Search

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 thematic issue, based on the international research project Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide (DigiWorld), aims to broaden such understanding. Examining 14 countries across Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, Latin America, and Oceania, the 10 articles in this issue reveal diverse approaches to issue-based political communication on social media, emphasizing the significance of comparative research in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 cross-country investigations, (b) the lack of a multidimensional approach to Facebook performance, and (c) the conceptual confusion around the normalization or equalization theories. This research tests both the absolute and the relative understanding of the hypotheses in all the visibility-related dimensions (adoption, activity, number of followers, user engagement, and ad spending) in a cross-country dataset that includes all the Facebook activity of 186 parties in 28 countries. Findings demonstrate that in absolute terms the equalization thesis prevails in activity and advertising, while the normalization thesis is confirmed in the dimensions of organic direct and indirect reach. At the same time, in relative terms, social media equalize political competition in each dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research examines political advertising on Facebook during the 2019 European and local election campaigns in Hungary. Previously, political advertising had been difficult to study due to a lack of publicly available data. However, since spring of 2019, information on political advertising on Facebook has been publicly accessible in European countries. The study collected all political ads during the two nationwide election campaigns in Hungary to map the political advertising sphere based on spending. The research tests theories regarding the political restructuring potential of social media, including the oppositional/democratizing role of social media, and the theses of normalization versus equalization. Additionally, the ad-specific thesis of 'stealth media' is tested, which argues that Facebook's ad platform can be employed to circumvent campaign-related regulations. Our findings suggest that the opposition remarkably dominates the political Facebook advertising sphere in the present illiberal context. Beyond this fact, the normalization theory seems to prevail, and there is no evidence that ads are used to increase the personalization of politics. In Hungary, Facebook's advertising platform is not a type of 'stealth media' as it is dominated by official political actors, but a few partisan media outlets were strongly involved in the advertising campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 owned media (posts) and earned media (user reactions, comments, shares). Our results concerning cross-country patterns indicate that differences in European parties' paid media activity exist and only a few parties leverage sophisticated targeting strategies. Regarding temporal dynamics, we find that paid media is used to supplement owned media during similar campaign phases. In terms of engagement-triggering effects, we show that sponsoring posts is a suitable tool to increase earned media. Overall, paid media activity on Facebook is largely embedded into parties' overall marketing strategy and national countries' regulatory settings. Our results have implications for the understanding of public opinion, voting behaviour and the regulations of elections in modern European democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 effects of Hungarian politicians' (n = 51) image-based communication on Facebook (n = 2,992) and Instagram (n = 868) during the Hungarian parliamentary election campaign in 2018. By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. This work is designed to fill three gaps in the literature. We argue that existing research of visual political communication (1) treats images predominantly as illustrations, (2) is limited to single-platform studies, and (3) does not investigate the engagement effects of images. To move beyond these limitations, this study investigates images as objects of interest on their own; it adopts a cross-platform comparative approach and examines the engagement effects of visual cues by applying a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. Our results show that images are often used to personalize communication. While on Facebook the individualization dimension of personalization is more common and popular, on Instagram its privatization dimension prevails. Furthermore, on Facebook, users like more politics-related candidate-centered images, but on Instagram we could not find similar effects for more informal visuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 coverage is considered a cue for their acceptance as legitimate actors in the wider media ecosystem, even when other media may not accept their interpretations. Our findings tell two different stories in the compared countries. In Hungary, we note that radical-right media are to a certain degree incorporated into the wider media networks, while in Romania, radical-right media are observed to be in isolated positions in both of the media networks we examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the validity of the media visibility thesis in a cross-country 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 context of discursive opportunities for political mobilization, whereby the presence of discursive elements of populist radical right communication in mainstream media is understood as empirical evidence for the visibility of populist radical right politics. We analyze first the characteristics of media discourses. We then identify the positions of radical right media products in relation to mainstream media. Using network analysis as a methodological approach, we evince the differences and similarities pertaining to the location of radical right media in the wider network architecture of the public spheres in Hungary and Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]