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The article explores the relationship between the incentives of parties to campaign on valence issues and the ideological proximity between one party and its competitors. Building from the existing literature, we provide a novel theoretical model that investigates this relationship in a two-dimensional multiparty system. Our theoretical argument is then tested focusing on the 2014 European electoral campaign in the five largest European countries, through an analysis of the messages posted by parties in their official Twitter accounts. Our results highlight an inverse relationship between a party’s distance from its neighbors and its likelihood to emphasize valence issues. However, as suggested in our theoretical framework, this effect is statistically significant only with respect to valence positive campaigning. Our findings have implications for the literature on valence competition, electoral campaigns, and social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 21 May 2015 entered into force Law no. 113 regarding amendments and completions to Law no. 334 of 2006 on financing the activity of political parties and electoral campaigns. By the normative act in force, namely Law no. 113 of 2015, a number of Greco recommendations have been implemented and some measures have been regulated to reimburse from the state budget the expenditures for the electoral campaign belonging to political parties and independent candidates that meet a number of criteria of representativeness established by law. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political campaigns are made to attract the attention from citizens. The beginning of its adaption is linked to the appearance of the social media and user-generated content. Since the number of users of social network sites in Europe constantly grows, 2009 was the first time that these websites were used in political marketing purposes for the European Parliament elections. This is an exploratory study of the nature and extent of video-based social media, studied through the content analysis of YouTube videos created for the electoral campaign for the 2009 European Parliament elections by 13 political parties from four EU states. Results have shown the specificities of political advertising on the YouTube, a raising interest in social media among citizens in Europe, and the development of this way of campaigning. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]