Polarisation

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 …

The final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Patrick Parschan, whose focus is on the use of ideal point estimation for the analysis of party positions in campaign tweets. There are various text scaling algorithms for the analysis of political positions in tweets on a left-right scale, in comparison with party manifestos, but unfortunately these often do not agree with each other.

Patrick approached this with data for US and German elections across several years, using party manifestos and tweet corpora. Existing approaches have tended to draw on word frequency …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is our host Martina Edr Novotná, who continues our focus on gender. Gender stereotypes create barriers for women in politics; they also align such women with issues that are perceived to be female-coded, and thereby limit their ability to engage in other topics. But evidence on such gendering remains inconsistent, as party affiliation and other aspects also intersect with such patterns.

This study, then, examined gender issue ownership on Facebook across some 18 countries in the DigiWorld research network. It focussed on national …

And the afternoon session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Maria José Ávalos Troncoso, whose focus is on women political candidates in Chile. Two of the eight candidates in the first round of the Chilean presidential elections in 2025 were women; one of them, Jara, made it to the run-off election against the eventual winner, Kast.

The question is, then, how she was treated during the election campaign; role congruity theory, gendered disinformation, platformised bias, and the continuum of political violence all predict that she would be treated differently from her opponent(s) because …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Tariq Choucair, whose focus is on assessing polarisation amongst political leaders during election campaigns. The emphasis here is on affective, identity-based, and relational polarisation: the presentation of ‘us vs. them’ and sectarian in- and outgroup perspectives.

Computational methods might be valuable for this, but current methods do not fully capture this; they do not usually capture whom polarised language is directed against, and manual methods are commonly used instead. This paper develops this further, and applies this to a study …

The next speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is my colleague Stephen Harrington, who begins by highlighting the importance of the attention economy in political communication; Donald Trump, for instance, is now also the Troll-in-Chief because he knows that even his most outlandish posts generate wall-to-wall media coverage.

But Trump himself can also be trolled, for instance by California governor Gavin Newsom, who has a dedicated communications team on Xitter, @GovPressOffice, that fights Trump’s fire with his own fire. This project scraped all of that account’s tweets, and categorised these as …

The next session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno starts with Anita Bonetti, whose focus is on in civility on social media platforms. Such in civility can be strategic in hybrid media systems: incivil content can go viral, and be picked up and amplified by mainstream media outlets. Incivility has been studied increasingly in recent years, but we still lack a longitudinal and comparative perspective. This paper explores this for the Italian political context.

This study works with posts on Facebook by Italian political parties during the 2014, 2019, and 2024 EU and 2018 and …

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 …