communication activities of political parties, and the advantages it provides compared to traditional communication technologies, and it has been claimed that voter analysis and segmentation based on data directly affects the campaign strategies and message creation processes of the parties. For this purpose, examples of the use of big data in election campaigns around the world were examined and the findings were collected by interviewing the representatives of political parties in Turkey using in-depth interview method.