German Federal Election Campaign Research Articles

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.

Communicating in an eventful campaign: A case study of party press releases during the German federal election campaign 2021

Party competition during the German federal election campaign 2021 was marked by major external events and remarkable shifts in poll ratings. Existing literature argues that parties adjust their communication to such changing contexts and proposes three strategies: parties can respond to other parties, voter concerns or external events. In addition, these salience strategies are potentially moderated by further factors (e.g., poll ratings). The dynamic setting of the German federal election campaign 2021 provides an ideal case to bring together and test the outlined theories. We train a state-of-the-art model (BERT) on labeled manifestos and apply it for cross-domain topic classification of party press releases. The analysis shows that the parties used press releases for different purposes during the campaign and adjusted their issue communication to other parties and external events, but not to voter concerns. The use of different salience strategies was thereby unaffected by poll trends. These findings emphasize the influence of contextual changes on election campaigns and add important evidence to prominent theories of party competition.

Do electoral candidates reflect or select campaign issues? The influence of electoral manifestos on online communication

This article investigates the influence of electoral manifestos on the online communication of electoral candidates. Our study addresses electoral candidates’ conflict between party discipline and individual issue prioritisation. Building on the salience framework, we examine the thematic congruence between manifestos and online communication. Moreover, we test which issues are emphasised during the 2017 German federal election campaign. To this end, we created an original topic dictionary based on party manifestos. Applying the dictionary, we classify 143,969 tweets by 797 candidates. Our analyses demonstrate that manifestos shape the online communication of electoral candidates substantially. The findings show that electoral candidates of left–wing parties focus on core issues over time. Our results not only highlight the authority of party leadership, but also suggest that politicians do not tap the whole potential of online communication.

The Gendered Effect of Parenthood on Voting Behaviour in the 2021 German Federal Election

ABSTRACT The effect of parenthood on voting behaviour has so far been largely neglected in electoral research or is assumed to have a negligible effect. However, the 2021 German federal election campaign faced the politicisation of two main family- and children-related issues (i.e. the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change). Based on a comparison of data in the 2017 and 2021 German Longitudinal Election Study, we investigate the gendered effect of parenthood on voting behaviour. Our multinomial logistic regression analysis points to a significant parenthood effect for women during the 2021 election: women with at least one child under the age of 11 have an 8-percentage point higher probability of voting for the Greens than women without children in that age group (controlling among other things for education, age, religiosity and left-right identity). We do not find a similar effect for men. Further analyses suggest that this effect is partly due to a larger importance of climate change issues among mothers of young children. We conclude by highlighting the potential relevance of parents as an electorate force when family- and children-related issues are politicised during electoral campaigns.

PANDEMIC POLITICS: THE 2021 AND 2022 GERMAN AND AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGNS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

One of the effects of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic has been to further accelerate the incorporation of social media activities into political and electoral campaigning. Especially as a result of lockdowns and other restrictions to offline public life, overall social media use has increased in many countries; health concerns have severely curtailed conventional in-person political campaigning activities, from doorknocking to mass rallies (even if some candidates are openly flouting health measures in order to appeal to fringe, COVID-denialist voters); and concerns about the safety of in-person voting processes have also led to a growth in postal voting well ahead of election day, potentially increasing the importance of political messaging early on in election campaigns. In addition, of course, the pandemic itself, and the health, economic, and social measures taken by different governments to address and manage its implications, have also become a dominant theme in most political contests. Political parties around the world have scrambled to keep up with and engage with these changing circumstances, voter behaviours, and political debates, and it is therefore time to re-examine the current state of affairs. This panel does so by focussing on social media campaigning in two of the most recent major national elections: the German federal election campaign in August and September 2021, and the Australian federal election campaign in March to May 2022. The four papers included in this panel examine political campaigning, public engagement, and journalistic coverage on Facebook and Twitter, as well as political advertising practices on Facebook, and in combination offer a very timely new perspective on electioneering in the final stages of a multi-year global pandemic.

How Partisanship Matters: A Panel Study on the Democratic Outcomes of Perceived Dirty Campaigning

Uncivil campaigning and deceitful campaign techniques are increasingly relevant phenomena in politics. However, it remains unclear how they share an underlying component and how partisanship can influence their associations with democratic outcomes. We introduce the concept of dirty campaigning, which is situated at the intersection of research on negative campaigning and political scandals. Dirty campaigning involves violations of social norms and liberal-democratic values between elite political actors in terms of style and practices, such as uncivil campaigning and deceitful campaign techniques. In a two-wave panel study (<em>N</em> = 634) during the 2021 German federal election campaign, we investigate the associations of perceived dirty campaigning by the least and most favorite party with distrust in politicians, trust in democracy, attitudes toward dirty campaigning regulation, as well as perceived harmful consequences of dirty campaigning for democracy. We find that perceived dirty campaigning by the least favorite party increases perceptions of harmful consequences of dirty campaigning for democracy over time. In contrast, perceived dirty campaigning by the most favorite party decreases perceptions of harmful consequences of dirty campaigning for democracy as well as attitudes toward dirty campaigning regulation over time. Perceptions of harmful consequences of dirty campaigning for democracy increase distrust in politicians over time and vice versa. Our findings suggest that the outcomes of dirty campaigning can depend on partisanship and can have important implications for the quality of democracy.

„Mexican Standoff“ – Trielle in Berlin: TV-Debatten in der heißen Wahlkampfphase 2021

Multiple debates were held on TV in the 2021 German federal election campaign between the chancellor candidates Armin Laschet (CDU/CSU), Olaf Scholz (SPD) and Annelena Baerbock (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) . For the last three televised debates (so-called „Trielle“), surveying viewers immediately before and immediately after the events and conducting real-time measurement of the candidates’ debate performance help understand their per- ception and impact . The debate performances of Scholz and Baerbock were rated signifi- cantly better than Laschet’s . The candidates used very different strategies . While Laschet focused surprisingly strongly on attack, Scholz pursued a classic incumbent strategy . The perceived performance of the chancellor candidates in the debates had a direct impact on their likability ratings, most strongly in the first broadcast . Overall, Scholz benefited the most from these debates . Baerbock, but especially Laschet, failed to close the gap on the SPD . Our analyses underscore the impact of televised debates and their outstanding impor- tance in election campaigns .

Googling Politics: Parties, Sources, and Issue Ownerships on Google in the 2017 German Federal Election Campaign

Democratic election campaigns require informed citizens. Yet, while the Internet allows for broader information through greater media choices, algorithmic filters, such as search engines, threaten to unobtrusively shape individual information repertoires. The purpose of this article is to analyze what search results people encounter when they employ various information orientations, and how these results reflect people’s attributions of issue ownership. A multimethod approach was applied during the 2017 German Federal Election campaign. First, human search behavior depicting various information orientations was simulated using agent-based testing to derive real search results from Google Search, which were then manually coded to identify information sources and ascribe issue ownerships. Second, a survey asked participants about which issues they attribute to which party. We find that search results originated mainly from established news outlets and reflected existing power relations between political parties. However, issue-ownership attributions of the survey participants were reflected poorly in the search results. In total, the results indicate that the fear of algorithmic constraints in the context of online search might be overrated. Instead, our findings (1) suggest that political actors still fail to claim their core issues among political search results, (2) highlight that news media (and thus existing media biases) feature heavily among search results, and (3) call for more media literacy among search engine users.

Election Campaigning on Social Media: Politicians, Audiences, and the Mediation of Political Communication on Facebook and Twitter

Although considerable research has concentrated on online campaigning, it is still unclear how politicians use different social media platforms in political communication. Focusing on the German federal election campaign 2013, this article investigates whether election candidates address the topics most important to the mass audience and to which extent their communication is shaped by the characteristics of Facebook and Twitter. Based on open-ended responses from a representative survey conducted during the election campaign, we train a human-interpretable Bayesian language model to identify political topics. Applying the model to social media messages of candidates and their direct audiences, we find that both prioritize different topics than the mass audience. The analysis also shows that politicians use Facebook and Twitter for different purposes. We relate the various findings to the mediation of political communication on social media induced by the particular characteristics of audiences and sociotechnical environments.

The #BTW17 Twitter Dataset–Recorded Tweets of the Federal Election Campaigns of 2017 for the 19th German Bundestag

The German Bundestag elections are the most important elections in Germany. This dataset comprises Twitter interactions related to German politicians of the most important political parties over several months in the (pre-)phase of the German federal election campaigns in 2017. The Twitter accounts of more than 360 politicians were followed for four months. The collected data comprise a sample of approximately 10 GB of Twitter raw data, and they cover more than 120,000 active Twitter users and more than 1,200,000 recorded tweets. Even without sophisticated data analysis techniques, it was possible to deduce a likely political party proximity for more than half of these accounts simply by looking at the re-tweet behavior. This might be of interest for innovative data-driven party campaign strategists in the future. Furthermore, it is observable, that, in Germany, supporters and politicians of populist parties make use of Twitter much more intensively and aggressively than supporters of other parties. Furthermore, established left-wing parties seem to be more active on Twitter than established conservative parties. The dataset can be used to study how political parties, their followers and supporters make use of social media channels in political election campaigns and what kind of content is shared.

Responsive elections: The effect of public opinion on political campaigns

Political campaigns exist so that electoral candidates and parties can pursue votes, but what explains their content? It is clear that a lot of thought (and a lot more money) go into election campaigns, but the issues political actors focus on and those that they avoid are not well understood. In this paper we consider the responsiveness of the 2009 German Federal election campaigns to public priorities expressed through the “most important problem” survey question. Through the use of time series models of daily media reports of campaigns and rolling cross-section survey data on the attitudes of individual voters we find evidence that the 2009 German Federal election campaigns were responsive to public priorities and the attention of opponent campaigns. However, the focus of the campaign on the party or an individual candidate led to more and less responsiveness respectively. These results suggest that political campaigns dynamically respond to public opinion and each other, but that the nature of the campaign can lead to drastic changes in the level of responsiveness exhibited.

Beyond the Base? Political Parties, Citizen Activists, and Digital Media Use in the 2009 German Federal Election Campaign

ABSTRACTThis article examines who sees party and campaign information through social media, as well as which people share this information through social media. Using the 2009 German Longitudinal Election Study, we find that younger party members and strong partisans are more likely to see party and campaign information through social media, regardless of their income, education, or gender. In addition, party members are significantly more likely to share party and campaign information through social media. These results are promising because they suggest that parties can engage younger voters through social media sites. Moreover, they show that when parties post campaign information online, they make it easier for party members to mobilize people who might otherwise not be exposed to campaign information.

Combining ideological and policy distances with valence for a model of party competition in Germany 2009

This paper addresses two problems: how can we identify a verisimilar policy space and how can we detect Nash equilibria in this space for parties’ policy positions? We argue that the ideological party positions that voters perceive are fixed during the time span of one electoral campaign and that they constrain the policies parties offer the electorate in search of optimal vote shares. We apply the valence model developed by Schofield to party competition during the German federal election campaign 2009. First three issue scales are combined with a left–right scale to form one homogeneous space in which equilibrium locations of parties are sought. The results show that local Nash equilibria in this combined space depend heavily on the start values and are implausible. Fixing the ideological dimension leads to a stable and meaningful equilibrium configuration in which large parties move to more central positions and smaller parties move to more peripheral positions in the policy space.

Deliberative Qualities of Generic News Frames: Assessing the Democratic Value of Strategic Game and Contestation Framing in Election Campaign Coverage

News frames are patterns of news construction journalists rely on to present information to their audiences. While much of the research on news frames has focused on their identification and effects, less work has investigated the specific contributions these different frames make to democratic life. Value judgments about distinct news frames are often not generated in a systematic fashion, not grounded in democratic theory, and/or not supported by empirical evidence. In this article, we address these problems by arguing for and extending normative assessment as a standard operating procedure to determine the democratic value of political communication phenomena. We demonstrate the usefulness of normative assessment by showing how two important generic news frames (politics as a strategic game and as a substantive contestation) contribute to a deliberative public discourse prior to a general election. Using data on television news coverage of the German federal election campaign in 2009, we investigate how these frames are related to the inclusiveness and civility of public discourse and the extent to which it features exchanges of substantive reasons for political positions. Results show that mediated democratic deliberation suffers consistently from strategic game framing, while contestation frames make ambivalent contributions. Implications for political communication scholarship as well as journalistic practice are discussed. [Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): coding protocol used in content analysis.]

The Campaign and its Dynamics at the 2009 German General Election

This article analyses the 2009 German federal election campaign with specific emphasis on the three categories of actors that play key roles in contemporary election campaigns – parties and their candidates, the mass media, and the voters. Mainly aiming at a theoretically informed comprehensive description, the article addresses some key themes of the recent literature on electioneering. The Bundestag election on 27 September 2009 was preceded by a campaign that lacked drama. There were several reasons for the absence of a more polarised campaign, not least the fact that CDU/CSU and SPD had been tied together in a Grand Coalition and had to deal with massive political challenges. Against the background of an unclear picture painted by the media, the feasibility and likelihood of various types of government coalitions were dominant topics of the campaign. The CDU/CSU in many respects had an edge over the SPD.

‘Miniature Campaigns’ in Comparison: The German Televised Debates, 2002–09

Given that US-style televised debates were held for the third time in a row in a German federal election campaign, it seems fair to say that they have become an institutionalised feature of German campaigns. Although a number of studies have analysed (single) German debates, comparative work covering the full set of debates is still lacking. The aim of this paper is to reveal patterns and trends in a) debate exposure, b) the evaluation of the candidates' debate performances and c) debate effects. To this purpose, a pooled data set for the 2002, 2005 and 2009 debates is analysed. Consistent evidence is found that cognitive as well as partisan mobilisation increases the probability of watching debates. Concerning the impact of debates, it is found that debate exposure has a mobilising effect – especially among those less interested in politics. In addition, we find a considerable impact of debates on party choice – with the effects reflecting patterns of ‘reinforcement’ as well as ‘conversion’. The greatest debate effects can be observed for independent voters. Given these results, televised debates are not only an institutionalised feature of German campaigns, but also a powerful and hence possibly decisive one.

Campaigns, candidate evaluations, and vote choice: Evidence from German federal election campaigns, 1980–2002

This article examines the effect of German federal election campaigns on citizens' attitudes toward chancellor candidates. Building on previous research, it puts forward three hypotheses tested using survey data gathered during seven German federal election campaigns. The results confirm that campaigns polarize the voters' perception of the chancellor candidates. During campaigns, voters also bring their opinions about candidates into line with their partisan attitudes. Moreover, during three campaigns candidate preferences become increasingly powerful predictors of vote choice. The findings also suggest that election-specific factors condition campaign effects. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of these findings for campaigns and political science.

Testing Visual Signals in Representative Surveys in Combination with Media Content Analyses of the 2002 German Federal Election Campaign

Testing Visual Signals in Representative Surveys in Combination with Media Content Analyses of the 2002 German Federal Election Campaign

Reliability and Validity of Real-Time Response Measurement: a Comparison of Two Studies of a Televised Debate in Germany

This paper investigates the reliability and validity of real-time response measurements (RTR). It is based on a comparison of two quasi-experimental studies independently conducted on the second televised debate of the two major candidates for chancellor in the 2002 German federal election campaign. Participants in Bamberg and Mainz—two mid-sized German cities—followed the debate on a large-scale screen. The viewers’ immediate reactions to the candidates were measured in real-time. In terms of technicalities and substance, both quasi-experiments differed in several important respects. For example, the system used in Mainz was based on a control unit with a 7-point scale and yielded one merged metric dimension for both candidates. The Bamberg system measured positive and negative impressions of the candidates independently, yielding categorical data. Despite these operational differences, the results show that both methods render reliable results that also meet the criteria of face, construct, and criterion validity. Hence, RTR measurements provide valuable, unique insights into subjective immediate reactions to candidates in televised debates and help to explain post-debate perceptions and attitudes.

Candidate Orientations in Election Campaign: An Analysis of the German Federal Election Campaigns from 1980 to 1998

This article analyses the effects of German federal election campaigns on citizens' orientations towards chancellor candidates. Three hypotheses are formulated. They refer to polarization, party politicization, and priming of candidate attitudes; additionally, it is argued that campaign context moderates the effects. The hypotheses are tested empirically using survey data collected in the election campaigns from 1980 to 1998. Empirically, the perceptions of the chancellor candidates become more polarized during campaigns; additionally, the perceptions are brought into line with party preferences. Finally, priming effects are less common, but in some cases, substantial candidate priming is found. Hence, election campaigns influence candidate orienta- tions in Germany, and the effect varies according to political conditions.