Are Campaigns Getting Uglier, and Who Is to Blame? Negativity, Dramatization and Populism on Facebook in the 2014 and 2019 EP Election Campaigns

ABSTRACT

Relating to theories of dissonant public spheres and affective publics, we study negativity, dramatization, and populist content in political party Facebook posts across 12 countries during the 2014 and 2019 European Parliament Election campaigns. A quantitative content analysis of 14,293 posts from 111 (2014) and 116 (2019) political parties shows that negative emotion, negative campaigning, dramatization, and populist content has increased over this time. We show that political parties sought to evoke more negative emotions and generate more dramatization, engaged more in negative campaigning, and included more populist content in their Facebook posts in the 2019 EP election than in 2014. Further, we show that posts evoking negative emotions and dramatization and involving negative campaigning yield higher user engagement than other posts, while populist content also led to more user reactions in 2014, but not in 2019. Negative, exaggerated, and sensationalized messaging therefore makes sense from a strategic perspective, because the increased frequencies of likes, shares, and comments make parties’ messages travel farther and deeper in social networks, thereby reaching a wider audience. It seems that the rise in affective and dissonant communication has not emerged unintentionally, but is also a result of strategic campaigning.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• political parties
• user engagement
• European elections
• content analysis

Acknowledgments

Research for this project was partially conducted and financially supported by the research group on “News, Campaigns, and the Rationality of Public Discourse” at the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin and by the grant ReCitCom from Audencia Foundation at the Audencia Business School, Nantes.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website at https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2022.2133198

Notes

1. manifesto-project.wzb.eu.

2. sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352340920308623.

3. In 2016, Facebook diversified „likes“ into 6 categories of reactions (like, love, haha, wow, sad, angry). For 2014 we collect likes, for 2019 we add all reactions.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ulrike Klinger

Ulrike Klinger is Professor for Digital Democracy at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and associated researcher at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. She studies social media and election campaigns, the transformation of digital public spheres and the role of technology in democratic societies.

Karolina Koc-Michalska

Karolina Koc-Michalska, Professor at Audencia Business School and Affiliated Researcher at CEVIPOF Sciences Po Paris, France, and University of Silesia, Poland. She studies the strategies of political actors in the online environment and citizens’ political engagement. She employs a comparative approach focusing on the United States and European countries.

Uta Russmann

Uta Russmann is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies with a focus on Democracy Research at the Department of Media, Society and Communication at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Her research focuses on political communication, media and election campaigns, digital communication, (visual) social media, public relations and strategic communication.