Márton Bene

Hungarian Academy of Sciences | HAS · Institute for Political Science

Although images have always been part of politics, research on the visual aspects of political communication recently gained momentum, especially with the spread of social media-based political communication. However, there are still several significant research gaps in this field. The aim of this article is to identify and compare the patterns and...

This study is designed to contribute to the debate on whether Facebook is a normalizing or equalizing force in political competition in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections. It argues that conflicting findings in the literature are due to (a) the lack of crosscountry investigations, (b) the lack of a multidimensional approach to Fa...

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of how parties across 28 countries use digital political marketing on Facebook by drawing on the example of the 2019 European Parliament election. We introduce a theoretical model of political Facebook marketing and compare the paid media activity (sponsored posts, ads) of 186 parties to their...

It is an old concern in public and academic debates that people are not interested in European-level issues, and even European Parliamentary election campaigns, which are the main democratic tool of the EU to involve ordinary people into political decision-making, are mostly about national-level political topics. Moreover, even when European issues...

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visi...

For digital political advertising (DPA) on Facebook, parties can complement their organic communication by targeting users with sponsored posts (Facebook-sponsored posts) and advertising campaigns (Facebook ads). Based on the theoretical framework of dissonant public spheres in the digital age, this article provides the first empirical analysis of...

This chapter investigates moral emotions in social media-based visual political communication and their effects on user engagement. Specifically, we focus on the extent and the ways political actors use self-conscious moral emotions in their visuals, and the effects of these in terms of emotional reactions on Facebook. For that, we apply quantitati...

Using an ethnographic approach, this study examines the social media-based local public sphere during a by-election campaign in Jászberény, a medium-sized city in Hungary. We conducted online observations and interviews with local actors to explore the construction and functioning of the communication arena on Facebook, the central social media pla...

p>As ideological, class-based voting has waned, issue-based voting has become more prevalent. Political parties can sway election outcomes by promoting certain topics, particularly on social media, which has become pivotal to political communication. However, our understanding of political actors’ social media strategies remains limited. This thema...

In this article, we focus on how the issue strategies of political leaders are influenced by an external shock that completely changes the public agenda of the election campaign. The 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election campaign is a unique case to investigate this question, as Russia attacked Ukraine six weeks before the election day (April 3, 20...

Economic, social, and health crises have shaken and polarized contemporary politics. An element fueling this polarization is the dissemination of divisive topics on social media platforms. While these polarizing social media tendencies are increasingly studied, research exploring digital political communication in South America remains scarce. This...

A közösségimédia-platformok nemcsak az országos, hanem a helyi közösségek szerveződésében is fontos szerepet játszhatnak, és a helyi nyilvánosság fontos felületévé válhatnak, azonban az elmúlt évtized kutatásaiban a lokális hatásokra kevesebb figyelem irányult. A nemzeti szintre vonatkozó megállapítások nehezen általánosíthatóak a specifikusabb hel...

Eliciting user reactions is an important tactic for political actors using social media like Facebook to seek attention for campaign messages on policy issues. Still, little is known about policy issues’ effect on user reactions and how structural factors play into this relationship. Applying a standardized manual content analysis on Facebook posts...

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a fertile space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in mobilizing voters. However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear through political actors’ Facebook communication, and what post- and pag...

The study examines the Facebook use of elected local politicians over two years in Hungary. To gain insights into the role of local politicians in social-media-based local publics in Hungary, a large-scale data collection has been conducted to capture the Facebook activity of all elected local representatives (mayors and councilors; N = 19,503) fro...

Recent scholarship demonstrated that Facebook is a convenient space for populist political communication as its unmediated and viral nature make populist appeals highly efficient in voters’ mobilization (Engesser et al., 2017). However, less attention has been paid to the way these populist messages appear on political actors’ communication, and wh...

Viral political marketing is a powerful political communication strategy that is designed to produce persuasive messages that are able to provoke engagement on social media platforms. Viral political marketing can transform social media communication from pull media into push media, and it helps political actors to reach less interested and engaged...

The current paper studies the 2022 parliamentary election campaign, in regards to what extent and quality certain elements of political debate can appear in political actors’ social media communication. During our research, we analyzed 2441 Facebook posts from parties and party leaders prior to the election. According to our results, political acto...

Focusing on the 2019 European Parliament campaign, we investigate parties’ engagement in negative campaigning on Facebook and the relationship to a parties’ ideology and their status as governing versus opposition party at the national level. Manual coding of 8,153 Facebook posts of parties from twelve European countries shows parties create less n...

Along with the recent boom in support of populist movements in Europe, social media seems to be the ideal place for their interaction with the public. While Facebook has been thoroughly explored for populist campaigning, there is still scarce research on visual aspects of their communication. Analysing the 2019 European Parliament campaign, this st...

Filtering strategies enable social media users to remove undesired content from their feeds, potentially creating homophilic environments. Although previous studies have addressed the individual-level factors and content features that influence these decisions, few have solely focused on users’ perceptions. Accordingly, this study applies social ex...

Populism is presented as a severe challenge to democracies as it delegitimises the institutions and processes on which democratic society is built. The infectious nature of populism within a system drives a shift in the public mood. We investigate this phenomenon through a content analysis of party posts on Facebook during the 2019 European parliam...

The investigation of main features of Hungarian parties’ strategic communication on their central Facebook pages during the 2019 EP election shows huge Fidesz dominance in the level of user engagement. Also, oppositional parties (DK, Momentum) that reached unexpectedly good election results compared to the other opposition parties also performed ve...

Parties have limited opportunities to determine the audiences of their organic communication. However, Facebook offers sophisticated advertising possibilities which enable parties to sponsor their organic messages in order to target them at selected and narrow segments of the electorate. Information on advertising activity was not available in Euro...

The article reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions about digital news media and online political communication in Hungary. Our knowledge synthesis focuses on three specific subfields: citizens, media platforms, and political actors. Representatives of sociology, political communication studies, psychology, and linguistics have res...

The Hungarian government’s crisis management fit well the illiberal logic of the current regime. It was characterized by strong leadership of Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán who personally controlled the first wave of fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. His unquestionable leadership was further reinforced by a controversial law that provoked intense...

Populists in Hungary had to manage the crisis from government position. Orbán has shown strong leadership during the crisis and dominated the political context of the issue. However, the usual elements of the ‘populist myth’ characterizing Orbán’s and Fidesz’s ordinary communication were adopted to interpret and frame the COVID-19 crisis. Within th...

Populists in Hungary had to manage the crisis from government position. Orbán has shown strong leadership during the crisis and dominated the political context of the issue. However, the usual elements of the ‘populist myth’ characterizing Orbán’s and Fidesz’s ordinary communication were adopted to interpret and frame the COVID-19 crisis. Within th...

This study investigates the political topics that triggered user engagement on candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2018 Hungarian general election campaign on a full dataset of politicians’ communication by using automated content analysis approaches. We have limited knowledge on what topics spread well on Facebook. This study aims to fill this g...

The European Election campaign 2019 enjoyed heightened attention in the European and global public due to the recent emergence of populist actors, new parties, and large European issues such as immigration, climate change, and Brexit. Starting theoretically from the issue ownership theory, shareworthiness, and the second-order character of European...

As a motivational factor of action, political efficacy is an important predictor of political behavior. The term was invented to capture the extent to which people feel that they can effectively participate in politics and shape political processes. Today, we have a comprehensive knowledge of the individual-level factors (socio-demographic variable...

The article addresses the issue of political polarisation in the news media in Hungary. Hungary is an illustrative case of a country which has been studied as the example of high political parallelism in news media, and one of the most politically polarised societies in Europe. We contribute to the literature in a number of ways. First, to our know...

This article investigates the discursive opportunities for radical-right populist politics in Hungary and Romania. We argue that it is important to assess whether the discursive activities of radical-right media are reflected and included in the chains of discussion in the public sphere. The involvement and visibility of radical-right media in news...

This study investigates how candidates' Facebook performance, measured by the number of average shares, likes and comments per post, affects the personal vote they gained during the Hungarian general election campaign of 2014. The database contains three of the most voted-for candidates owning Facebook pages from all single-member districts. The re...

The study explores the validity of the media visibility thesis in a crosscountry comparative framework, concentrating on the position of media outlets sympathetic or affiliated to the populist radical right parties in the public spheres in Hungary and Romania. The visibility of such media outlets in the public sphere is considered crucial in the co...

The study investigates 25 viral posts during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. These are posts whose numbers of shares were much higher than the average shares of their posters’ posts. The study addresses the question of what kind of contents may get viral and how this happens. First, it investigates the most specific and common feat...

The study examines the role and impact of Facebook as a central political information source within today’s high-choice information environment among university students. It assumes that the growing role of Facebook as a political information source means the return of the two-step flow of information model: political views and experiences of the l...

This paper proposes new approach in understanding political polarization by presenting an explorative research that focuses on the Hungarian media sphere. Given the heavily partisan, increasingly post-objective and highly fragmented nature of the Hungarian media, we provide an issue-centred case study approach to comprehend whether mass communicati...

The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge...

The present paper examines the political construction of ageing and conflicts between generations. The process of construction is driven not merely by institutional actors and opinion leaders in the media, but also by citizens who talk to each other about politics. In my paper I have focused on the latter by observing online discussions that appear...

Despite voluminous literature explaining the emergence and the electoral contours of right wing radicalism in Europe, little is known about the location of radical right mass communication channels in the media sphere. The aim of this article is to fill the gap by identifying and analysing the positions of the radical right media within the network...