Abstract
Building on research identifying manipulative communication design (MCD) tactics, including clickbait and dark patterns, in the 2020 U.S. election, we analyzed the interface of political emails from the 2023 Kentucky gubernatorial contest between Andy Beshear (D) and Daniel Cameron (R). This extended abstract reports study results from a critical interface analysis of 291 emails to answer the question: How does political ideology influence the use of MCD tactics? Such tactics exploit cognitive biases to gain political advantage by maximizing the extraction of donations from supporters. Five MCD tactics were prominent in both campaigns (individualization and personalization, inverted authority appeals, political culture jacking, polarizing urgency, and manipulative visual rhetoric. Our poster presentation visualizes these tactics and encourages discussion on ethical design in political communication.
Recommended Citation
Cheek, Ryan, and Samuel Allen. "Biden's Puppet and McConnell's Protege: Manipulative Political Communication Design in the 2023 Kentucky Govenors Race." Proceedings of the 42nd ACM International Conference on Design of Communication, SIGDOC 2024, Association for Computing Machinery, 2024, pp.259-261.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/3641237.3691683
Department(s)
English and Technical Communication
Keywords and Phrases
election technology; email design; political campaigns; political marketing
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2025 Association for Computing Machinery, All rights reserved.
Publication Date
28 Oct 2024
Included in
Communication Technology and New Media Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Rhetoric and Composition Commons, Technical and Professional Writing Commons
