It seems to me that 2024 will be a year when we, as a research community, get back to basics. Three interlocking trends are undermining the foundations of empirical research. There is a lot that we simply do not know, and there are a number of once-stable assumptions that we may now need to revisit.
We have been through similar moments before. In fact, it calls to mind the bygone years when my career was just getting started.
This was back in the mid-to-late aughts, the peak of “Web 2.0” enthusiasm. Not a lot of people studied digital campaigning back then. It was not yet clear that digital tools mattered to any of the behaviors or outcomes that we, as a research community, tended to study.
But what made it an exciting time was the sheer rate of change in the digital media environment. One could make a strong argument that digital campaigning circa 2000 had little-to-no impact. (In fact, Bruce Bimber and Richard Davis did make such an argument in their 2003 book Campaigning Online, and it was strongly supported by empirical evidence.) But the Internet of 2004 and 2008 was not the Internet of 2008. We had to keep returning to descriptive questions – “what are these tools?” and “how are campaigns, journalists, and the public even using them?”
I still recall one of my first paper presentations. It was at a special conference on “YouTube and the 2008 election.” I asked my assembled peers why no one in the room had conducted any studies of YouTube in the 2004 election. An awkward silence descended for a moment before I delivered the punchline: YouTube did not even exist in 2004. We were dealing, in a nontrivial sense, with an N of 1.
Read the entire study in Political Communication