Dmytro Lutsenko

// DISSERTATION PROJECT

Campaigning in the 21st Century

What are the most recent techniques used by professional campaigners to persuade the electorate and how efficient can they be? Under what circumstances can political campaigns influence the elections’ outcomes and when are they powerless? What are the key issues that party leaders pursue during turbulent times? How persistent is the influence of revolution over issues that parties emphasize? These are the main questions that I seek to answer in my dissertation project “Campaigning in the 21st century”. It consists of 3 articles, each of them dealing with an important aspect of modern political campaigns.

The first article analyses the influence of micro-targeting (personalized advertising that is based on personal characteristics of the voter) over a group of voters. This issue became prominent after the 2016 U.S. presidential election when campaign managers used big data in order to construct messages that would influence the voting outcomes. Despite the broad resonance that it caused in the media, the topic remains vastly unresearched, especially when it comes to measuring the efficiency of such techniques and their limitations. The following article is related to the analysis of electoral manifestos of Ukrainian political parties over the last 24 years, starting with the first parliamentary election that took place in 1994 until the most recent one in 2019. The third article assesses the overall efficiency of political campaigns in German multi-party system over a long temporal perspective.

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// ACADEMIC BACKGROUND

2020 - ongoing
Doctoral Candidate in Political Science, Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences (BAGSS) - University of Bamberg

2018 - 2020
Masters Degree in Poltical Science, Otto-Friedrich University, Bamberg - Germany

Masters Thesis: Political Branding of CDU and SPD in 2017 German General Election

2015 - 2018
Bachelors Degree in Political Science, Marya Curie-Skłodowska University, Lublin - Poland

Bachelors Thesis: The Emergence of Authoritarianism in the Twentieth Century

Awards and Scholarships:

2022

Awarded a scholarship by the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (KAS)

2013
HMC Scholarship (Bloxham Public School), Bloxham - UK

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// EXPERIENCE

Voluntary Experience:

Since 10/2019
Member of the student's work group "Ak Pol" at the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg.

2015 - 2016; 2017 - 2018
Member of the university student’s work group “Political and societal thought” at the Marya Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

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// PUBLICATIONS

Saalfeld, Thomas, and Lutsenko Dmytro .2022.  “The German Party System Since 1990: From Incorporation to Fragmentation, Polarization and Weaker Ties..” In: The Legacy and Impact of German Unification The Elusive Dream of ‘Flourishing Landscapes , edited by Michael, Oswald and John Robertson, 103–32. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Saalfeld, Thomas,  Lutsenko Dmytro and Eklund Marie-Madeleine. 2022. „The Digital Transsformation of Parliaments and Implication for Democratic Representation.” In: Smart Parliaments: Data-Driven Democracy, edited by Fotios, Fitsilis and George Mikros, 71-80. European Liberal Forum.

Image Credits: © Bamberg Graduate School of Social Sciences