Federal Election Research Articles

Reaching the Voters: Parties’ Use of Google Ads in the 2021 German Federal Election

Election campaigns during the pandemic showcased the increased use of costly digital campaigning by parties. While many studies focus on the use of Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other social networking sites during elections, parties’ use of Google Ads remains widely unstudied. This is surprising given that parties spend a substantial proportion of their budget on Google Ads and Google reports on this spending and other details of the ads in its <em>Transparency Report</em>. Based on the equalisation vs. normalisation thesis, we identify party factors (size, age, government/opposition status, and electoral strongholds) that affect parties’ use of this instrument to a different degree in their campaigns. We aim to highlight parties’ use of Google Ads during the campaigns for the 2021 German Bundestag election, relying on the official data provided via Google’s Ad Library. We discuss both empirical work on the factors that determine the use of Google Ads and conceptual work on the merit and perils of such ads in democratic elections, and we present descriptive and exploratory findings of our deep dive into the archive of Google Ads.

Do independents like to party? The rise in independent and minor party MPs in Australian parliaments since 1970

ABSTRACT Commentary about the successes of the ‘Teals’ and the Greens in the 2022 federal election echoes scholarship regarding the ongoing fragmentation of major party support, weakening partisan alignment, and the rise of post-materialist voting since the 1970s. To explore the dynamics behind this trend, we construct a novel dataset of independent and minor party members of parliament elected to single-member electorates in Australian lower houses since 1970, empirically exploring the circumstances through which these candidates are successful. Tracing the rise of independent and minor party MPs, we observe that initially, these MPs often emerged through lower levels of government and outside organised politics, while, more recently they have succeeded through party structures and what we term ‘party-like’ forms of organisation. Our results suggest that political fragmentation is increasingly a challenge to conservative politics, especially via the rise of organised party-like independents, representing a realignment from the twentieth century.

Exploring Twitter discourse with BERTopic: topic modeling of tweets related to the major German parties during the 2021 German federal election

AbstractWe present a study in the context of computational social science that explores the topics debated in the context of the 2021 German Federal Election by using the topic modeling technique BERTopic. The corpus consists of German language tweets posted by political party accounts of the major German parties, as well as tweets by the general public mentioning the party accounts. We examined the textual content of the tweets but also included the text in images that were posted into the analysis by extracting the text using optical character recognition (OCR). Our results show that the most frequently discussed topics are party-oriented policies (including call-to-action content), climate policy and financial policy, with these topics being discussed in tweets by both, the political party accounts and tweets by accounts mentioning them. In addition, we observed that some topics were discussed consistently throughout the year, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate policy or digitization, while other topics, such as the return to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan or Israel were debated to a greater extent at limited time frames during the election year.

Election-Denying Republican Candidates Underperformed in the 2022 Midterms

We combine newly collected election data with records of public denials of the results of the 2020 election to estimate the degree to which election-denying Republican candidates over- or underperformed other Republicans in 2022 in statewide and federal elections. We find that the average vote share of election-denying Republicans in statewide races was approximately 3.2 percentage points lower than their co-partisans after accounting for state-level partisanship. However, we find no such underperformance on aggregate for U.S. House elections, perhaps due to the more-partisan nature of many House districts. Together, the results suggest that the types of candidates in American elections who take more-extreme positions tend to underperform, but that these performance gaps are relatively small in the present, polarized political environment.

‘Waiting for the Barbarians’: constructing the visible invisibility of Australia’s ‘boat people’

ABSTRACT The image of the barbarian at the border has long captured the imagination of ‘civilized’ communities. Drawing on C P Cavafy’s 1904 poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, and J M Coetzee’s 1980 novel of the same name, this article explores the Australian polity’s responses to the arrival of ‘boat people’, who embody the ‘barbarian Other’ in the Australian psyche. Examining the response to unauthorised boat arrivals on Australian Federal Election day in 2022, it situates those events as part of Australia’s performance of Waiting for the Barbarians. It then examines how ‘visible invisibility’ of ‘boat people’ is constructed visually, juridically and geographically. It considers how the cultivation of fear, hostility, and forgetting enable the visible invisibility so constructed. Finally, it turns to the possibilities of resistance to the construction and devastating human effects of visible invisibility. To do this, it looks to those who are ‘visibly invisible’ for inspiration, exploring how documentary, literature, art, music, and artificial intelligence can be harnessed as powerful forms of non-violent resistance. As Cavafy and Coetzee do, the article serves as a reminder that the barbarian is within us as it ponders the possibility of ‘boat people’ offering ‘us’ a different kind of solution.

Is Negative Campaigning a Response to a Dynamic Polling Environment? Evidence from Facebook and Twitter Posts by German Party Leaders in the 2021 German Federal Election

ABSTRACT Do negative campaigning strategies evolve in sync with a party leader’s position in public opinion polls? In Germany’s multi-party system, previous research during the traditional media era found that a chancellor candidate’s drop in the polls did not impact negativity. This study focuses on the dynamic campaign in the 2021 Federal Election, which is the most competitive campaign to date in the social media era as there was no incumbent chancellor candidate. The prevalence of negative campaigning by six major party leaders who made a total of n = 3580 posts on Facebook and Twitter from 1 March to Election Day on 25 September 2021 is studied here. Negative posts accounted for 7.7 per cent of total posts. Results also show that a chancellor candidate’s position in the polls matters: Front-runners are less likely to rely on negative campaigning, but as candidates drop down in the polls from being the main challenger to rank third or lower, their negative campaigning increases. During the official six-week campaign or the hot phase, the number of negative posts increases overall as Election Day approaches. Variation in the use of negative campaigning among the individual chancellor candidates is discussed as is evidence of negative campaigning prior to the hot phase.

Prediction of Canadian Federal Election Results Based on Multilevel Regression and Post-Stratification

In democratic countries like Canada, elections provide eligible citizens (aged 18 or older) the opportunity to vote and elect their leader. Since different political parties have distinct ideologies, election outcomes have significant societal impacts, making election result predictions crucial. This study aims to predict whether the Liberal Party will maintain its victory in the 2025 Canadian federal election using a multilevel regression model combined with post-stratification. The data for this research comes from the 2021 Canadian Election Study (CES) and the General Social Survey (GSS), with the cleaned datasets including variables such as age, gender, education, and province. Through the constructed multilevel logistic regression model and post-stratification adjustments, the results show that approximately 26.63% of Canadian citizens will vote for the Liberal Party in the next Canadian federal election. This prediction aligns with the hypothesis that the Liberal Party will not win the upcoming federal election. However, some variables in the model are not statistically significant, and the data is somewhat outdated. Future research should consider incorporating more variables and updated data.

ВЛИЯНИЕ ДЭГ НА ЯВКУ ИЗБИРАТЕЛЕЙ НА ВЫБОРАХ В РОССИИ В 2021–2023 ГГ.

Remote electronic voting, also known as i-voting, transforms elections in Russia and worldwide, opening up new opportunities for the state and society to move from agent-object to subject-to-subject relations. However, the impact of i-voting on political processes, especially at the regional level, is yet to be studied by social sciences. The author analyzed the effect of remote electronic voting on voter turnout at the federal and regional elections in Russia in 2021–2023 and compared them with the turnout that involved traditional means of voting. The cross-regional and cross-temporal analysis of electoral statistics partially proved that remote electronic voting as an additional voting channel increased voter turnout at the federal level. The Russian electronic voting network appeared to be an efficient state operator in 2021–2023. However, the increase in voter turnout was lower in the regions. If subjected to strict public control, remote electronic voting can justifiably considered as an effective form of conventional political participation.

Political Giving by Retired U.S. General and Flag Officers

Why do retired U.S. General and Flag Officers (GOFOs) donate to political causes? I argue that retired GOFOs likely sort between nondonors, partisan donors, and corporate political action committee donors. Using a novel data set of all former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Combatant Commanders from 1979 to 2022 and drawing on data from the Federal Election Commission, I examine the conditions associated with increased likelihood of GOFO political giving. The results suggest that the majority of retired GOFOs are nongivers. However, retired GOFOs are more likely to donate to Republicans than to Democrats, and GOFOs are more likely to donate to Republicans during U.S. presidential elections. I find strong partisan trends in GOFOs’ political giving, and the results provide new insights into the conditions under which retired American GOFOs take domestic political action.

Edgy Conservatives? The Late-Twentieth Century Rise of the Mortgage Belt in Australian Electoral Politics

The expansion of home ownership in Australia in the second half of the twentieth century was accompanied by a new vernacular geography – the mortgage belt. From the 1970s, such belts around major cities were frequently said to be crucial to federal and state elections. This article examines where political commentary located mortgage belt areas in Sydney and Melbourne and finds that it encompassed a diverse range of places often, but not always, on their urban edges. Their residents were believed to be particularly sensitive about interest rates but also other risks. While the politics of outer suburbia has often been posited as conservative, it is argued that such areas were electorally nuanced and reflected longstanding contingency in Australia around expectations of government that stands in contrast to conservatism elsewhere. These areas also highlight the continuing significance of popular access to property ownership as a theme of Australian political history.

EVOLUTION AND PROSPECTS OF THE «ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY»

In recent years, the populist Alternative for Germany (AfG) party, which systematically opposes the ruling mainstream parties, has become active on the German political scene. In contrast to the approach of the mainstream parties, the AfG’s views on governance and engagement with the European Union now pose a threat to the coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Alliance 90 / The Greens because of the increasing popularity of right-wing populists among the German electorate. In autumn 2025, Germany will hold federal elections to the Bundestag, which will determine the political course of the country for the next 5 years. The purpose of this article is to assess the prospects of the Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag elections in 2025.A significant part of the article is devoted to reviewing the ideological evolution of the party, which has gone from a minor moderate party to the leading opposition force in the country. This is essential in order to understand the implications of the current rise in social tensions and scandals around Alternative and how this may affect its future political sustainability. Authors provide a forecast of the party’s chances of success in the parliamentary elections and assess the risks that the AfG may face during the electoral struggle. The conclusion is made that the chances of the Alternative for Germany party to enter the government in 2025 will depend on its capacity to timely eliminate the accumulated internal contradictions, such as the excessive radicalisation of the party and the lack of a unified ideological component among its leaders.

Who Gives to American Trade and Professional Association Political Action Committees and Why?

This paper asks: Why do people contribute to American trade and professional association political action committees (PACs)? Our data, which come from an original survey of donors during the 2021–2022 federal election cycle, indicate that trade and professional association PAC donors are not like other campaign donors. Specifically, unlike donors to candidates, who appear to be motivated primarily by purposive benefits and ideology, these PAC donors are motivated largely by material benefits. Our data also showthat trade and professional association PACs are constraining forces in American politics. While donors tend to hue to a strict ideological lane, PACs do not. In short, PACs are balanced in their giving, while individual donors are not.

From Confidence to Convenience: Changes in Voting Systems, Donald Trump, and Voter Confidence

Abstract A growing body of research indicates that voters’ perceptions of the electoral system change when the means of administering elections change. As some electoral jurisdictions have moved to systems designed to increase voter convenience, little is known about whether convenience is achieved at the expense of confidence. Utah’s rollout of Vote by Mail (VBM) occurred county by county across five federal elections, and the three most populous counties adopted all VBM elections successively in 2014, 2016, and 2018. This meaningful variance in voter experience with VBM allows us to model the relationship between experience with VBM and voter confidence. We find that the switch to a more convenient system of voting came at the expense of diminished confidence in the voting process. However, experience with VBM is positively related to confidence such that the loss in confidence can be recouped over time. To capture this dynamic relative to other factors, we also estimate the effects of partisanship and the messages of political elites. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, the effect of partisanship on voter confidence changed compared to just two years earlier. Elite messages appear to be especially negative for Trump voters after 2020. More experience with VBM acts as a bulwark against those negative messages, almost completely attenuating the negative effects of Trump’s fraud claims among his voters with the highest levels of VBM experience.

Beyond disdain: Measurement and consequences of negative partisanship as a social identity

Negative partisanship, voters’ rejection of a party, increasingly garners scholarly attention. Yet we lack robust empirical evidence on the nature of the concept and how it shapes attitudes towards citizens of the “other side” of politics. In this paper I argue negative partisanship should be conceptualised as a type of social identity, beyond a mere “dislike” of a party. Leveraging a three-wave online panel administered during the 2021 German federal elections, I test the measurement properties of a multi-item scale measuring negative party identification. Further, I examine the effects of negative identities on attitudes towards other citizens by combining the online panel with a nine-country survey. I find that negative identification is at least as stable as (positive) partisanship and it predicts hostile attitudes towards out-voters. These findings suggest that, when dislike of a party becomes part of one’s sense of self, the consequences for social cohesion are particularly egregious.

Sport as a Pathway to Political Office and its Gendered Effects

ABSTRACT This paper finds that a background in competitive, organised sports is common among those active in electoral politics. Unique data collected through surveys of federal election candidates and local party association presidents together with the examination of candidate and MP biographies establish that many have a sporting background. This sporting experience offers the opportunity for individuals to acquire skills beneficial to political candidacy and makes them more attractive to party gatekeepers. This paper then connects this, and the significantly lower sports participation rates among women/girls, to their consistent under-representation in the pool of election candidates presented by Canada’s political parties and at every level of our elected legislatures. Women/girls participate in sports at significantly lower levels than men/boys. Men thus benefit disproportionately from both the personal skills developed through sports that lead to formal political participation and the local notoriety desired by party candidate search committees that sports participation offers.

Hometown bias in Flanders: the impact of ministerial local embeddedness on the distribution of conditional grants (2004–2017)

ABSTRACT Are grants strategically allocated to towns where ministers live? This question is investigated using panel data covering four legislative periods and 293 Flemish municipalities. The findings provide clear evidence of hometown bias. Ministerial careers related to local embeddedness explain differences in received conditional grants. Ministers, who were once mayors, started their careers locally or predominantly developed upper-level careers to bring more resources to their hometowns. Conversely, ministers, recruited from outside politics, do not generate extra resources. During local election years, ministers in key positions on local lists (leader or pusher) also secure significantly more funding. Investigating grants during federal, regional, and local election years consistently reveals significant hometown bias. This trend persists across various ministerial career trajectories, particularly for ministers who began their careers locally or served as mayors, highlighting the impact of ministerial local embeddedness on grant distribution.

Canada: Political Developments and Data in 2023

AbstractThere was no federal election in 2023 but change seemed to be in the air, as the official opposition Conservatives, under their new leader, made major gains in the polls and took a significant lead over the Liberals. Controversy over foreign interference in Canadian politics generated controversy, and foreign policy issues had an uncharacteristic impact on Canadian politics. The Liberal government responded with a major Cabinet shuffle, while by‐elections left the party positions in the House of Commons essentially unchanged.

Social Media, Sentiments and Political Discourse ? An Exploratory Study of the 2021 Canadian Federal Election

Social media are widely used for online political discourse. Opinions shared on social media have different sentiments associated with them. Given the very high adoption rates of Twitter (now X) among adults, those who share their opinions on Twitter (X) not only represent a sizable segment of the society, but also influence (through emotion contagion) an even larger segment who are passive (non-contributing) users of the platform. Further, the discourse that is initiated on Twitter (X) typically spreads to other more traditional media. As a result, Twitter (X) is influential, which makes it useful to understand the factors related to the sentiments expressed in tweets. Such understanding can help policymakers to take actions that align with public needs and priorities. This research focuses on identifying the drivers (keywords) of sentiments associated with political discourse on Twitter (X). We also explore virality, i.e., how much a message (the tweet) spreads, and the relationship between sentiments and virality. Finally, we explore whether the clustering of tweets among sentiment and virality groups can improve the potential of social media content for predicting election results. Sentiment Analysis of 764,000 tweets related to the 2021 Canadian Federal election was followed by text clustering to identify sentiment-driving topics. We found some keywords predominantly present within a positive or negative sentiment that are suggestive of entities or ideas to invest in or mitigate by political decision makers. We were also able to find partial evidence for “negativity bias” by detecting a negative relationship between sentiment (positivity) and virality (number of retweets). Finally, we demonstrated that high positivity on the political discourse does not reflect election outcomes and examining Twitter (X) content in more neutral groups can improve predictive power. Our findings have implications for political decision makers and social media analytics researchers.

The social landscape of wolves in Canada - preliminary findings

ABSTRACT Despite the long-standing presence of wolves (Canis lupus) in Canada, attitudes toward wolves have been understudied at the national scale. However, such data can inform wildlife management policies and robust coexistence strategies. We developed an 11-question survey to assess “the social landscape” of wolves in Canada. We explored the following research questions: 1) Are attitudes toward wolves generally positive? 2) What is the role of proximity on attitudes toward and tolerance for wolves? 3) What demographic characteristics matter most? Preliminary results indicate that Canadians have positive attitudes toward wolves regardless of age, gender, province, and vote in the last federal election; only ethnicity had a statistically significant effect. We also found that positive attitude is related to proximity and tolerance. More research with larger sample sizes and more focused surveys are needed to delve deeper into these preliminary results.

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.