Campaigning on Facebook in the 2019 European Parliament Election: Informing, Interacting with, and Mobilising Voters
Abstract
This book investigates how political parties from 12 European countries used Facebook to inform, interact with, and mobilise voters in the 2019 European Parliament election. Facebook has become one of the most important tools in election campaigning, but cross-country comparisons on its use in European Parliament elections are widely missing. This content analysis of more than 14,000 Facebook posts contributes to filling this gap. After presenting the theoretical framework and method, the results on each country are presented. This is followed by in-depth analyses of European parties’ Facebook campaigns, the spread of populism on Facebook and the use of Facebook ads by the parties. The final chapter compares all countries and indicates that focusing on information while neglecting mobilisation and particularly interaction is a common campaigning style on Facebook. The campaigns in the 12 countries are more strongly shaped by the national than by the European political context.
... In that regard, studies found differences along parties' ideological lines (Lau & Pomper, 2004), with candidates and parties far from the ideological center (particularly far-right ones: Nai, 2020;Valli & Nai, 2020), more likely to use negative campaigning (Maier & Nai, 2020;Walter, 2014;Walter et al., 2014). A recent study on the 2019 EP election campaign found that ideology was a key aspect in parties' issue strategy (Haßler, Magin, Russmann, & Fenoll, 2021), therefore ideology is expected to also drive negativity in second-order elections. Consequently, we hypothesize: H3: The further a party is ideologically away from the political center, the more negative were its Facebook posts in the 2019 European election campaign. ...
... Facebook, with its vast user base and strategic functionalities, has emerged as a pivotal social networking platform in political campaigning (Haßler et al., 2021). The platform's capabilities for organic (i.e., regular posts) and paid media (i.e., sponsored posts and ads) are integral to today's political marketing strategies (Kruschinski & Bene, 2022;Stuckelberger & Koedam, 2022). ...
p>In times of declining party identification, parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election (Dassonneville et al., 2012). Setting topics in such a way that voters are convinced to cast their vote has become an essential prerequisite for success in modern election campaigns. Social media are suitable for this, as parties can set their own topics or highlight the topics most important to the voters and communicate them to a large audience in organic posts or target specific voter groups with ads. While tendencies of issue ownership in posts on Facebook are repeatedly shown empirically (e.g., Ennser-Jedenastik et al., 2022), there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions in Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this paper investigates whether parties communicated consistently on Facebook with regard to the issues they set in organic posts, sponsored posts, and ads during the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign. The results of a manual quantitative content analysis (n = 1,029 posts, n = 1,197 sponsored posts, n = 2,643 ads) show that parties focused on issue ownership in their posts. Still, their investments in sponsored posts and ads followed different strategies. Here, most parties highlighted social policy, contradicting issue ownership for some parties. The paper provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences.</p
... Social campaigns for the 2019 European Parliament have been widely studied in the literature. The article collection in [23] analyzes how political parties in 12 member states used Facebook in the lead-up to elections. Again, the overall message is that social media was used to persuade the public to vote for the candidate, rather than using the platform to interact and mobilize voters. ...
For U.S. presidential elections, most states use the so-called winner-take-all system, in which the state’s presidential electors are awarded to the winning political party in the state after a popular vote phase, regardless of the actual margin of victory. Therefore, election campaigns are especially intense in states where there is no clear direction on which party will be the winning party. These states are often referred to as swing states . To measure the impact of such an election law on the campaigns, we analyze the Twitter activity surrounding the 2020 US preelection debate, with a particular focus on the spread of disinformation. We find that about 88% of the online traffic was associated with swing states. In addition, the sharing of links to unreliable news sources is significantly more prevalent in tweets associated with swing states: in this case, untrustworthy tweets are predominantly generated by automated accounts. Furthermore, we observe that the debate is mostly led by two main communities, one with a predominantly Republican affiliation and the other with accounts of different political orientations. Most of the disinformation comes from the former.
... Citizen disaffection has increased at the same time that some Chapter 5 institutional actions to promote Europeanism were introduced, showing the inability of public communication policy to achieve a Europeanization of the journalistic treatment (Walter, 2017). Elections to the European Parliament are even considered third-order elections by political actors, which is reflected in low turnout (Haßler et al., 2021). ...
The role of truth for the society is undermined in an accelerated digital era, since opinions are more important than facts in the shaping of the public opinion. Journalists seem to prefer opinionated stories, especially regarding complex issues such as the EU. This means a crisis of this sort of democratic institutions. In the case of the EU, its news coverage is also affected by a distant approach that overlaps with a feeling of remoteness towards the European project. Taking these trends into account, the current research aims to conceptualize the role of opinionated news in disinformation, as this practice takes advantage of a polarized public opinion. Beyond a theoretical approach, we use the multiple-case study as research strategy to assess the degree of opinion-oriented stories about the European Union (EU). The report of this issue suffers from cultural clashes that threaten its journalistic quality. In the multiple-case study here applied, we compare the coverage of EU affairs in local media from Germany, United Kingdom (UK) and Spain. The analysis is performed on a sample of news items on European issues (n=612), collected over a six-month period during the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections. The study focuses on two variables (personalization and negativity) through the analysis of headlines, topics and reader’s comments. Drawing upon the sample, we argue that the prominence of opinion-oriented news about the EU could boost polarized disinformation. Polarization is more frequent in the UK (polarized liberal), while the German press shows approaches that seek a balance from different sources and the Spanish cases present a low negativity. Our theoretical approach reveals how the current state of play of journalism has influenced the success of polarization in the digital sphere. This disruptive communication around individualization could mean a decline of democratic institutions, as facts are no longer relevant for the audience.
... Opinion-oriented news as a source of polarized disinformation on the EU: a case study analysis during the 2019 EP elections 152 institutional actions to promote Europeanism were introduced, showing the inability of public communication policy to achieve a Europeanization of the journalistic treatment (Walter, 2017). Elections to the European Parliament are even considered third-order elections by political actors, which is reflected in low turnout (Haßler et al., 2021). ...
... In that regard, studies found differences along parties' ideological lines (Lau & Pomper, 2004), with candidates and parties far from the ideological center (particularly far-right ones: Nai, 2020;Valli & Nai, 2020), more likely to use negative campaigning (Maier & Nai, 2020;Walter, 2014;Walter et al., 2014). A recent study on the 2019 EP election campaign found that ideology was a key aspect in parties' issue strategy (Haßler, Magin, Russmann, & Fenoll, 2021), therefore ideology is expected to also drive negativity in second-order elections. Consequently, we hypothesize: H3: The further a party is ideologically away from the political center, the more negative were its Facebook posts in the 2019 European election campaign. ...
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 negative posts than positive and neutral ones. However, these negative posts attract more shares than positive, neutral, and balanced statements, which increases their prominence on the platform. Hence, users and algorithms create a negative campaign environment on Facebook to a greater extent than parties.
... Theoretical analyses and case studies suggest that their transnational outreach, low costs of messaging, and an emphasis on user engagement render social media particularly attractive for the otherwise rather detached supranational institutions (e.g., Barisione & Michailidou, 2017;Krzyżanowski, 2020;Zaiotti, 2020). However, extant large-n social media studies focus only on EU actors with direct electoral accountability, such as the Council and European Parliament (EP) representatives (European Parliament Directorate General for Parliamentary Research Services, 2021; Fazekas et al., 2021;Haßler et al., 2021;Nulty et al., 2016;Umit, 2017), thereby neglecting exactly those executive institutions that citizens most strongly associate with the EU as a polity (Silva et al., 2021). ...
Given the politicization of European integration, effective public communication by the European Union (EU) has gained importance. Especially for rather detached supranational executives, social media platforms offer unique opportunities to communicate to and engage with European citizens. Yet, do supranational actors exploit this potential? This article provides a bird’s eye view by quantitatively describing almost one million tweets from 113 supranational EU accounts in the 2009–2021 period, focusing especially on the comprehensibility and publicity of supranational messages. We benchmark these characteristics against large samples of tweets from national executives, other regional organizations, and random Twitter users. We show that the volume of supranational Twitter has been increasing, that it relies strongly on the multimedia features of the platform, and outperforms communication from and engagement with other political executives on many dimensions. However, we also find a highly technocratic language in supranational messages, skewed user engagement metrics, and high levels of variation across institutional and individual actors and their messages. We discuss these findings in light of the legitimacy and public accountability challenges that supranational EU actors face and derive recommendations for future research on supranational social media messages.
Social networks have become the ideal platform for populist leaders to directly engage with their followers, facilitating the dissemination of polarizing narratives. Populist actors have gained electoral momentum in different parts of the world by importing populist content from diverse national contexts. Argentina’s legislative elections in 2021 are a case in point. The main objective of this study is to examine the communication strategy employed by Javier Milei, an anarcho-capitalist politician, on Instagram during this electoral campaign. Through a quantitative content analysis, we identify the thematic and populist elements present in Milei’s Instagram posts. Our findings reveal a new style of ‘libertarian’ populism, which employs discursive components previously used by populist parties from various ideologies and the strategic alignment of political communication with opportunistic themes and contextual dynamics. Milei focuses on positioning himself as the leader of the electoral campaign, with minimal emphasis on concrete policy proposals. His populist strategy revolves around attacking ideological adversaries (such as communism and feminism) and denouncing the corrupt political ‘caste’. Unlike other rightwing populist politicians, Milei’s discourse does not particularly focus on the issue of immigration.
Emojis have become ubiquitous in digital communication, but we know relatively little about how they are used in political and campaigning contexts. To address this deficit, we analyze the use of emojis in the Facebook communication of parties in 11 European countries during the 2019 European election campaign. Results indicate that the use of emojis by political parties differs significantly from general online communication. Political parties more often use neutral and representational (such as flags) emojis than emotional and facial emojis to draw users' attention while maintaining a serious appearance of their content. Based on our empirical results, we develop a typology to characterize the mixture
This chapter offers a brief overview of the main themes covered in visual politics. It does so by taking into consideration that while there is a growing body of scholarship in the field of visual politics, most of this research has a strong empirical focus on North America and Europe and neglects forms of visual politics that can be found in different sites across the Global South. The authors draw on Boaventura Sousa Santos’ work to argue for epistemologies of the South that revolve around the struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy, and they also provide a discussion on the growing body of research published in the English language on visual politics focused on the Global South.KeywordsGlobal SouthVisual politicsSouthern theoryVisual communicationGeopolitics of knowledge
The Introduction to this volume provides a brief overview of the political context and media landscape surrounding the 2019 EU election. The outcome of the ensuring campaign is considered along with interpretations of how it was conducted. Furthermore, this chapter summarises some of the previous research on EU elections, with a focus on campaign studies, and features synposes of every chapter in the collection and commentary on their main findings. The closing section reflects on whether the 2019 election campaign signals a move towards the embracing of a European public sphere or, at the very least, a discernible movement in this direction.
Medien haben eine Lautsprecherfunktion in der und für die Demokratie – insbesondere in Krisenzeiten. Medien leisten folglich einen unverzichtbaren Beitrag zum Funktionieren der Demokratie. Diese Thematik steht auch im Mittelpunkt von Arbeiten des Instituts für vergleichende Medien- und Kommunikationsforschung an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW). Der Beitrag beleuchtet die (Dys-)Funktionen von Medien in und für die Demokratie und die wandelnde Rolle von Medien und Öffentlichkeit unter Berücksichtigung aktueller Entwicklungen wie der Plattformisierung der Medien. Diese Betrachtungen erfolgen in Bezug zur Historie und den Arbeiten des Instituts für vergleichende Medien- und Kommunikationsforschung an der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (ÖAW).
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 elections, the study at hand investigates the campaigns of 69 parties from 9 countries on Facebook as one of the current central spheres of electoral contest. Facebook enables parties to provide users with selected issues considered advantageous for themselves. The number of posts’ shares indicates whether the parties manage to reach out to the voters with these issues. The results show that parties use Facebook strategically for highlighting certain issues and focusing on specific political levels in line with the theoretical approaches. However, it seems that users in contrast to the theories do not pay heightened attention to issues and political levels which are strategically emphasized by parties. These findings point to a remarkable gap between parties’ and their followers’ communication. The supply and demand side of campaign communication obviously do not overlap to a high degree. User engagement seems to be driven by other factors.
In 2017, the anticorruption #rezist protests engulfed Romania. In the context of mounting concerns about exposure to and engagement with political information on social media, we examine the use of public Facebook event pages during the #rezist protests. First, we consider the degree to which political information influenced the participation of students, a key protest demographic. Second, we explore whether political information was available on the pages associated with the protests. Third, we investigate the structure of the social network established with those pages to understand its diffusion within that public domain. We find evidence that political information was a prominent component of public, albeit localized, activist communication on Facebook, with students more likely to partake in demonstrations if they followed a page. These results lend themselves to an evidence-based deliberation about the relation that individual demand and supply of political information on social media have with protest participation.
Este artículo pretende analizar cómo se desarrollan los mítines electorales en un periodo de intensa mediatización, en el que los medios de comunicación y los políticos se influyen mutuamente. Para ello, tomamos como referencia las elecciones autonómicas en la Comunidad Valenciana celebradas en abril de 2019, que coincidieron por primera vez con unas elecciones generales, de modo que la campaña adquirió más relevancia que en citas electorales anteriores. En ese contexto, nos centramos en conocer cómo se diseñaron esos mítines y qué impacto tuvieron tanto en redes sociales como en televisión. Los datos se obtuvieron mediante un análisis observacional de tipo cualitativo de los mítines centrales de los principales partidos concurrentes a esos comicios (PP, PSPV-PSOE, Compromís, Ciudadanos, Unides Podem y Vox), que se combinó con una metodología cuantitativa para el análisis de contenido de las distintas publicaciones que esos partidos y sus líderes subieron a sus cuentas oficiales de Facebook y Twitter sobre dichos mítines, y con el estudio de la cobertura que la televisión pública valenciana, À Punt, ofreció de los mismos mítines en sus informativos. Los resultados indican, por un lado, que los mítines electorales continúan siendo acontecimientos muy ritualizados que los partidos políticos diseñan pensando en cómo serán difundidos por un sistema mediático que ha cambiado, se ha fragmentado y diversificado, y en el que las redes sociales están adquiriendo cada vez mayor importancia. Por otro lado, la investigación apunta a que la información sobre los mítines está, en parte, todavía controlada por los sujetos políticos. Una circunstancia habitual en las campañas electorales españolas.
In this paper, we examine how online political micro-targeting is regulated in Europe. While there are no specific rules on such micro-targeting, there are general rules that apply. We focus on three fields of law: data protection law, freedom of expression, and sector-specific rules for political advertising; for the latter we examine four countries. We argue that the rules in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are necessary, but not sufficient. We show that political advertising, including online political micro-targeting, is protected by the right to freedom of expression. That right is not absolute, however. From a European human rights perspective, it is possible for lawmakers to limit the possibilities for political advertising. Indeed, some countries ban TV advertising for political parties during elections.
With the advent of social media, political communication scholars have systematically revised theories and empirical corollaries revolving media use and democracy at large. Interestingly, in about the same period of time, a reinvigorated political populism trend has taken place across different latitudes in the world. This widespread populist movement has expanded regardless of whether these political systems were established democracies, emerging democracies, or societies immersed in political contexts at peril. This essay serves as the introductory piece to a special issue on populism. First, it highlights the ways in which “populism,” being an old phenomenon, has further transpired into the political realm in the era of social media. Second, the essay seeks to better contextualize what populism is and how it has developed within today’s hybrid media society. Finally, this introduction also lays out the ground to six central theoretical and data-driven papers that encapsulate many of the important issues revolving the phenomenon of populism today.
Politicians’ social media use affects their relationship with citizens. For example, politicians are better evaluated when they communicate interactively. However, they mostly use social media to broadcast information to their audience. This study asks why politicians use Facebook and Twitter the way they do. The study contends that politicians want to satisfy their audiences’ expectations, to get favorable reactions and increase their visibility, and that politicians from different parties have different audiences who have different expectations for how politicians should communicate. Data from two surveys conducted among national (n = 118) and local (n = 859) German politicians show that politicians’ Facebook and Twitter communication is strongly oriented to their perceptions of their audiences’ expectations. The party size did not influence politicians’ Twitter communication, but their Facebook communication: Compared to politicians from major parties, politicians from minor parties communicate in more interactive ways via Facebook. In addition, politicians from minor parties perceive more strongly than their colleagues from major parties that their audience expects them to criticize other politicians or journalists.
The 2014 European Parliament elections were hailed as a "populist earthquake," with parties like the French Front National, UKIP and the Danish People's Party topping the polls in their respective countries. But what happened afterwards?
Based on policy positions, voting data, and interviews conducted over three years with senior figures from fourteen radical right populist parties and their partners, this is the first major study to explain these parties' actions and alliances in the European Parliament. International Populism answers three key questions: why have radical right populists, unlike other ideological party types, long been divided in the Parliament? Why, although divisions persist, are many of them now more united than ever? And how does all this inform our understanding of the European populist radical right today?
Arguing that these parties have entered a new international and transnational phase, with some trying to be "respectable radicals" while others embrace their shared populism, McDonnell and Werner shed new light on the past, present and future of one of the most important political phenomena of twenty-first-century Europe.
This paper analyses the differences in the communication styles on Facebook during the electoral campaigns in Spain 2016 and Germany 2017. The article aims to find out if the populist parties share a common communication strategy on Facebook. From a quantitative perspective, we analyse the content of 1884 posts published by the main candidates and political parties. The results reveal discrepancies in the populist communication strategies according to the ideology of each party.
Political elections see several actors rise to the fore in order to influence and inform voters. Increasingly, such processes take place on social media like Facebook, where media outlets and politicians alike utilize seek promote their respective agenda. Given the recent rise of so-called hyperpartisan media—often described as purveyors of “fake news”—and populist right-wing parties across a series of western contexts, this study details the degree to which these novel actors succeed in overtaking their more mainstream or indeed established competitors when it comes to audience engagement on the mentioned platform. Focusing on the one-month period leading up to the 2018 Swedish national elections, the study finds that right-wing actors across the media and the political sector are more successful in engaging their Facebook followers than their competitors. As audience engagement is a key factor for social media success, the study closes by providing a discussion on the repercussions for professionals within the media and the political sector.
Abstract. At the beginning of 2017 massive protests took place on the streets of the biggest cities in Romania, unprecedented in the post-De- cembrist history of the country. They were caused by a decree passed by the government that was meant to decriminalize certain offences, in- cluding official misconduct. In situations such as social movements on a larger scale, the communication flow on social networking platforms, es- pecially on Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform in Romania, increases exponentially (Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Valenzuela, 2013). In this context, the present paper focuses on the analysis of the so- cial media communication of the main political parties and their leaders. The communication strategy expressed especially on Facebook is interest- ing, because it is preferred by a large part of the protest participants (for information regarding Facebook groups of protesters see Adi & Lilleker, 2018). The central question of the present paper revolves around the way in which political parties and leaders communicated during the afore- mentioned protests. We have carried out a computer-assisted frequency analysis and have analyzed 15 Facebook accounts of the main political parties and their leaders during the period January 18th – March 5th 2017, which corresponds to the period of the protests.
Keywords: Social Media; Official communication; Political parties; Political actors; Credibility.
Platform Europe is an international research project led by Roma
Tre University and co-funded by the European Parliament (EP)
within the multiannual work program for grants in the area of
communication (2016-2019), category of communication actions
in support of the 2019 European Elections COMM/SUBV/2018 /E.
As explained in the call for proposal, the EP’s aim was ”to cofinance
communication actions aimed at providing citizens with
non–partisan and factual information in the run up to the 2019
European elections to be held on 23-26 May 2019. For the purpose
of this call for bids, “communication actions” are online and offline
actions and products that stimulate debate and engagement in the
European democratic process”.
The principal investigator of the Platform Europe research project
and coordinator of the European Election Monitoring Centre is prof.
Edoardo Novelli, Università di Roma Tre, Italy.
The co-coordinator of the European Election Monitoring Centre is
prof. Bengt Johansson, Gothenburg University, Sweden.
Platform Europe’s general aims were:
• to promote the dissemination and knowledge of the European
election campaign;
• to improve the transnational circulation of the electoral materials
produced in the different nations;
• to allow European citizens to access and compare the different
national European campaigns and political proposals;
• to improve the comparative study and knowledge of European
political communication, political cultures and political history.
Platform Europe’s specific aims were:
• to establish 28 National research units
• to define Codebooks of analysis
• to develop an online web-platform for the analysis and uploading
of the materials
• to monitor, collect and analyse the European electoral campaigns
in the 28 Member States.
• to create a database of electoral materials produced for the
European Election campaigns in each Member State.
• to develop a digital platform containing the materials collected.
• to run 26 national workshops.
• to release research reports on the European electoral campaign
progress and development, at both national and transnational
level.
Las redes sociales han supuesto una revolución para la comunicación política, posibilita a los partidos tener un canal de comunicación masivo con capacidad de personalizar y crear una comunicación directa con los ciudadanos. Este estudio analiza las publicaciones de los principales partidos políticos españoles en Facebook durante la campaña de las elecciones de 2015. Desde una perspectiva cuantitativa, comparamos la frecuencia de publicación y el contenido de los mensajes a través de un análisis computarizado. Los resultados señalan que existen diferencias entre partidos tradicionales y emergentes en la gestión de las páginas de Facebook.
Media often portrays European Union (EU) decision-making as a battleground for national governments that defend the interests of their member states. Yet even the most powerful individuals, such as the German chancellor, the French president, or the Commission president, are party politicians. At the same time the consistent empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) means that the party groups of European-level "Europarties"-political parties at European level-are in a key position to shape EU legislation. The Parliament has also become more directly involved in the appointment of the Commission, with the results of EP elections thus influencing the composition of the Commission. Examining the "partyness" of European integration, this article argues that scholarly understanding of the role of parties in the EU political system has taken great strides forward since the turn of the millennium. This applies especially to the EP party groups, with research focusing particularly on voting patterns in the plenary. This body of work has become considerably more sophisticated and detailed over the years; it shows that the main EP groups do achieve even surprisingly high levels of cohesion and that the left-right dimension is the primary axis of contestation in the chamber. It nonetheless also emphasizes the continuing relevance of national parties that control candidate selection in EP elections. Considering that most votes in the Parliament are based on cooperation between the two largest groups, the center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the center-left Party of the European Socialists (PES), future research should analyze in more detail how these groups build compromises. Actual Europarties, however, remain relatively unexplored. Case studies of treaty reforms or particular policy sectors reveal how individual Europarties have often wielded decisive influence on key integration decisions or key appointments to EU institutions. The Europarty meetings held in conjunction with European Council summits are particularly important in this respect. The regular, day-today activities of Europarties deserve more attention, both regarding decision-making and vertical links between national parties and their Europarties. Overall, it is probably more accurate to characterize Europarties as networks of like-minded national parties or as loose federations of member parties, especially when compared with the often centralized and strongly disciplined parties found in the member states.
The 2016 vote to leave the European Union was one of the biggest developments in recent United Kingdom political history. Only one political party was wholly united for Brexit – the United Kingdom Independence Party. This research finds that in the years leading up to Brexit, the United Kingdom Independence Party presented itself as a rigid core-issue complete-populist party. Content analysis shows how pervasive the European Union was in much of the party output and in the contemporaneous newspaper coverage of the party. The party also utilizes complete-populist rhetoric, with ‘othering’ populism as the most prevalent form. The consistent concentration on the European Union collocated with populist messaging, in both news releases and select newspaper coverage, may have helped afford the United Kingdom Independence Party issue-eliteness in the referendum campaign. But this same work may have also ultimately contributed to make them irrelevant by 2017, and possibly moribund by 2018.
Główna hipoteza badawcza postawiona w artykule brzmi: postulatyprogramowe (wyborcze) partii PiS, PO i ZL, miały decydujący wpływ na sukces wyborczy tych partii w wyborach parlamentarnych w Polsce w 2015 roku. Celem autora była charakterystyka programów wyborczych prawicowych i lewicowych partii oraz koalicji wyborczych przed wyborami parlamentarnymi w 2015 r. Scharakteryzowane zostały programy wyborcze poszczególnych komitetów wyborczych. W artykulepodjęto próbę charakterystyki partii politycznych posiadających największy potencjał wyborczy i reprezentujących główne nurty ideowe w Polsce: konserwatywny, liberalny oraz socjaldemokratyczny. Tekst ma charakter interdyscyplinarny, problem badawczy został przeanalizowany z perspektywy politologicznej, socjologicznej i filozoficznej. Weryfikując hipotezę postawioną w pracy, zauważono, iż występuje dużeprawdopodobieństwo, że to właśnie (socjalny) program wyborczy partii PiS, miał kluczowy wpływ na jej wynik wyborczy. Próba odpowiedzi na postawione pytanie badawcze może wnieść istotny wkład w dalsze badanie procesu rywalizacji wyborczej partii politycznych w Polsce.
The populist phenomenon has acquired great relevance during the last decade. The emergence of new populist actors and
the consolidation of the use of social media such as Twitter are transforming the field of political communication. The objective
of this paper is to know the agenda set by the leaders of the main European populist political parties on Twitter, as well
as the strategy they use and the user interaction achieved. The sample consists of the 2,310 tweets published by the leaders
of Podemos, the 5 Stelle Movement, France’s National Front and UKIP during three random time periods. The results show
a low degree of thematic fragmentation, the launch of proposals instead of attracting voters, and the existence of a strong
negative correlation between the number of published tweets and user interest.
Research on social media use during election campaigns has largely focused on Twitter. Building on recommendations from previous scholarship, the work presented here provides comparative insights into party and citizen engagement on several platforms-Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube-during the 2017 Norwegian elections. Results indicate that the themes of popular, "viral" posts vary across platforms, suggesting the need to adapt political messages to each specific outlet. The findings are discussed in light of the suggested "analytics turn"-when political actors can gauge the minutiae of how their online efforts are engaged with, how do those types of insights influence the shape and content of political campaigns?
This paper investigates individual’s perceptions of inequality and the impact this has on mass public opinion support for the European Union (EU) in the Republic of Ireland. This question is posed in the context of the onset of the economic and financial crisis of 2007/8 as the crisis can be regarded as a critical juncture in Ireland’s relationship with the EU as a result of the economic downturn and the widening of economic disparities individuals have experienced. Ireland is a critical case in examining EU support as since its accession to the EU in 1973 it is often considered an exemplar of what the EU could offer small member states with a strongly pro-integrationist mass public. Using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) multiple regression analysis on 2009 European Election Study (EES) data, this paper shows that individuals’ concerns about inequality lowers support for the EU as it is currently constituted, but increases support for continued European integration. This suggests that individual-levels of support may be in a precarious state, yet they can be salvaged as individuals in Ireland regard the EU as the institutional-driving force to address market-generated inequality.
In this article, the introduction to a special International Journal of Press/Politics (IJPP) issue on populism, we articulate and define populism as a communication phenomenon. We provide an overview of populist political communication research and its current foci. We offer a framework for ongoing research and set the boundary conditions for a new generation of research on populist political communication, with an aim to push the research agendas and design toward a more interactive, systematic, and in particular, comparative approach to the study of populist political communication.
Populism has been defined in many different ways, mostly in regard to political ideology and political dynamics, but only in recent years in relation to communication variables. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the identification of a socially mediated type of populist communication profoundly affected by the specific nature of social media. It presents and discusses empirical evidence on Italy’s populist and non-populist leaders that use Facebook regularly, and highlights the extent of the overflow of populist communication patterns and ideological features into mainstream political communication. Populist ideology fragments emerged in Italian leaders’ Facebook posts, thus leading to two main conclusions: first, populism appears to be ‘endemic’ in the Italian online facebooksphere; second, political actors—even non-populist ones—do not disdain the adoption of typical populist rhetorics.
Some of the most important impacts of social media on social movement organizations come not through the new forms of speech that are created but through new forms of listening. This article discusses “analytic activism”—the practice of applying analytics and experimentation to develop new tactics and strategies, identify emergent mobilization opportunities, and listen to their members and supporters in new ways. After defining the key components of analytic activism, the article then develops and illustrates two boundary conditions—the analytics floor and the analytics frontier—that define the limited context within which analytic activism operates. The article concludes by highlighting how a focus on digital listening leads researchers to capture phenomena that have previously been ignored in the social media and collective action literature.
Social media have changed the way politicians communicate with and relate to their constituencies during election campaigns and routine periods alike. Many scholars have postulated that populists would benefit most from the new digital media. Despite their growing importance, few studies have addressed the features of online populist communication and how to assess its success. The purpose of this article is to fill this gap by providing a framework for the analysis of populist communication on social media. Taking the case of Italy’s Lega Nord (Northern League (LN)) as an example, the article will clarify which aspects of online communication are most valued by LN supporters, in relation to both the key elements of populism (references to ‘the people’, ‘elites’ and ‘others’) and the expression of an emotional style in the messages. The article analyses the controlled communication that LN and its leader, Matteo Salvini, published on their Facebook profiles during a sample period of 30 days. Our findings demonstrate that populism, emotional style and, in general, the role of the leader as a source of communication positively affect the ‘likeability’ of a message.
In this chapter we analyse some examples of digital practices led by parties during the 2017 General Election campaign. We argue that whilst targeted advertising through Facebook has become the new normal for parties, it raises important questions regarding data-use and public expectations that require attention. We also suggest that digital media has enabled new non-party organisations to conduct what we call ‘satellite campaigns’. This development raises issues around party control, activist organisation and what we can expect from future digital campaigns. Cumulatively we therefore argue that developments in the digital realm have important implications for our understanding of electoral campaigning.
La principal novedad surgida desde las Elecciones Generales de 2015 es la irrupción de Instagram como el segundo canal de comunicación política online por el que optan más candidaturas, superior en todos los casos al registrado por Facebook. Otra de las principales conclusiones de la comunicación política digital en la campaña de 2019 fue el absoluto liderazgo en el crecimiento de las comunidades de seguidores por parte de los partidos populistas Vox y Unidas Podemos.
By considering the Facebook activity of 52 party leaders during national election campaigns held in 18 Western democracies that went to the polls between 2013 and 2017, we study users’ engagement with popularization and with populist leaders. Applying negative binomial hierarchical models on original data of party leaders’ Facebook pages, we find that elements of popularization in leaders’ posts are associated with an increase in users’ acknowledgement (number of likes), decreases in redistribution (number of shares), while they do not affect discursive interactions (number of comments). Our research also shows that, irrespective of their content, messages published by populist leaders are more capable of increasing both acknowledgement and redistribution, while they do not generate more comments than those published by non-populists. Finally, we find that when populist leaders adopt popularization as a communicative style, they do not achieve any extra gain vis-a-vis non-populist actors.
Insurgent candidates from across the political spectrum are increasingly turning to social media to directly engage the public. Social media offer a platform that favours affect and personality, both key components of populist-style rhetoric, a label that is often attached to politicians outside the political establishment. Despite noteworthy exceptions, few cross-national studies of high-profile candidates’ use of social media exist, and even less is known about how candidates representing various political ideologies employ affect alongside populism. To advance the state-of-the-art, this study examines the sentiment and rhetorical targets of attack in the Twitter feeds ( N = 25,825 tweets) of six presidential candidates in the United States and French election campaigns of 2016 and 2017. Employing dictionary-based quantitative analysis, the study finds variation among the candidates’ rhetoric in terms of how they employ populist themes, affect and ideology. The findings suggest that scholars should consider a more nuanced approach to populism in late-modern democracies.
Adopting a longitudinal ‘demand’ perspective to the study of online political campaigning, the present study details developments in supporter engagement on party Facebook Pages during three Swedish elections — 2010, 2014 and 2018. Specifically, the work presented here uncovers the roles of populism and platformization as ways of constructing political messages. Results indicate that over time, viral posts emerge as increasingly crafted based on the ever-changing affordances of the studied platform, evolving from text-based in 2010 to image-based in 2014 and emerging as primarily video-based in the 2018 elections. Implications for political campaigning are discussed.
This article confronts some of the difficulties that temporality poses for the study of digital politics. Where previous articles have discussed the unique methodological challenges for digital politics research – centrally, that we face ceteris paribus problems when attempting to study how people use a medium that is itself still being developed – this article addresses the underlying subject of temporality itself. It offers two distinct provocations. First, it discusses what we are ignoring when we discuss Internet politics in terms of an overarching “digital age” or “digital era.” Conceptualizing a uniform digital age in contraposition to previous media regimes is an easy heuristic crutch, but it comes at the cost of rendering key features of the sociotechnical system invisible. Second, the article distinguishes temporal rhythm from the more common concepts of linear and cyclical time. Particularly in the areas of contentious politics and media politics – areas that are central to the topics covered in this special issue – some of the core changes in institutional processes can be understood as a breakdown of routinized temporal processes. The article then offers suggestions for how digital politics scholars can better incorporate temporal concepts into our research.
The 2019 local elections were run in conjunction with European Parliament elections, a constitutional referendum to ease restrictions on divorce, and local plebiscites in Cork city, Limerick and Waterford on the introduction of directly elected mayors. Turnout was 50.2%, the joint lowest in the history of the State. The elections were contested on a mixture of local and national issues and saw Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael consolidate their positions as the two dominant parties in Irish local government, winning a combined total of 534 seats out of 949. The Green Party enjoyed a rise in local authority council membership from 12 to 49 seats while Sinn Féin suffered a 78-seat loss. ‘New Irish’ candidates and women fared quite well by past standards. Campaigning for the mayoral plebiscites was lacklustre and, amidst much confusion and a lack of information, the proposal was narrowly defeated in Cork city and Waterford. It passed in Limerick, where the expectation is that a mayoral election will take place in 2021.
When the exit polls for the European elections in Ireland were released, there was much discussion of a green wave, with large successes expected for the Green Party. Indeed, while those polled did list climate change as a major concern, purely domestic issues still played a major role in the election and, despite the on-going process of the United Kingdom's exit from the European Union, European issues were still conspicuously absent from the election. Both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil increased their seat total, and Sinn Féin fared particularly badly, losing two of its three seats. This report provides a detailed overview of the election, the main issues and the results. It examines the context within which the election is situated, the candidates, the course of the campaign and opinion polling throughout the campaign, and finally the results. It will argue that, despite increasing attempts to have European elections fought on Europe-wide issues, the 2019 election remained a largely second-order affair, fought on national issues, although climate change did take on a new importance.
Purpose
This paper aims to uncover the drivers of consumer-brand engagement on Facebook, understood here as users’ behavioral responses in the form of clicks, likes, shares and comments. We highlight which content components, interactivity cues (calls to action [CTA]) and media richness (e.g. video, photo and text) are most effective at inducing consumers to exhibit clicking, liking, commenting and sharing behaviors toward branded content.
Design/methodology/approach
This study analyzes 757 Facebook-based brand posts from a media and entertainment brand over a 15-week period. It investigates the relationship between interactive cues and media richness with consumer engagement using a negative binomial model.
Findings
Results show positive relationships for both interactivity cues and media richness content components on increasing consumer-brand engagement outcomes. The findings add clarity to previous inconsistent findings in the marketing literature. CTAs enhance all four engagement behaviors. Media richness also strongly influences all engagement behaviors, with visual imagery (photos and videos) attracting the most consumer responses.
Research limitations/implications
The sampled posts pertain to one brand (a radio station) and are thus concentrated within the media/entertainment industry, which limits the generalizability of findings. In addition, the authors limit their focus to Facebook but recognize that findings may differ across more visual or textual social networking sites.
Practical implications
The authors uncover the most effective pairings of media richness and interactivity components to trigger marketer-desired, behavioral responses. For sharing, for example, the authors show that photo-based posts are more effective on average than video-based posts. The authors also show that including an interactive call to act to encourage one type of engagement behavior has a near-universal effect in increasing all engagement behaviors.
Originality/value
This study takes two widely used concepts within the communications and advertising literatures – interactivity cues and media richness – and tests their relationship with engagement using real and actual users’ data available via Facebook Insights. This method is more robust than surveys or wall scrapping, as it mitigates Facebook’s algorithm effect. The results produce more consistent relationships than previous content marketing studies to date.
The 2015–9 election period was long; hence, the election campaign had already begun when the Prime Minister called the election for 5 June 2019, just ten days after the EP election. Nine already established parties, one old yet not represented party and three new parties, two of which are (very) opposed to immigration fielded candidates across the ten electoral districts for the 175 seats in parliament (excluding the four MPs elected in Greenland and The Faroe Islands). The overlapping EP election, climate, and immigration characterized the campaign agenda. One of the new (immigration sceptic) parties made it into parliament, and among the established parties, some were (more than) halved, others were (more than) doubled, and some remained stable. In particular, the two government (supporting) parties, Liberal Alliance and Danish People’s Party, got a slap in the face by the electorate. While the Prime Minister’s party, the Liberals, did well, the majority shifted to left of centre, which resulted in a minority Social Democratic government headed by Mette Frederiksen, supported by the Red-Green Alliance, Socialist People’s Party and Social Liberals.
Populists combine anti-elitism with a conviction that they hold a superior vision of what it means to be a true citizen of their nation. We expected support for populism to be associated with national collective narcissism—an unrealistic belief in the greatness of the national group, which should increase in response to perceived in-group disadvantage. In Study 1 (Polish participants; n = 1,007), national collective narcissism predicted support for the populist Law and Justice party. In the experimental Study 2 (British participants; n = 497), perceived long-term in-group disadvantage led to greater support for Brexit and this relationship was accounted for by national collective narcissism. In Study 3 (American participants; n = 403), group relative deprivation predicted support for Donald Trump and this relationship was accounted for by national collective narcissism. These associations were present even when we controlled for conventional national identification. We discuss implications of the link between collective narcissism and support for populism.
Research has shown that social media is a particularly well-suited channel for distributing populist messages. However, it has hardly been explored what type of audience reactions populist communication triggers on social media and whether populist political leaders garner more support online than political leaders who do not represent populist views or communicate in a populist way. In this chapter, we address these open questions. We define populist communication, review recent research on populist online communication, and describe what we learned when we analyzed the tweets and Facebook posts of 36 diverse political leaders in six countries over a three-month period.
Theorizing on mediatization of politics stresses the importance of structural conditions on different levels of media systems for explaining the increasing importance of media logic in media coverage. Levels of autonomy of media from politics and the extent of commercialization pressure are considered particularly important. However, most studies investigate differences between countries and the passing of time as proxies and qualitatively infer which structural conditions might account for the level of mediatization. The current study goes beyond these proxies. It reviews and systematizes how structural autonomy from political institutions and extent of commercialization pressure influences the importance of media logic in media coverage and operationalizes these influences in a comparative analysis of election campaign coverage in Germany and Austria over 60 years. A multi-level analysis finds that between-country differences and within-country changes in macro- and meso-level autonomy from politics/commercialization pressure account for a large part of the time/space (campaign/country) variation of the importance of media logic. It complements earlier research (1) by demonstrating that between-country differences and within-country changes in media coverage reflect underlying media structures; (2) by specifying which structural influences (representing the media’s autonomy from politics and commercialization pressure) are most important in shaping the importance of media logic in campaign coverage.
The use of social media by politicians has received much scholarly interest. However, much less is known about the citizens who follow them and whether their motivation to seek information directly from political actors is linked to perceptions of journalism practice. To address this gap, this paper examines the motivations of news users, in six countries (Australia, Germany, Ireland, Spain, UK and USA), who also follow politicians and political parties on social media. Analysis of data from the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2017 shows the desire to access information unfiltered by journalists was the primary motivation, followed by partisan support, and dissatisfaction with elements of mainstream political reporting. Additional logistic regression analyses for each country reveals these ‘followers’ are younger, have a higher interest in political news, stronger political orientation and efficacy, and participate more in sharing and commenting, than ‘non-followers’. Drawing on contemporary gatekeeping theory and the curation of information flows, this paper highlights the desire of these politically interested news users for greater control over the information they consume and raises questions about the impact of negative perceptions of journalism on the desire to seek alternative information sources. © 2018
This timely publication offers a fresh scholarly assessment of political advertising across the EU, as well as an insight into differing political and regulatory systems related to political advertising in the individual member states. With a detailed focus on the images and communication styles that characterised the 2014 European Parliament election campaign, this edited collection evaluates political advertising across the EU using empirical data to compare and contrast styles and approaches in different members. This work allows the authors to offer an important evaluation of the similarities and differences in the posters and broadcasts used to win public support in the 2014 campaign at the time of the great European recession and financial crisis, specifically looking at the place of posters and video commercials. This book will appeal to researchers and students of political communication, political science, history, European studies as well as candidates and campaign workers who want a more comprehensive understanding of the representation of Europe in political adverts at the 2014 elections. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017. All rights reserved.
The catchall party remains a useful concept despite the lack of a widely agreed definition or list of parties. This article suggests defining catchall parties based on how they act strategically. Although catchall parties act strategically on both the organisational and ideological dimensions, this article concentrates on three key ideological features: catchall parties are ideologically centrist, dispersed and flexible over time. Relying on original surveys in the Republic of Ireland, which interviewed two‐thirds of parliamentarians, it is confirmed that Ireland's ‘catchall’ and ‘programmatic’ parties clearly differ in terms of how they compete ideologically. Ireland's catchall parties employ all three identified strategies. Smaller, more programmatic parties are consistent over time, non‐centrist and extremely ideologically coherent on core programmatic issues. The competition between catchall parties and ideological populist parties is a pressing issue, and the Irish case provides new theoretical insights and empirical evidence to understand these party types.
In this study, it is theorized that party websites play a distinctive role in two regards: (i) they function as a pluralistic civic forum by facilitating the voice of oppositional challengers and increasing the visibility of minor and fringe parties, so that attentive citizens can learn more about the range of electoral choices; (ii) in addition, party websites function as a channel for political participation by facilitating interactive linkages between citizens and parties. The debate about the function of the Internet for pluralism and participation is laid out in Part I. The supply-and-demand research design, including content analysis of 134 websites (supply) and surveys of the public using party websites (demand), in the 15 European Union member states, drawn from the Spring 2000 Eurobarometer, is outlined in Part II. The evidence for patterns of party competition in European party websites is examined in Part III and in Part IV the use of party websites among West Europeans is analyzed. Compared with traditional mediated channels, substantial evidence is presented that party websites play a distinctive role in the process of political communications.
The use of social media platforms in political campaigns has widely been studied. Many scholars have provided evidence about the impact of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. So far; some of them have argued on the uselessness of these technologies about changing vote decisions, candidates' perception or political information efficacy. Most recently, the sentiment analysis has provided new paths to understand the link between the social media technology and voters. This paper analyzes data collected from Facebook's posts (4128 posts) and their emoticons - love, hate, anger, likes, etc. - that reveals some kind of sentiment from the users in a local government campaign in the central State of Mexico, which took place in June 2017. Findings show that political parties have a large impact with few posts, but in general, this paper reveals that voters' perception of candidates in Facebook is bad for the winner political party, since despite of this situation, the political party with the best sentiment impact, could not win the elections.