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In times of declining party identification, political parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election. 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, there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions on Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from the literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this article 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 article provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increased use of social media has triggered a visual shift in digital political communication. One central strategy is visual (self-) personalization and many studies have analyzed why and to what extent political communication is focused on individuals. Yet, most research has concentrated on personalization, leaving aside the question of whether it comes at the expense of policy issues or whether people are brought into focus as facilitators of such issues. We fill this research gap by analyzing how visual (self-) personalization on Instagram pages of parties and politicians during election campaigns has changed over time and whether it comes at the cost of addressing policy issues. We use data from three quantitative content analyses of Instagram posts published by parliamentary parties (n = 7) and top candidates (n = 18) in the 'hot phases' before three national German elections (N = 2313), covering all nationwide elections since Instagram has become a common campaign tool. It is shown that personal depictions are very common in Instagram campaigns of parties and candidates while addressing policy issues in posts varies between elections. Using a multilevel binomial regression model, we show that addressing policy issues is negatively related to personalization but further analysis shows that it is not a zero-sum game at the cost of addressing policy issues. Our results provide insights into how the presentation of politics might change when image- and video-based platforms continue to gain importance in political communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 of generic and unique functions of emojis used in political communication, outlining how they are used for (1) attracting attention, (2) visual structuring, (3) mobilizing, (4) promoting, (5), referring to political levels, (6) emphasizing policies/values, and (7) displaying affect/emotion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]