Election Campaign Research Articles

The Relationship Between Topics, Negativity, and User Engagement in Election Campaigns on Facebook

Negativity is a common feature of current online political communication during elections. Previous studies on negativity and its impact on user engagement focused mainly on Western European countries. Considering the political particularities of the Central and Eastern European countries, the present study focused on Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, the Republic of Moldova, and Romania, where national election campaigns took place from 2020 to 2022. We aimed to investigate comparatively different topics prevalent in the negative messages and look at users’ engagement with negative communication. We applied manual content analysis of N = 4,095 Facebook posts published four weeks before the elections by political parties elected in the national parliament. Results showed significant differences across countries using negative messages and the associated topics. The posts’ highest rate of negative statements was identified in Czechia (52%), while the lowest was in Lithuania (17%). There are topics consistently associated with negative statements across most countries, such as corruption, economy and finance, foreign policy, labor, and social issues. However, given that those elections took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in Czechia, Lithuania, Romania, and the Republic of Moldova and, in Hungary, after Russia invaded Ukraine, we also identified contextual topics such as health, war, and conflicts with other countries and defense that were mainly associated with negative messages. Furthermore, negative posts generate more reactions and comments than posts containing no negative statements. Addressing foreign policy in negative posts generates significantly more reactions and comments.

Campaign Ethics for the President in the General Election

Every five years, Indonesia holds General Elections that are held directly, generally, freely, secretly, honestly, fairly, or commonly known as Luber Jurdil. In the principle of ethics, in politics related to morals, the politics of a country if followed by ethics then a prosperous, just and prosperous nation will be achieved. At this time, campaigns are still widely used to invite commotion by spreading hoaxes. The president has an obligation to maintain neutrality. The president has an obligation to maintain his neutrality during the election campaign. Yesterday's campaign, the President was accused of carrying out a campaign that skewed towards one of the candidate pairs. In this study, juridical normative research was used to see issues related to campaign ethics for the President. When viewed from the context of democracy, the President has the right and freedom as a citizen to participate in the political process, including in election campaigns. As someone who is subject to the rules, the existence of rules regarding the President's right to campaign during the election period, the President must also maintain ethics and moral values outside of the existing legal rules.

Digital Technologies as a Means of Exercising Electoral Rights of Сitizens of the Russian Federation

The paper provides an overview of digital resources used during election campaigns, highlighting their positive and negative sides supported by cases from practice. Electronic democracy is considered as a logical consequence of introduction of information technologies to the life of society. The paper analyzes remote electronic voting as a subsidiary way of implementing active suffrage in the Russian Federation; The author considers a "Mobile Voter" as an alternative to absentee ballots that meets the requirements of the time; digital services provided through the federal state information system "Unified Portal of State and Municipal Services", as well as the possibilities of artificial intelligence in the framework of elections. It is pointed to the promotion of digital resources for the implementation of not only active but passive suffrage, which is expressed in the possibility of collecting signatures by candidates online. We witness an increase in the importance of AI technologies during election campaigns, as well as the need for legislative regulation of the limits of their use due to the risks of spreading fake information that can influence the opinion of voters about running candidates and, as a result, the election results. Since artificial intelligence technologies are new, there are gaps in the legal regulation of the issue under consideration in the Russian Federation. Thus, the paper indicates the impossibility of solving the identified problem by the point adoption of certain norms and, using the example of foreign experience, emphasizes the need for a systematic approach to the development of an appropriate regulatory legal act and highlights the possibility of forming a new branch of law (a digital branch) due to the announcement of the adoption of the digital code.

A Right-Wing Wave on TikTok? Ideological Orientations, Platform Features, and User Engagement During the Early 2022 Election Campaign in Sweden

While TikTok has established itself as a new platform for political communication, its role during elections remains understudied by researchers. In this article, we present a content analysis of actor dynamics and ideological content characteristics on TikTok during the early phase of the 2022 election campaign in Sweden, combined with an analysis of how political orientation and utilization of TikTok’s platform features impact user engagement. Results reveal that party youth organizations had a prominent presence during the campaign, while traditional party actors were less established. TikTok tends to lean toward right-wing content, with right-wing praise being a significant predictor of user engagement. Semiotic resources such as stickers and emoticons but also added music, were widely used platform features, but these features had no or weak negative effects on user engagement. Added speech, particularly when praising right-wing politics, positively influenced user engagement, suggesting the importance of verbal communication on a platform characterized by multimodal experimentation.

Tuning into Democracy: Youtube Podcasts in South African Election Campaign: A Case Study of Economic Freedom Fighters

Tuning into Democracy: Youtube Podcasts in South African Election Campaign: A Case Study of Economic Freedom Fighters

Analysis of the Filter Bubble Algorithm on TikTok Concerning 'Toxic' Polarization During the 2024 Presidential Campaign

Social media is a platform for everyone to express and convey information. The emergence of social media certainly affects the behavior of each individual who uses it. This is due to a social media algorithm called the filter bubble, which can lead to polarization as in the Tiktok application and several other social media applications. Simply put, we are made to feel as if we know everything that is happening around us, when in fact we do not. This is what causes 'toxic' polarization to form an ignorant personality. In other words, 'toxic polarization' will isolate every social media user intellectually. Of course, this will be very dangerous if it happens during the 2024 presidential election campaign because it will cause many divisions. The long-term effect will certainly affect democracy so that it can cause stagnation.

Social Media Political Communication and Misinformation: A Case Study of the Youth in Kiambu County, Kenya

Social media in recent times has proven to be extremely persuasive in influencing the public’s opinion on political affairs. Since 2007, election campaigns have actively utilized several social media platforms in Kenya for communicating with, mobilizing, and organizing supporters. Politicians and political activists along with their parties make maximum use of it to interact and provide civic education to the public. However, few written materials are available on how Kenyan youth, particularly those who live in Kiambu County, use social media for political engagement. The objective of this research is therefore to explore patterns as well as practices characterizing social media use by young people in Kiambu County and how this affects their political involvement and discourse. This research is guided by Habermas’s Theory of the Public Sphere, which asserts that public political discourse that is free from government interference is important for creating functional democracies. Social media, which acts as a public sphere, can allow the youth to engage in political discussions and other civic activities. The research employs a descriptive research design, utilizing an online survey as the primary tool for data collection, administered via Survey Monkey. The research’s target population includes young people enrolled in institutions of higher learning in Kiambu County who use social media for communication. The sample size was determined based on the number of university students in Kiambu County. It utilized stratified random sampling on a target population of 115,330 to draw a sample of 380 youths using a Survey Monkey online sample calculator with a 95% confidence level and 5% margin of error. Initially, a pilot study was conducted on 10% of the sample, which is 38 respondents, to ascertain the reliability of the research instruments, eventually, from the 342 surveys sent out, 224 were completed and returned. For data analysis, Microsoft Excel was utilized in coding and organizing the data to create tables and graphs. The findings showed that X was the respondents' most used platform for political discourse. Most respondents were aware of and engaged in political discussions on social media, and believed that social media influenced their political attitudes and beliefs. Although most viewed social media as a source of civic education, they were skeptical about its reliability due to misinformation. The study concludes that many youths in Kiambu County are actively participating in political discussions online and therefore it recommends that better education should be provided to help the youth discern credible information from misinformation. Additionally, interventions should be established to curb digital crimes like cyberbullying and online fraud.

STRATEGIC INNOVATION AND POLITICAL TRIUMPH: APPLYING THE BLUE OCEAN STRATEGY APPROACH IN ELECTORAL CAMPAIGNS

In the dynamic realm of electoral politics, achieving victory hinges on strategic innovation and the ability to capture voter sentiment effectively. This paper explores the application of the "Blue Ocean Strategy" to electoral campaigns, drawing parallels between business strategy and political success. Originating from the business sector, the Blue Ocean Strategy advocates creating uncontested market spaces by simultaneously enhancing value and reducing costs, thereby redefining competitive dynamics. By analyzing Canadian Prime Minister Trudeaus electoral triumph in 2015, where innovative strategies targeted non-traditional voters through positive messaging and digital engagement, this paper illustrates how political actors can transcend traditional partisan strategies. It delves into key components of the Blue Ocean Strategy adapted to the electoral context, emphasizing the importance of strategic divergence from conventional tactics. This study offers insights for future electoral campaigns seeking to navigate and innovate in the complex landscape of contemporary politics.

A Critique on Rhetorical Devices Used by Pakistani Politicians to Increase their Vote Bank A Critical Discourse Analysis of Urdu Newspapers' Headline

This research study has investigated how Pakistani politicians use rhetoric in their addresses during the election campaigns 2024 to persuade their voters. The sole purpose of this research is to discover the dimensions and power of Rhetorical devices used by Pakistani politicians for their personal objectives. It has explored how politicians grab the attention of the public by using rhetorical choices in their discourses. The best and most frequent uses of Rhetorical devices by politicians are antithesis, allusion repetition, hyperbole, metaphor amplification, alliteration, parallelism, symbolism, allegory, and imagery. The current research study employs the Power, Ideology, and Manipulation Identification (PIMI) model, a novel problem‐ oriented tool designed for the systematic examination of political discourse. This model integrates and adapts elements from two established analytical frameworks (Chilton & Schäffner, 1997; van Dijk, 2006) and is rooted in the theories and methodologies of Critical DiscoursemAnalysis (CDA).

A Consistent Picture? Issue‐Based Campaigning on Facebook During the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign

In times of declining party identification, political parties need to persuade and mobilize their voters from election to election. Setting topics in such a way that voters are convinced to cast their vote has become an essential prerequisite for success in modern election campaigns. Social media are suitable for this, as parties can set their own topics or highlight the topics most important to the voters and communicate them to a large audience in organic posts or target specific voter groups with ads. While tendencies of issue ownership in posts on Facebook are repeatedly shown empirically, there is a lack of studies investigating which strategies parties follow in their investment decisions on Facebook ads. Based on theoretical expectations derived from the literature about digital political marketing and issue prioritization in election campaigns, this article investigates whether parties communicated consistently on Facebook with regard to the issues they set in organic posts, sponsored posts, and ads during the 2021 German federal election campaign. The results of a manual quantitative content analysis (n = 1,029 posts, n = 1,197 sponsored posts, n = 2,643 ads) show that parties focused on issue ownership in their posts. Still, their investments in sponsored posts and ads followed different strategies. Here, most parties highlighted social policy, contradicting issue ownership for some parties. The article provides novel insights into digital campaigning and discusses the extent to which parties can engage audiences beyond their organic reach within party-affiliated audiences.

Tapestries of Topics: Factors Affecting the Issue Diversity of Political Parties’ Social Media Campaigns

<p>For citizens to make well-informed decisions, they require information on diverse policy issues, which, among others, are publicized on political parties’ social media accounts. However, as strategic actors, parties carefully weigh which issues to highlight and which to play down, rather than addressing a full range of issues in their campaigns. We investigated the hitherto neglected question of which issue diversity parties prioritize on their social media accounts and which factors influence this choice. We conducted a standardized content analysis of the official Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts of 10 Norwegian parties and their leaders during the 2021 national election campaign. The results of our analyses indicate that issue-related campaign strategies influence parties’ issue diversity more systematically than parties’ governing/opposition statuses and their choices of social media platforms.</p>

Model of electoral behavior of russian citizens in the conditions of digitalization of the electoral process

The introduction of information and communication technologies (hereinafter referred to as ICT) occurs not only in sectors of the country’s national economy, but is widely used in the electoral process. Moscow has accumulated some experience in introducing and effectively using ICT during the preparation and conduct of election campaigns. In the fall of 2023 shortly before the election of the Mayor of Moscow, the author conducted a survey of residents of the capital city. The organizers of the survey of the citizens were tasked with collecting, summarizing and analyzing the opinions of the Moscow electorate on the issue of introducing digital technologies in elections. The article provides specific results of a survey of Muscovites, their attitude towards the use of electronic technologies in the elections. The author argues about the advisability of increasing the legitimacy of elected authorities by increasing the voter turnout indicator. Specific examples demonstrate that the introduction of digitalization into the electoral process ultimately helps to increase the legitimacy of elected parties, public associations and their candidates. Analyzing the results of the elections to federal, regional and local executive and legislative bodies in recent years (2021–2024), as well as the results of the above-mentioned survey of Moscow residents, the author proposes an option for constructing a causality model using an external factor such as digitalization, which has a significant influence on the electoral process.

Can money buy control of Congress?

Can a political party spend enough across electoral campaigns to garner a majority within the U.S. Congress? Prior research on campaign spending minimizes the importance of campaign heterogeneity and fails to aggregate effects across campaigns, rendering it unable to address this question. Instead, we tackle the question with a system-level analysis of campaign expenditures. First, using a flexible machine learning approach, we show that spending has substantial and nonlinear marginal effects on outcomes at the level of the campaign. Second, by aggregating these effects to the entire U.S. Congress, we show that large seat swings that change congressional control have, in the past, been possible for expenditure levels consonant with those presently observed after having removed the most extreme levels. However, this possibility appears to have faded over the past decade. Our approach also allows us to illustrate the often significant effects that eliminating campaign spending could have.

Explaining Mainstream News Media Use in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Roles of Partisanship, Perceptions of Threat, Negative Emotions, and News Media Trust

ABSTRACT As the COVID-19 pandemic struck the United States amid the 2020 presidential election campaign, the public health crisis rapidly developed into a polarizing political issue. Within the context of a politicized public health crisis, efforts to deepen a scholarly understanding of how people’s information-seeking behaviors can be understood in relation to partisanship bear timely importance. In this light, this research aims to explore the relationship between partisanship and mainstream news media use in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study examines the role of perceived threat, negative emotions, and news media trust for helping to explain mainstream news media use. Analyses of data from a survey, conducted during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic (N = 546), confirm that perceptions of threat, along with negative emotions stemming from perceived threat, play a mediating role between partisan identification and mainstream news media use. Moreover, this research also demonstrates that the mediated relationship between these factors varies, depending on people’s perceptions of the news media’s trustworthiness. The findings of the study contribute to deepening scholarly understanding of media consumption behaviors during times of a politicized public health crisis.

Indigenous representation and participation: The case of the Chilean Mapuche

According to the empowerment hypothesis, minority politicians encourage minority participation. The relationship between representation and participation has been extensively analyzed for several ethnic minorities and women, but there are no studies for indigenous populations in Latin America. This paper evaluates the link between descriptive representation and electoral registration of Mapuche, a deprived indigenous minority from the South of Chile that is as large as ten percent of the total population. We implement a panel estimation that controls district effects using a national dataset of more than three million new registrations in Chile for five municipal elections. We found that Mapuche mayors are significantly associated with higher Mapuche participation during the first year of the mayoral period. Since registration in Chile occurs throughout the representatives’ term, and we use registrations long before the next election, our evidence suggests that office-holding affects participation by channels other than electoral campaigning. To shed light on the channels, we describe the symbolic and substantive mechanisms used by Mapuche mayors to empower their communities.

Pola Konten Pemberitaan Pemilu 2024 dan Ideologi Moderatisme di Media Keislaman Online

This study aims to comprehend the pattern of news content of Indonesia's 2024 presidential election and the ideology on the media suaramuhammadiyah.id and NU online during the presidential election campaign. Using a qualitative content analysis method, this study found that the news content of the two online Islamic media had different patterns in issue selection and source determination. Meanwhile, in the category of content tendencies, the two online media showed relatively the same pattern, that is, both were neutral. This study also found that the news content of the media suaramuhammadiyah.id and NU online was influenced by the ideology of moderation. This can be seen from the tendency of the content of the two online media which disseminated moderate Islamic ideology developed by Muhammadiyah and NU. The tendency of neutrality is in accordance with the values of Muhammadiyah and NU moderation, as contained in the doctrine of Muhammadiyah's "Islam Berkemajuan" (Progressive Islam) and NU's "Islam Nusantara" (Islam of the Archipelago).

Islam Moderat sebagai Retorika Populisme Aktor Politik: Semiotika Akun @CakIminNow

This study examines the populist rhetoric of political actor, Muhaimin Iskandar, delivered on @CakIminNow during the 2024 Indonesian presidential election campaign, especially in the tweet dated October 1, 2023 regarding the Celebration of Pancasila Sanctity Day. This study uses a critical paradigm and Roland Barthes' semiotic analysis technique in analyzing nine units of analysis posted on @CakIminNow. The results of this study have revealed that the representation of moderate Islam has been utilized as a tool of populist rhetoric by Muhaimin Iskandar (Cak Imin) as one of the vice presidential candidates in the 2024 election. In addition, moderate Islam is not only seen as a system of beliefs and religious practices but also as a commodity in political marketing communication efforts by political actors. In short, this populist rhetoric functions as a strategy to strengthen the political image and garner voter support during Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election campaign.

Educating for political campaigning on social media via enhancing technical expertise: An analysis of the candidate education practices in a Finnish conservative-liberal party

Social media are increasingly impacting election campaigns, presenting challenges for political parties when educating their candidates regarding campaigning during general elections. Consequently, this study aims to elucidate the educational grammar at play in the candidate education practices related to social media within a Finnish conservative-liberal parliamentary party. Our idea of educational grammar draws on practice theories and the Foucauldian perspective on the entanglement of power and knowledge. The research question is: How is educational grammar concerning social media constituted in the studied political party’s candidate education practices? The empirical material comprises online educational resources available on YouTube, produced by the National Coalition Party for its candidates in the 2023 Finnish parliamentary election. The analysis reveals three perspectives on how the grammar of technical expertise is constituted—requesting culturally and discursively constituted authenticity from candidates, paying attention to the materially and economically constituted measurability of campaign work, and requiring socially and politically constituted goal-orientation when approaching the public. Consequently, the educational grammar concerning campaigning on social media is constituted as an issue of technical expertise through the interplay between calls for authenticity and assessment, advocating for moderation to represent a key feature of both the ideal candidate and the ideal campaign.

Implementation of village heads' neutralism in the General Election Campaign based on Law Number 6 of 2014 concerning Villages

Implementation of village heads' neutralism in the General Election Campaign based on Law Number 6 of 2014 concerning Villages

What Are Crises for? The Effects on Users’ Engagement in the 2022 Italian Election

Crises were highly relevant in the 2022 Italian general election. The label of “crisis” was associated with multiple policy issues, ranging from the environment and health to foreign policy. Previous studies have extensively discussed the impact of crises on voter behavior, demonstrating that voters are particularly concerned with parties’ valence attributes, such as the effectiveness of policies and leaders’ ability to resolve emergencies. However, limited attention has been paid to assessing how parties mobilize the crisis paradigm on social media. This study seeks to bridge this gap by analyzing the impact of crisis-related content on Facebook user engagement, with a special focus on distinguishing the relative effectiveness of populist versus mainstream parties in deploying such narratives. Moreover, this research explores how the intertwining of crisis narratives with portrayals of party responsibility or irresponsibility influences the virality of social media posts. To answer these questions, we manually coded 4,827 election campaign posts to create an original dataset. The evidence shows that crises have an impact on boosting user engagement, although this effect seems to be limited to populist parties. The results also suggest that irresponsible claims cease to be rewarding during a crisis. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of the strategic use of crisis narratives by political parties on digital platforms and underscores the complex interplay between crisis communication and public engagement in the contemporary political landscape.