A fistful of followers: the resilience of the second-order campaign model?

ABSTRACT

EP elections are widely regarded as the archetypal second-order national election. Although parties’ strategic moves are frequently mediated by traditional media, parties are increasingly using alternative communication strategies, as social media, to communicate directly to their electorate. Social media can be particularly relevant in ‘bridging the gap’ with voters in second-order elections. After 2014, EP elections took place in a context where policy had been, to a non-negligible extent, perceived to have been shaped at the European level. The extent to which Eurozone crisis ‘disrupted’ the second-order model requires further examination. Through the analysis of the activities of political parties in social media, this study seeks to assess the extent to which the Eurozone crisis triggered more intense campaigns while assessing the partisan variables that explain variation in parties’ levels of activities. Overall, social media activity tends to suggest the resilience of the second-order model. This article highlights that the economic downturn has very much forced European issues into the political agendas, unveiling important signs of a disruption of the second-order model. Also, the politicisation of Europe in the first elections after the Eurozone crises (2019) was characterised by higher levels of activities of parties that openly contested the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• European elections
• second-order model
• social media
• political parties

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Research Project “Changing European Elections: The impact of Eurozone bailouts on European Parliament election campaigns”, funded by the Fundação para a Cie^ncia e Tecnologia I.P. under grant PTDC/IVC-CPO/3481/2014; and by the Operational Programme “Competitiveness and Internationalization” (COMPETE 2020) and Lisbon Regional Operational Programme (PO Lisboa), under reference POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016887. The authors would like to thank Stefanie Righi, Raquel Valentim, Allan Pena and Inês Almeida for their assistance in data collection procedures. We are also grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments that greatly contributed to improving the final version of the article. Any shortcomings and remaining mistakes are exclusively the author’s responsibility.

Notes

1 Political parties may have more than one Facebook page. However, in this article we are only looking for official Facebook pages. To do so, we searched for the parties’ official websites and included the pages to which there are clear references and links embedded in the websites.