Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries

ABSTRACT

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political content citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on “salient” and “owned” issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how users’ receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More specifically, we hypothesize that users are more likely to react, comment on and share posts focusing on salient topics or issues “owned” by parties rather than more permanent policy issues, and posts including populist appeals and negativity. Further, we test how these effects are moderated by geographical regions and the level of party system polarization. We manually coded 9,703 Facebook posts of 68 parties from 12 European countries in the context of the 2019 European elections. Our findings show that users are more likely to engage with immigration-related, domestic, populist and negative posts, but react less to posts dealing with environmental or economic issues. While issue ownership does not play a significant role for user engagement, country context plays a minor role. However, some populist appeals are more effective in more polarized countries.

KEYWORDS:

• Facebook
• viralization
• user engagement
• topics
• immigration
• issue ownership
• populism
• negativity
• polarization
• campaigning

Acknowledgments

This publication is part of the work of the junior research group “DigiDeMo” which is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) and also supported by the Incubator program of the Center for Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd Research Network (project number: 03013645) and Bolyai János Research Fellowship awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/334_20).

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/10.1080/10584609.2022.2042435.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. “Reactions” refers to the “like”, “love”, “angry”, “sad”, “haha” and “wow” buttons. We use the capital letter to differentiate this from “reactions” in terms of general behavior.

2. Jünger, J. & Keyling, T. (2019). Facepager. An application for automated data retrieval on the web. https://github.com/strohne/Facepager/. The data sets for Romania and Denmark were accessed via CrowdTangle.

3. Holsti reliability values in detail: polity (0.73), politics (0.74), policy (M = 0.93, Min = 0.86, Max = 0.99), political level (M = 0.92, Min = 0.82, Max = 0.99), blaming the elite (0.91), questioning the elite’s legitimacy to take decisions (0.98), calling for resistance against the elite (0.97), accusing the elite of betraying the people (0.95), reference to the people (0.86), reference to ethnic or cultural “other” (0.99), reference to political “others” (0.96), reference to other segments (0.99), privatization (0.99), negative campaigning (0.83), online mobilization calls (M = 0.95, Min = 0.81, Max = 1), offline mobilization calls (M = 0.97, Min = 0.91, Max = 1).

4. Environmental and energy policy – Greens-EFA (green party group); labor/social issues – S&D, GUE/NGL (left-wing party groups); economy/finance – EPP, ECR, RE (right-wing party groups), immigration & domestic policy – ID, ECR (Euroskeptic/far-right party groups), EU exit – Folkebevægelsen mod EU (Denmark), Brexit – The Brexit Party (UK).

5. The detailed conceptualization of our variables can be found here: https://osf.io/5fy48/?view_only=51216ace078640448f38d3adb8aa172c.

6. Based on the categorization of The PopuList (see, Rooduijn et al., 2019.

7. https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri = CELEX:52019JC0012&from = EN.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is part of the work of the junior research group “DigiDeMo” which is funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) and also supported by the Incubator program of the Center for Social Sciences, Eötvös Loránd Research Network (project number: 03013645) and Bolyai János Research Fellowship awarded by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (BO/334_20).

Notes on contributors

Márton Bene

Márton Bene is a senior research fellow at the Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence, and an assistant lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. His research interests are in political communication, social media and politics and political behaviour.

Andrea Ceron

Andrea Ceron is an associate professor at the University of Milan, Italy. His research interests include intra-party politics, text analysis and social media.

Vicente Fenoll

Vicente Fenoll is Associate Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Department of Language Theory and Communication Science at the University of Valencia, Spain. His research focuses on online communication, political communication, and empirical methods.

Jörg Haßler

Jörg Haßler is head of the Junior Research Group ‘Digital Democratic Mobilization in Hybrid Media Systems’ (DigiDeMo) funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) at the Department of Media and Communication at LMU Munich, Germany. His research interests include (digital) political communication, campaign communication, mobilization strategies, and computational methods.

Simon Kruschinski

Simon Kruschinski is a research associate and PhD candidate at the Department of Communication at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz, Germany. His research focuses on technology-intensive election campaigns and how data and analytics are used to persuade or mobilize voters online and offline.

Anders Olof Larsson

Anders Olof Larsson is Professor of Communication at the Department of Communication, Kristiania University College, Oslo, Norway. His research mainly deals with organizational use of online media, political communication and computational methods.

Melanie Magin

Melanie Magin is Associate Professor of Media Sociology at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway. Her research interests include political communication, media performance, algorithm-based information intermediaries (particularly social media and search engines) and comparative research.

Katharina Schlosser

Katharina Schlosser is a research associate in the Junior Research Group ‘Digital Democratic Mobilization in Hybrid Media Systems’ (DigiDeMo) funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt).

Anna-Katharina Wurst

Anna-Katharina Wurst is a research associate in the Junior Research Group ‘Digital Democratic Mobilization in Hybrid Media Systems’ (DigiDeMo) funded by the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts and coordinated by the Bavarian Research Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) at the Department of Media and Communication at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany. Her research focuses on the application of computational methods to analyse political communication in social media.