The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Melanie Magin, whose interest is in the campaigning strategies of Nordic political parties in comparison to the rest of Europe; this, then, takes a very broad approach which explores similarities and differences within and between geographical regions. The background to this are the various countries’ political communication systems, using the nation state as the core unit of analysis.
The three Nordic EU member states (Denmark, Sweden, Finland) have relatively similar political communication systems, also including strong public broadcasters and a highly consensus-focussed, restrained, and information-centric political culture; this is also under threat from the growth of populism in these and other EU countries, however. To what extent do multimodal and visual attributes align or differ in social media campaigning on Facebook across these countries, then?
This project worked with data from 23 EU member states for the last four weeks of the EU election campaign, covering some 97% of the EU population, and manually coded these for the presence of various visual elements (using a team of 64 in-country coders). Patriotic and European symbols were most prominent, with substantially fewer patriotic symbols in Nordic countries than elsewhere; patriotic symbols were more prominent in Sweden than in Denmark and Finland due to the campaigning style of the far-right Sweden Democrats. EU symbols were similarly prominent across all 23 countries.
Right-wing parties and anti-elite parties used more patriotic symbols than others, although this was not true for ‘people-centric’ populist parties. Party characteristics have a significant influence which is clearly larger than the influence of regional differences, then.
