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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 final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Delia Balaban, who shifts our focus to Romania. Romania has had some electoral turmoil as its 2024 presidential elections had to be annulled and repeated following massive Russian influence operations; but this also affected the 2024 parliamentary elections, which themselves were affected by scandals over dubious campaign funding.

Those controversies centred on TikTok, but Delia’s focus here is, to begin with, on the 2024 European Parliament elections on Facebook, which remains a key platform for political information and overall news in Romania …

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 …

And the final speaker in this session at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Mārtiņš Pričins, whose focus is on the campaigning of Latvian political parties on Facebook, comparing in particular the 2024 European parliamentary election and the 2026 Latvian national election.

The focus here is also especially on visual communication, and the potentially diverging campaigning styles of new political parties. Facebook (and YouTube) remain the top social media platforms in Latvia, and social media are now also a premier source of news and political information for Latvian users; the overall volume of posting has …

The next speaker at the DigiWorld network ECREA preconference on election campaigning in Brno is Alban Zeneli, whose focus is on the 2025 elections in Kosovo. Kosovo remains a region in transition, and political campaigning might unfold differently here; the focus of the present paper, then, is on how parties used Facebook and Instagram in their campaigning.

Kosovo’s political instability meant that it had two national elections in 2025, in February and December; populist politics (characterised by people-centrism, anti-elitism, and exclusionary tendencies towards minority others) played a significant role here, and were expressed also through visual communication.

The present project …

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 …

I’m in Brno for the ECREA conference later this week, but we start with a preconference organised by the DigiWorld network on social media and elections research. The first speaker is Tuuli Tomperi, whose focus is on the affective construction of political meaning through multimodal campaign content, in Finland.

Her past work has focussed on political advertising on Meta’s platforms during the 2023 Finnish parliamentary elections, and found that candidates mainly used their ads to promote themselves and emphasise party-specific political issues, but that research focussed mainly on textual content and now needs to be expanded to the multimodal aspects …