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This paper develops an analytical framework for comparative research on political contention in the digital age and, building upon it, provides a literature review of social media research related to LGBTQ+ political contention. So far, we lack systematic insights into the literature on digitally-mediated LGBTQ+ political contention and its potential for comparative research. Applying scoping literature review, we focus on the key comparative dimensions such as political context, social media, and knowledge production. The results provide an overview of the state of the art, limitations, and opportunities while also developing an agenda for future comparative research. This paper supports the visibility of LGBTQ+ issues in a still hostile public debate for both LGBTQ+ activists and researchers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brexit constitutes an unprecedented crisis for the European Union and its member states. Three affected parties – the United Kingdom, the EU and Ireland – worked hard to protect their interests, making the negotiations difficult, especially regarding the Irish land border. While the key interests of the negotiating partners are clear, it is less known how and to what extent these interests were communicated by the political representatives of the three countries. We approach Brexit as a critical juncture and base our work on the framing literature. We use a unique dataset including political speeches made by EU Commission members and the UK and Irish government officials during a period from January 2016 until January 2020, relying on the innovative automated text analysis approach of keyword-assisted topic modelling. Beyond insisting on their interests, communication reflects the socio-political context. We find indications that speeches reflect the flow of the negotiations. Finally, our analysis reveals topics that largely flew under the media radar, such as research and protection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of post-factual politics has become increasingly relevant for describing current political and societal developments. Though research on the topic has been blooming, we lack a common framework and systematic tool to map and analyze post-truth communication. Therefore, our paper advances the adaptation of claims-making for the analysis of how actors relativize the truth and use discourses of untruthfulness to attack their opponents, constructing their own versions of reality. We extend the affinity between populism and post-truth to conceptualize truth contestation in two aspects: (1) the antagonistic anti-elite constructions of accusations of creating and spreading false information and lies, (2) the emphasis on emotionality and negativity over facts and expertise. Building on a communication-centered approach to populism, we define key content and stylistic characteristics of post-truth claims to study the contestation of truth in political communication in a systematic way. Taking the Twitter communication of Donald Trump as a prime example, we illustrate the employability of our approach via a pilot study on the longest period of shutdown in US history (22 December 2018–25 January 2019). As a result, we introduce claims analysis as an approach that can be usefully adapted to study post-truth discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rotating EU presidency's relevance for EU politics has decreased since the introduction of a permanent council president. However, news salience and framing of the own government acting as the EU presidency can amplify publicity for EU affairs. We, therefore, evaluate the visibility and framing of the EU presidency in 12 Austrian newspapers for 2009–2019. We conduct an automated text analysis of 22 presidencies over 11 years, testing several hypotheses statistically, and qualify results via manually coded frames of the Austrian EU presidency in 2018. The results confirm the crucial importance of the domestication of EU politics, underscoring the potential of the presidency to serve as a window of opportunity for public debate. We discuss our findings with reference to the EU's democratic deficit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the recent crises in Europe, many governments have tightened their border controls despite considerable criticism from the EU Commission and civil society. While borders are at the core of recent crises, we lack systematic evidence of how governments publicly inform about border politics and justify measures. Therefore, we ask: How do EU governments communicate about borders? We analyze a comprehensive sample of press releases of the Austrian and German governments over 12 years (2009–2020). Applying a mixed‐methods design, we employ automated text analysis, specifically latent semantic scaling (LSX) to scale documents regarding how they communicated permeability (openness and closedness) of borders and the state of affairs regarding a state of crisis and routine. Based on this quantitative analysis, we then apply qualitative text analysis to explore the nuances and patterns of this communication to gain in‐depth insights into governmental stances about borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A plethora of accumulating crises, and the public frustration with how they were tackled, have provided fertile ground for growing public scepticism towards the European Union (EU). The way in which political leaders manage these crises may well decide the future of the EU. Research has addressed these developments comprehensively. However, it has not, to date, provided an adequate analytical lens to confront the crisis theme explicitly and therefore needs analytical advancement. We contribute to the debate by developing a framework for comparative analysis and evaluation of public political crisis communication, identifying four aspects along which public political crisis communication can be analysed: (1) how accessible it is, (2) how well it can contribute to allaying fears, (3) to what extent it accommodates public concerns, and (4) how politically aligned crisis managers are in their communication. We analyse a dataset of 10 years of speeches and press releases of the governments of Austria, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom in addition to the EU's executive institutions (EU Commission and Councils). Drawing on different approaches to automated text analysis, we score texts on the four identified dimensions and draw dimensions together in a holistic similarity index. Results demonstrate the cohesion of crisis‐relevant communication in contrast to non‐relevant communication. They also show that accommodation, is consistently emphasised more in crisis than in non‐crisis communication; however, political crisis managers have practiced a politics of fear rather than allaying concerns, potentially fuelling political frustration and disenchantment. In addition, the EU's crisis communication is not found to be different from communication about non‐crisis topics, opening up avenues for future research concerned with legitimation processes at different political levels. Overall, the results do partly resonate with the insights provided by the existing literature but also shine a new, holistic light on how political executives have managed crises in the past decade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networking sites offer politicians an opportunity to mobilize followers through carefully crafted messages appealing to their emotions. We examine the effects of uncivil and post-truth communication of populist and non-populist party leaders on the emotional emoji reactions of social media users during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Conveying a disrespectful tone toward the participants and topics of the debate, lying accusations, and incivility have become prominent aspects of contemporary political discourse in many European countries. We combine research on emotional cues in online political communication and the effects of political elites’ messages on social media. We apply manual content analysis (N = 2,549 posts) to study the political communication of Czech political party leaders on Facebook during the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020 to February 2021), which generated a higher sense of threat and uncertainty in the public. We show that uncivil and post-truth message elements, affiliation with a populist party, and pandemic influenced the volume of emotional interactions with political posts. The article has important implications for the study of how incivility and attacks on truthfulness can influence opinion exchange in public debate or increase societal polarization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]