Mulder, Justin (2026) Data-driven political campaigning in the Netherlands: A literature-based ethical assessment in the context of TK 2025. Bachelor thesis, Data Science and Society (DSS).
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Abstract
Data-driven political campaigning (DDPC) raises ethical concerns that remain understudied in multiparty systems. This thesis builds an ethical framework from existing scholarship and applies it to the Dutch 2025 House of Representatives election (TK 2025, named after the Dutch Tweede Kamer) across five dimensions: privacy and data use, transparency, accountability, exclusion, and manipulation. The case is distinctive: Regulation (EU) 2024/900 on political advertising entered into force nineteen days before the election, while Meta and Google withdrew from EU political advertising in the same period. The assessment finds the conditions for each ethical risk present, and in several cases recognised by regulators. Privacy and transparency are best supported by public evidence; accountability and manipulation are documentable as structural risk but not as party conduct. The clearest finding is a transparency paradox: formal obligations reached their highest level yet while the visibility they were meant to secure fell, because the platforms that carried political advertising had withdrawn. The main lesson is that raising obligations on paper achieves little when enforcement lags behind, and that the most credible correctives are structural rather than left to voters. A literature-based assessment cannot establish internal party conduct or quantify targeting effects, but it can map where ethical risk is structurally embedded, a more useful claim for regulation than overstatement or silence.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor) |
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| Name supervisor: | Bouman, L. |
| Date Deposited: | 10 Jun 2026 11:39 |
| Last Modified: | 10 Jun 2026 11:39 |
| URI: | https://campus-fryslan.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/808 |
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