Digitalization and the associated media change have led to the possibility of observing (public) political communication in real time on an unprecedented scale. The quantity and quality of the available data offers the potential to gain new insights into political communication as well as to triangulate previous findings. However, the conventional empirical methods of social science are only suitable to a limited extent for adequately capturing the quality and quantity of digital communication. Computational approaches offer to complement and expand empirical political
communication research through new data, enhanced data collection techniques, and new methods. In this entry, we thus start by describing new data before discussing computational approaches to collecting political communication data and to analyzing it. Lastly, we engage in the ongoing debate around how political communication can be methodologically approached.

Haßler, J. & Haim, M. (2025). Computational approaches. In A. Nai, M. Grömping, & D. Wirz (eds.), Elgar Encyclopedia of Political Communication (S. 240-244). Cheltenham, UK: Elgar. (content_copy)