Parliamentary Election Campaign Research Articles

Utilization of Algorithms and Artificial Intelligence Tools in the Election Campaign in the Republic of Poland and the Republic of Slovakia – Analysis of Case Studies

The article focuses on the issue of using artificial intelligence tools and algorithms in parliamentary election campaigns in Poland and Slovakia. In the first part of the article, the process of the conceptualization of the terms artificial intelligence and microtargeting was carried out. This was followed by an analysis of the legal conditions related to the use of artificial intelligence in election campaigns. The empirical part of the paper presents the results of the conducted research, presenting examples of the use of artificial intelligence in the 2023 parliamentary campaign. Campaigns in Poland and Slovakia were the subject of analysis. The main research question of the paper is as follows: how does artificial intelligence influence democratic processes in Poland and Slovakia? For the purposes of the paper, several research methods were used: institutional-legal analysis, comparative method and empirical research – analysis of content published on the Internet.

Shocking Experience: How Politicians’ Issue Strategies Are Shaped by an External Shock During Campaigns

In this article, we focus on how the issue strategies of political leaders are influenced by an external shock that completely changes the public agenda of the election campaign. The 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election campaign is a unique case to investigate this question, as Russia attacked Ukraine six weeks before the election day (April 3, 2022). The study aims to investigate whether the campaign’s issue strategies changed due to this shocking event, and if so, what are the main directions of the changes. The examination relies on a manual content analysis of Hungarian party leaders’ Facebook posts during the campaign, covering both the period before and after the outbreak of the war. First, based on the literature, we distinguish between different issue strategies such as issue ownership, issue stealing, “riding the wave,” and multi-issue and issue-poor strategies. We categorize political leaders’ issue strategies based on their issue focus before and after the external shock. Our results show that while war, economy, and foreign policy play a greater role in the communication of most political actors after February 24, there are remarkable differences between political actors. The communication of opposition party leaders seems to persist with their original issue strategies (issue-poor and multi-issue campaigns), while Viktor Orbán clearly changed his focus immediately after the invasion of Ukraine and ran a “riding the wave” campaign with a focus on war.

Hate Speech on Twitter: Vox in the Catalan Parliamentary Elections

ABSTRACT The Spanish far-right Vox party ran for the first time as a candidate for the Catalan parliamentary elections in February 2021. This paper analyses the party's political discourse on Twitter during the Catalan parliamentary election campaign in order to assess whether the degree of dialectical confrontation of their messages can exceed the limits of democratic debate. The results reveal how this far-right party's inflammatory messages, which seek to insult its political opponents, ultimately foster an undemocratic environment that turns Vox's political rivals into its enemy, driving social polarisation and a discourse of hatred towards individuals defending other ideologies or parties. Ultimately, it is intended to add that political-ideological nuance for future research that surpasses traditional hate speech —such as those based on criteria such as race or sex— and the suitability of Twitter for the proliferation of the latter.

Varieties of antigenderism: the politicization of gender issues across three European populist radical right parties

ABSTRACT This research contributes to the study of populist radical right parties’ (PRRPs) role in gendered democratic backsliding by analyzing their articulation and symbolic representation of gender issues. We compare the politicization of gender issues across three European PRRPs, examining how context-specific gendered opportunity structures – the level of contestation of gender issues in their country, the resonance of antigenderism among their electorate, and their issue repertoire and historical trajectory – shape the extent and ways in which the German AfD, the Italian Lega and the Sweden Democrats politicize gender issues. We conduct a quantitative content analysis of PRRPs’ framing of gender issues and construct topic networks based on the parties’ Facebook and Twitter posts during the European Parliament election campaign 2019. We analyze the salience of gender issues, the broader topical context in which they are embedded, the specific gender issues addressed, and the parties’ positions on these issues. Our results show how context-specific gendered opportunities shape PRRPs’ national gender discourses: A low level of contestation, evidenced by a high public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster a femonationalist framing, while antigenderist discourse is less pronounced in such a context. Instead, a higher level of contestation, expressed in a lower public recognition and legal protection of gender and sexual equality, seems to foster antigenderist discourse. A transnational femonationalist framing, shared by all analyzed parties, relates to a common nativist ideological core.

FROM TRADITION TO INNOVATION: A STUDY OF RIGHT-WING CONSERVATIVE PARTIES IN CONTEMPORARY POLAND

The purpose of this article is to systematize and generalize information about the political right-conservative movement in modern Poland. In the course of the study, the potential for support for right-wing parties exists in every society. It can grow due to two groups of factors. The first concerns issues related to the difficult economic situation, the modernization of societies or cultural aspects, which are called demand-related in the literature. The second large group consists of supply factors: factors of possible political success (structure of political opportunities), electoral rules, inter-party competition, the role of the mass media, the structure of political divisions or the role of the winning ideology. Polish right-wing conservatism and nationalism is characterized, both in the past and in the present, by a powerful influence on the social and political life of the Republic of Poland, acting as a fundamental element of the unification of the Polish people. This movement retains its traditional features, which are reflected in the ideology of the Polish ruling party “Law and Justice”, which adheres to a national-conservative orientation with elements of clericalism, maintains close ties with the Catholic Church and organizations close to it. In the period after coming to power (2015), “PiS” slowly but steadily lost its Christian-democratic character and evolved into a conservative political force. This allowed “PiS” to win elections for a long time, and in 2023, it allows it to maintain leading positions in public opinion polls regarding support for political parties. In the field of international relations, supporters of “PiS” operated with judgments that expressed the ideas of nationalism, presenting the Poles as a strong nation that should occupy an important place among other countries. The process of creating right-wing conservative political parties and associations in Poland continues on an ongoing basis. The strengthening of nationalist movements in Poland takes place with the support of the state authorities of the Republic of Poland and is accompanied by a gradual shift of emphasis on controversial historical issues in the direction of nationalist ideology. Despite official Warsaw providing political support to Kyiv in the international arena in connection with the Russian military threat, the authorities of the Republic of Poland have no intention of blocking anti-Ukrainian activities carried out by Polish national-patriotic right-wing movements. This is due to the preparation of the ruling elite for the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the tragic events in Volyn in 2023, as well as the parliamentary election campaign. In the future, the activation of radical right-conservative formations on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth may lead to protest actions in Poland, the purpose of which will be the dissemination of information unfavorable to our state in the Polish information space, which will have a negative impact on the formation of the foreign policy vector of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Ukrainian direction.

The role of hyperactive Twitter accounts in the diffusion of political information

ABSTRACT Social media virality is intertwined with content’s ability to trigger specific reactions; however, little is known regarding the behavioural component of political information diffusion. This study uses big data to investigate the significance of hyperactive social media use in the retransmission of information produced by political opinion leaders on Twitter during Poland’s 2019 European parliamentary election campaign. Using the isolation forest method, the research identified the social bot-like (semi)automated or human-controlled Twitter handles which are referred to as hyperactive accounts. The study finds that the hyperactive accounts produced almost all reactions in our sample (N = 114,036), but their average activity was relatively moderate and did not exceed human capabilities. Although their retweets equal 0.46% of the retweets obtained by political opinion leaders, the random forest regression models suggest that the likes and retweets from hyperactive accounts are the most important determinants of the dissemination of political opinion leaders’ tweets. The results draw attention to the alarming phenomenon of the further increase in Twitter’s interactional asymmetry.

Disinformation and the Brussels bubble: EU correspondents’ concerns and competences in a digital age

European Union (EU) political actors have been heavily affected by the so-called disinformation crisis, leading to intense worries about how EU citizens may be guaranteed access to trustworthy information in the years to come. While there is increasing research on how EU officials, platforms, and political parties react to the threat of disinformation, less attention has been paid to how another crucial group of actors in Brussels copes with this threat: EU correspondents. This paper presents one of the first empirical observations of EU correspondents’ perceptions of the disinformation crisis. We conducted a survey with Brussels-based correspondents ahead of a politicized 2019 European Parliament election campaign, and asked: What are (a) the concerns and (b) self-perceived competences these correspondents have in dealing with disinformation? Our study offers two main take-aways: First, we recommend further studying EU journalism as a complex organism whose concerns and competences are influenced by intra-European differences in press freedom and journalistic professionalisation. Second, disinformation studies in the EU context must no longer neglect the challenges professional journalism faces when aiming to stop false content.

Professionalization of Campaign Communication beyond Communication Forms. An Analysis of Poland’s Political Spots

Previous studies on the professionalization of campaign communication concentrated on forms of communication, ignoring the important question of how election campaigns vary in terms of the content of their election messages. The article intends to partially fill this breach by dealing with the case of Poland’s parliamentary election campaigns in the years 2005–2019. Therefore, it not only describes the main groups of determinants (systemic, competitive, technological, and social) influencing the speed and direction of the process of professionalization in Poland but also attempts to verify the extent to which a party’s electoral messages include certain content that can be treated as manifestations and effects of professionalization. Based on an analysis of audiovisual political advertising during five parliamentary campaigns, the study shows the dominance of valence issues (comparing them to position issues) in spots and the presence of centralized personalization (but not beyond simple party labeling). No linear increase or decrease of trend intensity has been observed regarding the above issues during the five elections. While the overall occurrence of these phenomena remains stable in the campaigns under study (meaning a significant, usually predominant share of party spots in a given year), their intensity varies.

Media populism and the life-cycle of the Norwegian Progress Party

Abstract The paper examines the media attention given to the Norwegian Progress Party (FrP) during the parliamentary elections in which it participated between 1973 and 2017. Particular attention is paid to the ideas of media populism and the so-called life-cycle model that outlines the relationship between the different media types and a populist movement regarding its life span. Our data consist of media coverage of the parliamentary election campaigns in Norway in Verdens Gang’s (tabloid) and Aftenposten’s (legacy) newspapers between 1973 and 2017 in general (n=16,536) and the FrP’s media attention in these two major newspapers in particular (n=1,671). The research method employed was a quantitative content analysis. The media coverage of the FrP follows somewhat the life-cycle model, but the party’s internal development and status in the political field, immigration as an individual issue, and changes in political and the media environments seem more important factors for the media attention.

Do politicians connect with young people? Analysis of Twitter use by candidates in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign

The use of social media, especially Twitter, has become part of the political communication strategies of parties and candidates. Reaching young voters and reducing their historical abstention has become a challenge, even more for candidates standing for the European Parliament, elections that have traditionally witnessed a much smaller turnout. To find out if the main six candidates in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign (10–26 May), called to occupy the presidency of the European Commission, connected with younger voters, this research applies the multiple-case study based on the analysis of their Twitter posts. The results show that candidates (Spitzenkandidaten) preferred to talk about tops such as territory, vote appeal, and their parties’ alliances above the topics that most interest young people: climate change and environment, education, poverty and inequalities, unemployment, human rights and democracy and health. Better political social media communication is needed to make candidates’ communication strategies more consistent and to promote voters’ participation, especially among youth.

The limits of live fact-checking: Epistemological consequences of introducing a breaking news logic to political fact-checking

This article analyses the novel form of live political fact-checking, as performed by the Norwegian fact-checking organisation Faktisk.no during the Norwegian parliamentary election campaign in 2021. The aim of the study was to investigate the epistemological consequences of introducing a breaking news logic to political fact-checking. Through methods of participatory observation, interviews and textual analysis, the study finds that Faktisk.no used several strategies to bridge the ‘epistemic gap’ between the logics of breaking news and political fact-checking. Combined, these strategies pushed the live fact-checking towards a confirmative epistemology, implying that the live political fact-checking confirmed (1) knowledge already believed to be true and (2) hegemonic perspectives on what constitutes important and reliable information. The findings thereby point to a potential reorientation of political fact-checking from being a critical corrective of political elites to confirming the perspectives and knowledge base of the same elites.

Political institutions and the gendered use of social media among political candidates: evidence from Tunisia

ABSTRACT Despite a recent boom in information and communication technologies (ICTs) in many developing countries, there is limited research on how social media is being used in political campaigns in emerging democracies. In these contexts, the introduction of electoral gender quotas often forms part of the constitutional reform. This paper investigates the gendered use of social media among political candidates during the 2019 parliamentary election campaign in Tunisia, which recently adopted an ambitious gender quota system. We have mapped the use of Facebook among a random sample of 400 men and women candidates and carried out interviews with 19 men and women candidates who ran in these elections. The results demonstrate how patriarchal structures interact with political-institutional features – the electoral gender quota system, the electoral system (a closed-list proportional-representation system), and the fragmented party system – in shaping the gendered use of social media among political candidates in Tunisia. We show that men are more likely to use Facebook for campaign purposes since they are more often placed at the top of the candidate lists. Hence, rather than having an equalizing effect, the study suggests that social media become a new tool for already privileged candidates in Tunisia.

«REPUBLICANS» AMID THE NEW SOCIO-POLITICAL REALITY

The article examines the problems faced during the presidential and parliamentary election campaigns of 2022 by the largest party of the right camp in France – the «Republicans» party. The paper emphasizes that the «Republicans» faced the tasks of both ideological equipment and the search for a recognized leader by all. A study of the actions of the «Republicans» candidate for president V. Pekress allows us to conclude that under the influence of a combination of structural and conjunctural factors, she could not become a figure capable of mobilizing right-wing voters and going beyond her political camp. She lost the battle for the center-right and right electorate to her competitors – President E. Macron and the leader of the right-wing populists M. Le Pen. Analysis of the results of the parliamentary elections showed that although the «Republicans» halved their presence in the National Assembly, thanks to the new alignment of political forces, characterized by the absence of an absolute majority in the pro-presidential bloc, a group of «Republicans»” found themselves in parliament as an arbitrator and gained new opportunities to influence the lawmaking process, which was deprived in the previous legislature. The author comes to the conclusion that the project of the «independent right center» suffered a crushing defeat in these elections, and the «Republicans» in the course of parliamentary practice can follow the path of actually turning into the right wing of the pro-presidential coalition.

Media Visibility Index as a Tool for Measuring the Presence of Political Parties in the Media: Case of Polish Parliamentary Election Campaign in 2019

The problem of media visibility of politicians and political parties is at the heart of the interest of political communication researchers. Theoretical reflections and empirical studies focus on numerous media presence determinants. At the same time, attempts to identify the media visibility of political actors in specific periods, such as the particularly important for democracy period of the election campaign preceding the parliamentary election, are relatively rare. This study is intended to fill that gap. It proposes a simple research tool in the form of a media visibility index, which makes it possible to calculate and compare the visibility of electoral committees in selected media during the election campaign. The tool was used to determine the visibility of electoral committees taking part in the 2019 parliamentary elections in Poland in two TV news services “Wiadomości” and “Fakty”, and three weekly opinion magazines “Newsweek”, “Polityka” and “Sieci”. The data to calculate the index was gathered through manual content analysis of the studied media conducted six weeks before the day of the parliamentary elections.

Women politicians in Austria: Still not breaking the media ceiling

Abstract The underrepresentation of women politicians in the media is a persistent feature in many contemporary democracies. Gender bias in election coverage makes it harder for women to reach positions of power in politics. Drawing on the special circumstances in Austria during the 2019 election campaign which saw the first female top candidate of a major party and a caretaker government containing equal numbers of men and women and which was led by the country’s first woman as chancellor, we examine the effect of these developments on women politicians’ representation in campaign coverage. We draw on quantitative content analysis of Austrian newspaper articles (N = 16,125) during four national parliamentary election campaigns (2008, 2013, 2017 and 2019). We show that for women politicians the media ceiling is slowly lifting at best, but that positions of power provide the most promising ways to evade gendered media bias.

Populism in the pre-election period: Analysis of the social discourse on the topic of migration in Slovak parliamentary election campaign 2020

The topic of migration is often used by populist and non-populist politicians in order to arouse emotions, polarise social attitudes and thus mobilise voters. The present study aims to identify themes (a cognitive aspect of attitudes) and discrete emotions (an emotional aspect of attitudes) in online social discourse as a reaction to the media posts of the main Slovak political parties on the topic of migration in the pre-election period (January-February 2020). Methodological triangulation of discourse analysis and Text mining was used to analyse the data. Analysis of the discourse revealed that articles with pro-migrant rhetoric provoked more discussion about the security and identity threat, while articles by populists provoked more discussion about the morality of elites and the economic threat of migration. The evoked sentiment throughout the discourse leaned more towards negative emotions (fear, anger) but pro-migrant articles and articles by non-populist politicians evoked also positive emotions (joy). Results indicate that rather than fear of migration, the anticipation of a change in the morale of the elites was the key element of the pre-election period in Slovakia. Limitations and implications of the study are further discussed. The value of this paper lies in focusing on both emotional and cognitive aspects of attitudes towards migration.

Peculiarities of Ukraine’s population’s political identity through the prism of results of electoral preferences

Key features of the Ukrainian society as an individual political nation have been characterized. The research is based on the election process at the level of the election to the Verkhovna Rada. In the research, data from parliamentary election campaigns held in Ukraine during the 21st century were used. Key markers for estimation of the population’s identity, the problem of language priority, the problem of historic memory, the issue of Ukraine’s unitary formation and its spatial and territorial integrity were determined. The arguments offered and the objective grounds of state integrity worded in the research prove separate, formed and integral nature of the Ukrainian political nation.

Opinionated Opposition and Pragmatic Government: The Online Argumentation of Political Parties and Party Leaders during the 2022 Hungarian Parliamentary Election Campaign

The current paper studies the 2022 parliamentary election campaign, in regards to what extent and quality certain elements of political debate can appear in political actors’ social media communication. During our research, we analyzed 2441 Facebook posts from parties and party leaders prior to the election. According to our results, political actors engage in opinionated discourse on social media and largely focus on public policy issues. They rarely rely on factual reasoning; instead, they tend to use individual phenomena to justify their claims. Ad hominem fallacy also plays a significant role in their Facebook posts when they are making an argument. However, other argumentation errors, so-called fallacies are quite rare in their communication. The main patterns are similar between the actors, but in general, parties and politicians from the opposition are more argumentative compared to the ruling party coalitions.

The Decision to Go Negative: Election Types, Candidate Characteristics, and Electoral Competition

This study examined the conditions that motivate candidates to go negative during a parliamentary election campaign. We argue that by-elections encourage candidates to engage in more negative campaigning. Three mechanisms might explain the alleged link: time pressure, media exposure, and voter turnout. Two main factors jointly determine which candidates rely heavily on negative campaigning during by-elections: candidate characteristics and electoral competition. New data collected from press coverage of Taiwanese legislative elections (2008–2022), covering 318 campaigns in single-member electoral districts, were analysed using the qualitative comparative analysis method. We modelled negative campaigning as a combination of a list of potential causal conditions. Thereafter, process-tracing methods were applied to analyse a typical case to demonstrate the internal causal mechanism. The qualitative comparative analysis results and the case study indicate that increased electoral competition causes parachute candidates to criticise political opponents during a by-election campaign, with less emphasis on their own policy proposals. These results suggest that researchers should pay close attention to important contextual factors that underlie candidates’ strategic choices, particularly during by-elections.

A Pragmatic Study of Speech Acts in Iraqi and American Parliamentary Electioneering Campaign Posters

Posters are one of the most effective tools for communicating ideas, thoughts, and plans. They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, with various goals and objectives. One example is the political posters, which are concerned with elections and seek to familiarize voters with candidates and their ideologies. Posters are designed to enhance the impact of candidates’ election programs (platforms, manifestos) in order to achieve their political aims. Politicians purposefully use various types of pragmatic elements in their election campaign posters in order to gain more votes by influencing voters. Furthermore, they rely on a variety of pragmatic means to express a wide range of speech acts. This study is concerned with investigating the Iraqi and American parliamentary election campaign posters pragmatically. The data is analyzed from pragmatic perspective .The data is taken from Iraqi parliamentary elections that are held in 2021, and American senate elections that are held in 2020. It applies Searle’s theory of speech acts (1979).