And the post-lunch session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno today starts with Georgios Lappas, whose focus is on a comparative Facebook study of party agendas across Europe during the European Parliament elections. How are such agendas structured: by national contexts, or transnational European party alliances? And how do audiences respond to this, using Facebook’s affordances for reactions and responses? Does this differ by policy areas?
This study covered 21 EU countries, 141 political parties, and nearly 20,000 Facebook posts over the four weeks before election day; it considered 11 policy fields that were constructed from 16 disaggregated policy domains. Reliability of data coding was assessed at national and cross-national levels.
This found that Europe did not campaign across one common issue agenda: foreign policy, the economy, energy, immigration, and other issues were prominent in different European countries. Similarly, the different European party groupings also had their own policy emphases. National contexts tended to outweigh party affiliations, though: issue emphases for parties from the same country were usually but not always more similar than emphases across pan-European party groups.
Conflict issues tended to mobilise attention – and especially anger, more so than comments and shares – in Facebook responses; positive reactions (like and love) were rare, and not systematically linked to policy domain, but mostly responded to posts relating to sports.
Overall, then, this was one election, but it had multiple agendas; nationalisation was strong, with some selective Europeanisation; and resonance to parties’ posts was highly asymmetric.
