Trends in Political Campaigning Research: A Bibliometric Literature Analysis

This research aims to document the trend of political campaigning from 2011 onward. Further, this research will address the broader context of proposing and identifying future trends and scope in political campaigning. Using a bibliometric analysis approach using, R. Authors has examined almost 1090 documents from reputed databases like Scopus and Web of Science from 2011 onward. The findings of this study concluded that the literature on election campaigning is extremely fragmented and yet in its early stages. Henceforth, building a more coordinated effort in storing these data is necessary, which would help the scholar and researcher, regardless of their disciplines, to acquire a viewpoint on political campaign study.


INTRODUCTION
Political campaigns are treated as vital events by politicians. [1] A campaign is a concerted effort to sway the opinions of a certain group of people. Political campaigns are commonly used in democracies to refer to election campaigns used to elect legislators or determine referendums. [2] While organizing the political campaign, political candidates would have to link with the Jan Sabha frequently, arrange a huge gathering, and choose a date for an event to disseminate political messages and participate in various activities undertaken by prior and current administrations. Political campaigns are conducted when a group of people shares the same thought process and fundamental philosophical views. [3] The political campaign helps reach out to various citizens, express their beliefs, and form a common umbrella. This is often accomplished by house-to-house crusading that enlists the participation of a large number of people, the distribution of leaflets and propagation materials, and open walks, mass meetings, and large-scale rallies. [4] Besides the election approaches, these exercises grow more intensive and explicit, with a deliberate attempt to persuade each member of the validity of a certain viewpoint. [2] New technologies progress and new types of campaign strategies emerge, such as certain political parties using election data as a new tool to organize events and disseminate information electronically to attract voters and gain a mandate. Meanwhile, political domain studies received acceptance from academicians. The research on political branding, political campaigning, and voter behavior, among other topics, became popular as the subject gained traction among academics. However, there is a dearth of research articles that focus on publishing activity, existing study features, and their contribution to the progress of literature. The authors have chosen a bibliometric approach to get more objective and reliable analyses. [5][6] Filling the above-mentioned research gaps and explaining the significance and penetration of political campaigning inside the academic discipline. This study covers the literature of the last decade (2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021). It presents an up-to-date synthesis of the literature from ten years of study in the political domain to help in a better understanding of political campaigning concepts and serve as a starting point for newbies to the area.

Study Objective
This study addresses the accompanying research objective: • To study the growth of literature in the field of political campaigning.
• To study the prominent authors in the field of political marketing.
• To identify popular journals that encourage the field of political campaigning.
• To study keywords utilized by the writers in their articles.
• To study Country-wise contribution in the political campaigning study • To study the citation analysis of political campaigning.
This study uses the bibliometric analysis, which is expressed by [5][6] (Garfield et al., 1964;white McCain, 1989) is a quantitative methodology for analyzing scholarly literature utilizing bibliometric data to give the description, assessment, and checking of the distributed published research in a specific field of study. The utilization of bibliometrics has been extended out to all disciplines; bibliometric analysis is grounds that involves a few stages that utilize various and different examinations and planning programming apparatuses, which are often accessible just under business licenses Bibliometrix is based on R (an open-source statical language) and is intended to help the analysts lead computerized science planning. The bibliometric study helps researchers with a predictable and normalized set of quantitative pointers, which aid qualitative inferences and new insights. [17] Bibliometrics is profoundly adaptable and can be incorporated with other R bundles to help statistical activities. The bibliometrix analytical tool is based on R programming, which, as expressed by its developers. in contrast to other open-source programs such as cite space and vos viewer, it provides information visualization features and focuses on the accuracy and accurate fulfillment of the outputs. [18]

RESULTS
The current study uses systematic indicators such as co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling, co-word, and co-citation analysis to establish a link with diverse entities. It also concentrates on the current literature and productivity of authors who have contributed to the field of political campaigning or political marketing. The process of gathering information becomes more challenging when the number of research papers grows at an increasing rate, and distributions become fragmented.

Theoretical Background
The election campaigns are the mechanism by which candidates and political parties prepare and express their ideas and viewpoints on topics to voters. [7] According to Nielson (2012), [8] the fundamental difference between campaigning studies and political advertising is that political showcasing emphasizes limited-time tactics and ideologies. In contrast, previous approaches emphasize limited-time strategies and philosophies. Researchers investigate how election campaigns are held and conducted, the factors kept in mind while conducting campaigns, how the political applicant is exemplified in correspondence organizations, and how they address in a public forum. [9][10] Political campaigning is a significant hotspot for the gatherings to speak with the citizens as the mission may assist them with acquiring valuable data. [11] In the political market, campaigns expect to expand mindfulness and information about political, ideological groups, preferences, and approaches to impact citizens' inclinations during the investigation of three Mexican official races somewhere in the range of 1994 and 2006. [12] A lengthy history of study has linked diverse media to outcomes and cycles such as political knowledge, interest, voting, and news consumption. [13] In any case, it is still unclear if politicians tailor their online communications to the problem priorities of a broad audience or specialized web-based media communities. [14] Frenz m, 2016 argues that web-based media represents a once more distinct communication heavenly body legislators are placed in an intelligent atmosphere that skews their messages to the point inclinations of their political organization.

LITERATURE REVIEW
The bibliographic data about political campaigning is extracted from the two prominent comprehensive academic databases sources -the web of science and scoups. I chose the scoups because it covers large chunks of records 23,452 various peer-reviewed journals, and 5500 fully developed open-access journals. [15] Furthermore, the web of science also has a large number of databases comprising 75 million Records across 254 disciplines comprising 21000 peers reviewed journals. [16] In 2021, the data were captured, such as Conference proceedings; Research papers are included in this investigation. After merging both the databases of Scopus and web of science from the period between 2011 and 2021. I used the following keywords for searching documents in scoups and web of science databases. In scoups, we used "Political campaigning" or "Election campaigning". In the web of science, we used "Political campaigning" or "Election campaigning". In the datasets of the Scopus and WoS utilizing the Bibliometrix -R package, 40 duplicate records were taken out, and a solitary document was made with 1090 records for the Bibliometric study and analysis.   Table 2 and Figure 3. depict top authors who contributed to the political campaigning domain from 2011 to 2021; the following parameter is -highly cited authors in the political domain, co-citation network, production over time, authors collaboration network. Figure 2 portrays the creators' creation throughout the long term, with subtleties including the number of articles published and Total Citations got in the specific year. The sizes of the circle define the volume of the document published. Moreover, the various shades of the circle portray the total citation count, and darker shades explain the higher no of citations. "nai-a" is the author observed as a top author over a while. Table 3 comprises author-level metrics such as g index, h index, and m index  Overview of data Table 1 Summary of the data -Scopus, and WoS based bibliometric data Source: Author's compilation.
This table encapsulates the data from scoups and web of science core collection databases. The dataset contains 1263 documents from 2011 to 2021, surging at an annual growth rate of 16.91%. Recent trends indicate that research on political campaign discipline still shows an incremental trend in its early stage. In the first place, research in this space is done inside a few other disciplines like correspondence, political theory, and promoting political campaigning strategies. The production Figure shows there is a sudden spike in the publication of  (total citation) to analyze the productivity and scholarly work done by the author over a period of time. [19] Moreover, these indicators and metrics are used to assess the performance of the journal. For example, the h-index indicates the no of a document published by the author having h or more citations.
Citations it has a direct correlation with the quality of the journal. In other words higher, h-index metric means superior to the journal. In like manner, the g-list is characterized as the number of top articles that are referred to a normal of g times. [20] m-index, then again is a variation of the g-index where a International journal of press/politics    There are three primary bunches seen in the co-citation network diagram: red, green, and blue. Bunches, like the co-reference network, are framed depending on their proximity. Nonetheless, rather than co-creators, the closeness of their co-citation is a factor. The cooperation network depicts 25 authors and 8 clusters of authors, each of which is shown in a distinct color to demonstrate how they cooperated on their projects on political campaigns. The clusters of "Pattie," fisher," "Johnson," and "fieldhouse" with the largest sizes indicate the greatest possible proximity between the writers; meanwhile, it represents the greater productivity over the period of time. Furthermore, we see that only two authors are there in 4 collaboration clusters. Sharing a space with a comparable set of authors means less proximity and trying to work independently in this bibliometric study. Moreover, the 3 clusters. Table 4 displays the periodicals that have been the most influential in the subject of political campaigning. The Journal of Political Marketing is the publication that has the most research papers that are related to election campaigns. This is because the purpose of the journal is to investigate the use of campaigning methods in politics. Table 4 contains a number of other journals, each of which has a high impact factor and makes a contribution to the expansion of knowledge in political marketing. Journal of Political Marketing, which is published by Taylor and fancies, and electoral studies, which is published by Elsevier, have the most publications about political campaigns. Figure 5 covers the most prominent periodicals in the field of political campaign domain, which demonstrates the most significant and influential publication in the political campaigning sector. Only these two journals have achieved above 20 cumulative occurrences combined. They were the political periodicals that had received the highest ratings overall. In general, the purpose of the magazine is to investigate the extent to which a variety of political campaigning strategies may be used in the political sphere. Figure  Most relevant keyword Figure 6. Provides a list of the author's most important keywords, as well as keywords generated by Elsevier and web of science references. Author keywords are phrases that the authors feel will reflect the substance of the document, whereas keyword-Plus entries are words that exist in the titles of referenced references and indicate the essence of the content. Shows the most often recurring author keywords suggest that the major issues of the papers include social media campaigns, negative campaigning, political communications, digital campaigns, and big data occurring before the general elections. Similarly, when the most frequently occurring keyword entries were examined, it was discovered that the documents focused on aspects such as studying voter behavior, analysing diverse perspectives associated with political organizations, measuring election campaigning effectiveness, and extending existing models of communications and political literature to be incorporated into political campaigning literature.   The available research is mostly focused on examining the impacts of communication on election outcomes. Frequent occurrence of author keywords when searching for political campaign studies and aspects such as online campaigning, social networks, democracy, big data, and election campaigning associated with different perspectives with political organizations measuring brand capacities among voters' existing communication models. On the other hand, the trending topic functions examine the evolution of a study field over time in the political arena. Figure 7. Displays a three-field plot diagram with three parameters: portrays the Country's, the authors' names, and lastly, keywords. The diagram can be understood by observation of campaign study by various authors cuttsd, johnson, parties, belong from different countries such as U.K., U.S.A., etc. It is noted that a multi-broad strand supported by different countries connects other author and combines the campaign word, and create a thematic connection between the research, the author, and the Country. With regard to focusing only on keywords and the determination of their similarities between study areas, the conceptual structural card is shown. Figure 8 also includes additional metrics such as the ratio of documents originating from authors affiliated with a country to the total number of documents (frequency), the total count of publications involving only authors from the specified Country (SCP), and the total count of publications involving international collaborations (MCP), It is possible to deduce from the fact that Europe is home to five of the top ten most prolific countries that European scholars have made significant contributions to the development of campaign literature for political campaigns. The studies conducted in the United States of America and the United Kingdom have made the greatest contribution, primarily to the advancement of the writing in the field of political campaigning by producing more than 200 papers. In comparison to the United Kingdom, "U.S.A." makes a little larger contribution. Then, when we compare the third and fourth nations in terms of the number of the document's contributors with a score of less than 50, we observe a significant disparity. According to the vast majority of citations obtained from academic work done in the political realm. The United States of America and the United Kingdom are at the top of the list with more than 1000 citations each, followed by the Netherlands, Norway, and Australia with citation counts ranging from 400 to 1000. Figure 9 illustrates the globe level author collaborative effort by making use of a world map and connectivity for collaboration. Surprisingly, the bulk of the recent research coming from prosperous countries with high incomes per person is included in the country-level graph analysis. Citations from archives located in countries with lower per capita income are not as prominent as references from archives located in countries with higher per capita income. Figure 10 is a representation of the top 20 educational establishments located in different regions of the globe with whom the author is affiliated or cooperating. The majority of universities in the United Kingdom have provided the most publications, as seen in the graph; nevertheless, the United States has supplied the most in the political campaigning arena. Table 4 Summarises the most important and highly-cited documents in the political campaigning domain across the world. The vast majority of the exceptionally highly cited paper is multi-author records. The exceptionally cited research paper is hypothesis-based and utilizes contextual investigation research techniques to present the ideas of the political domain.

Highly globally cited document
The first paper, "Studying political microblogging: Twitter users in the 2010 Swedish election campaign," explores the importance of microblogging services to win the election in 2010 Sweden by various political parties". The authors emphasize the use of twitter by analyzing twitter users' data, such as small blogs on Twitter regarding various subjects and agendas of the   political parties to win a political race. The authors use a social network analysis by examining a node of a website represented as a social actor and the connection between two hubs as communicated by hyperlinks. [21] The second paper, "Personalized campaigns in party-centered politics" by Gunn Sara online and Eli skoberg 2013" his seminal work in the context of the Norwegian election, crucial work. The study uses information from meetings and announcements from two Norwegian political campaigns to investigate why Norwegian lawmakers use web-based media as a political marketing tool. According to the research, the findings suggest that political leaders describe both advertising and citizen dialogue as thinking processes in their usage of web-based media. Politicians' true use of web-based media to promote existing causes was reflected in their justification. [22] The third article, "Online social networks and micro-blogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign-style by authors Maurice Vergeer and Liesbeth Hermans in this article investigates how a new political candidate running for the European Parliament in 2009 utilized microblogging and online interpersonal network Microblogging as expression tool, and Twitter specifically, is one of the new and well-known Web 2.0 applications, yet there has been very more little exploration on the utilization of Twitter by a political leader or politician. The author presents viewpoints on how political candidates connect with the public by using Twitter. [23] The fourth study, "New Political Governance in Westminster Systems: Impartial Public Administration and Management Performance at Risk, "article inspects the phenomenon of how political parties pressurized the governments in four Westminster frameworks (Canada, Australia, Britain, and New Zealand) how it impacts the changes in their communications, and mass and media in terms of clear communication on political polarisation in the electorate. after analyzing the four countries, political framework author find New Zealand is best in coping the various political risk by implementing transparency in governance such as the independent appointment of top-level public post. Lastly, This research paper recommends the approach for independent staffing of higher management public posts and less intervention of political parties in public management to the smooth functioning of governance. [24] The fifth study, "How political candidates use Twitter and the impact on votes," by author Sanne Kruikemeie examines the 2010 dutch election campaign by analyzing the various content characteristics of the online Twitter campaign, such as ("Politically personalized communication") vs. who don't use online Twitter campaign. Two types of data sources have been used to analyze the relationship: quantitative online computer-based assistive data and manual content analysis. The results show Twitter has a positive impact on the election result. The candidates running an online Twitter campaign got more votes in the election than the candidate who did not; lastly, Twitter showed the highest voter's engagement in the Dutch election. [25] The sixth study examined, "Which candidates do the public discuss online in an election campaign? "Examined various new communication strategies used in the election campaign and their effectiveness. This analysis provides empirical confirmation regarding the impact of social media on the U.S. precedential election in 2012, by checking the relationship between the candidates' level of engagement and "candidate salience" in online social media. This technique permits us to inspect whether online media, which is generally perceived as a breakthrough in the more extensive financial and social areas, can change the traditional elements of U.S. political races. [26] The seventh study, "Informing, engaging, mobilizing or interacting: Besides, disconnected disparities inside and between countries difference in gatherings' online systems. [27] The eighth study, "political network on twitter Tweeting the Queensland state election," by authors Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield, has highlighted the political pattern and political campaign through the use of Twitter in the context of the Australian state of Queensland election in 2012. The author has used an innovative technique to track the Twitter activity in the important hashtag # and monitor the critical conversation done by the political candidate and other users who are sitting as members of parliament. Such analysis gives new experiences into the various ways to deal with online media drive, which were embraced by candidates and party associations and shows the relative importance of social media campaigns state-wide side campaigns at this time. [28] The ninth study, "A social media revolution or just a case of history repeating itself? The use of social media in the 2011 Finnish parliamentary elections" Kim Kim Strandberg. Investigate Finland's 2011 parliamentary election campaign strategy by analyzing the usage of social media tools for both citizen and political candidates. Survey results show that candidates use the political campaign in new forms, such as offline Jan Sabha rallies and online tailored teller messaging campaigns, using a variety of new media technologies. A second effect is that the literature on political campaigns is very fragmented, with notions drawn from a range of disciplines, which has led to the creation of fresh theories, models, and approaches. This study has the potential to significantly impact the political arena, and leading social science or political marketing journals should focus on encouraging articles on this subject by announcing special issues dedicated to political campaigning. Table 2 shows that there are just a few researchers working in this field. Organizing conferences on the political campaign will help to encourage research and boost collaboration among experts. The findings also highlight the need for fresh publications in this field. [32] The bibliometric study's findings assisted the authors in recognizing the limitations of existing research and identifying new research directions.

Future research scope
Bibliometrics study indicate politics is a relatively understudied area that is attracting attention from academics. The vast majority of research is conducted in a western context. There are very few studies in the Asian setting that focus on political party dynamics. Research gaps were noted and new avenues were suggested by the prospective writers.
• Recognizing the multidisciplinary nature of political campaigns: Political campaigns are really interdisciplinary, and novices to the sector must put in a lot of effort to get up to speed. Because of its complexity, ideas and techniques from other fields cannot be directly used and must be changed to meet the requirements of a political arena that is always changing. [30] Political campaigning is also impacted by recent breakthroughs in marketing and political science.
• Examining how political campaigns enhance democracy: Political organizationsuse of marketing has been criticized. To prove the validity of the area, emphasize its role in supporting democracy and public engagement. Future research should examine how political campaigns and fair elections make the government more responsive to people' requests and how policy promises are realized.
• Advancing the discipline in the direction of international political campaign research: Principles-based politics is now a worldwide phenomena that is rapidly spreading to a growing number of nations. There are serious social ramifications to copying political marketing strategies from affluent nations to undeveloped ones. Most of the publications originated from America, Europe, and the netherlands. Figure 8 demonstrates that. Figure 10 illustrates this. Thus, international cooperation social media a lot, but online elections are almost normal. Citizens' use of social media in the campaign was also very low and had much less of an impact on voting decisions. Nevertheless, the lack of political attention in explaining the large-scale use of social media found in the analysis is breaking the established patterns of political participation. [29] The final study, "Variability in Citizens' Reactions to Different Types of Negative Campaigns," by Kim L. firidkin investigated the various reaction and impacts of the negative campaign in the 2006 U.S. senate campaign. This research has a sample size of 1045 people aged 21 to 28 in the United States election. Finding suggests the impact is multifaceted and comparable across circumstances. We believe that negative messages related to rudeness are most powerful, especially for those who are not too tolerant of negative political attitudes. [30] Critical analysis and Implication This study provides an up-to-date survey of the research literature to aid in a better grasp of the ideas of political campaigning from 2011 to 2021 and serves as a preliminary reference for newcomers to the subject. The current study's approach provides essential information to assist researchers regarding publication opportunities, relevant actors (publication sources, institutions, and countries), Strategies, the campaign needs and understanding of strategic political communication during election campaigns, which necessitates knowledge of political parties and campaigns as organizations. The research also emphasizes the structural aspects of several scientific actors participating in the publication process. Research plans for political marketing literature have been devised after an examination. Existing ideas must be experimentally verified and developed in order to satisfy the needs of a political environment that is always changing. The political system, rules, regulations, political culture, and media system, as well as the sorts of parties and rivalry among them, all influence the setting in which campaigns and communications take place. The Figures in Table 1 show that editorial material is scarce in the field of political campaigning. More editorial materials are needed at this level of study in this subject, particularly from the journals included in Table 3, because they are essential in this field. Because the discipline is still in its early stages of formalization, academics should concentrate on developing a solid theological foundation for political campaign literature. The rate of expansion of papers suggests that political marketing research will approach an institutionalization phase in a few years. [31] The Implication of the findings also shows that political campaigning literature helps to Formulate a plan for the conventional methods of political campaigning: As the covid 19 pandemics have altered some areas of political campaigns, they now limit social gatherings. In the future, the bibliometric research will give direction in strategizing may contribute to high-quality research and to the generalizability of results.

CONCLUSION
The goal of this research was to determine the pattern in political campaigning studies between 2011 and 2021. The analysis was carried out on five broad levels of bibliometric indicators -scientific production, authors, country level, affiliation, scientific production, and sources or journals. This bibliometric study furnishes the analysts with an early advantage, who wish to find out more and add to the field of a political campaign. Lastly, this study helps aspiring research scholars get new insights and trends in political campaigns who want to work in political marketing or political campaigning.

Limitation
The study is limited to papers indexed by the WoS database and Scopus databases; future research should include, among other databases, to track the growth of the subject. The bibliometric analysis serves as a descriptive tool, revealing information about the most influential articles. However, it cannot be used as a guide because it does not clarify the context or purpose of mentioning or citing a document. This is a methodological problem because "political campaigning" is frequently employed in the literature without much thought.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The author would like to thank the editor and anonymous reviewer for their assistance in improving the quality of the research document.