Young Platforms and Old Politics: Quantitative Analysis of Parties’ Instagram Posts During the 2022 French Legislative Elections

Abstract

The French legislative elections of 2022 saw President Emmanuel Macron's majority in the National Assembly being dramatically tilted. This was driven by youth votes that favoured the left-wing group NUPES and the far- right party Rassemblement National. The literature on young people's online political communication, on the characteristics of social media campaigns and on political outreach to young people usually assumes dichotomies of political engagement and age. The aim of this study is to challenge these dichotomies and establish a baseline of communication characteristics for each of these areas, as well as for the areas of political campaigning on Instagram and political campaigning for young people. The content of the Instagram pages of the parties in the elections and their youth branches was analysed quantitatively. A codebook combining a priori, inductive and deductive knowledge was used to highlight patterns in the use of social media, visual and campaign features. Statistical tests were conducted to examine their relationship to the pages of youth and traditional parties, and to the pages of parties more or less successful in mobilising young voters. Statistically significant features were arranged in a matrix that summarises them visually. The results show that youth parties and the parties that are more successful in mobilising young voters have similar visual approach to information structure and presentation. Additionally, while youth and more successful parties might follow different strategies in their choices of topics and issues, they follow similar trends identifiable only by considering the strategies employed by their counterparts.