The media’s gatekeeping function means that party press coverage often reproduces and reinforces existing power structures

In election campaigns, parties and candidates want to get their message across to the public, and the central means of doing so is by generating media coverage. Yet, the media does not slavishly pay attention to each party’s campaign messages. Which actors are most likely to hit the media? And which campaign messages are most likely to make the news? Thomas M. Meyer, Martin Haselmayer and Markus Wagner present research which shows that parties are in general rather successful in getting their messages to the media. However, the media’s gatekeeping function also reproduces existing distributions of power and attention: party messages are most likely to be covered if messages are spread by powerful politicians and if they fit with the current media issue agenda

Does social media enhance party responsiveness? How user engagement shapes parties’ issue attention on Facebook

Representative democracy presents politicians with an information problem: How to find out what voters want? While party elites used to rely on their membership or mass surveys, social media enables them to learn about voters’ issue priorities in real time and adapt their campaign messages accordingly. Yet, we know next to nothing about how campaigns make use of these new possibilities. To narrow this gap, we use a unique data set covering every Facebook post by party leaders and party organizations in the run-up to the 2017 Austrian parliamentary election. We test the hypothesis that party actors are more likely to double down on issues that have previously generated higher levels of user engagement. We also theorize that responsiveness is conditional on major/minor party status and pre-campaign issue salience. The analysis shows that parties’ issue strategies respond to user engagement, especially major parties on low-salience issues. This represents some of the first empirical evidence on how social media can enhance parties’ issue responsiveness.Bundesministerium für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung (BMBWF)Peer Reviewe

Candidates rather than context shape campaign sentiment in French Presidential Elections (1965–2017)

AbstractThe manuscript explores whether and how the strategic context of elections and candidate attributes affect campaign sentiment. Studying five decades of French presidential elections, it provides the first longitudinal test of campaign tone outside the USA. Thereby, the paper examines concerns of an increase in negativity due to changes in electoral competition. It takes leverage from the electoral system, to study whether the strategic environment of elections (first vs. second rounds of elections) or candidate characteristics (ideology and outsider status) determine the use of positive and negative tone. To this end, the paper applies sentiment analysis to personal manifestos (professions de foi) issued by all candidates running in presidential elections (1965–2017) and validates the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary for longitudinal studies of campaign tone. Results reject worries about an increase in negativity in French elections over time. Moreover, while context matters to some extent, candidate attributes are by far more important for explaining campaign sentiment in presidential races. The findings contribute to research on the role of sentiment in electoral competition and tackle broader issues related to the impact of positive and negative political communication for elections and democracies.</jats:p

The dark side of campaigning

Die kumulative Dissertation erforscht drei zentrale Aspekte von Negative Campaigning: Parteiverhalten, Medienberichterstattung und WählerInnenwahrnehmung. Die vorliegende Arbeit stellt eine neue Konzeptualisierung vor, die bestehende, dichotome Ansätze zur Analyse negative Kampagnen durch ein feingliedrigeres Maß negativer Tonalität erweitert. Methodisch zeigt Studie 1, dass Crowdcoding (d. H. Online-Codierung durch eine große Anzahl von Laien) und ein Sentiment-Diktionär valide und zuverlässige Messstrategien zur feinkörnigen Erfassung von Negativität sind. Die nachfolgenden Studien wenden diese Methoden an, um Negative Campaigning in österreichischen Wahlkampagnen zu untersuchen. Studie 2 erforscht die Häufigkeit und Tonalität von Negative Campaigning zwischen Koalitionsparteien in Mehrparteiensystemen. Die Ergebnisse spiegeln das strategische Dilemma von Regierungsparteien in Wahlkämpfen wider. Diese kritisieren einander häufig, vermeiden jedoch heftige Attacken auf ihre Koalitionspartner. Studie 3 verknüpft Negative Campaigning mit themenbasierten Kampagnenstrategien. Parteien nutzen Themen mit hoher Medienpräsenz für Negative Campaigning und greifen verstärkt an wenn ihre GegnerInnen eine hohe thematische Sachkompetenz in der Wahrnehmung der WählerInnen aufweisen. Studie 4 zeigt, dass JournalistInnen öfter über negative Parteikommunikation berichten. Negative Campaigning erhöht somit die Chancen der Parteien ihre Kampagnenbotschaften mit Hilfe der Massenmedien zu verbreiten. Darüber hinaus profitieren politische AkteurInnen wenn sie in negativen Wahlkampfmeldungen auf zusätzliche Nachrichtenfaktoren, etwa überraschende Themen, setzen. Als Analyse der Effekte von Negative Campaigning im Mehrparteienkontext zeigt Studie 5, dass Parteipräferenzen die Wahrnehmung von Parteikommunikation stark beeinflussen. Da ParteianhängerInnen negative Informationen über ihre bevorzugte Partei nicht annehmen, reduzieren sich die Effekte negativer Kampagnen auf unentschlossene oder unabhängige WählerInnen. In ihrer Gesamtheit erweitern die fünf Studien das Verständnis von Wahlkampfstrategien, Koalitionspolitik und politischer Kommunikation. Die Dissertation erörtert mögliche Konsequenzen von Negative Campaigning für das Verständnis und die Qualität von Demokratie und liefert relevante Ergebnisse für politischen AkteurInnen, wie KampagnenberaterInnen oder JournalistInnen.This cumulative dissertation studies three aspects of negative campaigning: party behaviour, media coverage and voter perceptions. It presents a new conceptualization that enriches the dichotomous approach to negative campaigning with a graded measure of sentiment strength. Methodologically, Study 1 presents crowdcoding (i.e. massive online non-expert coding) and a sentiment dictionary as valid and reliable measurement strategies for obtaining fine-grained measures of negative sentiment. The subsequent chapters apply these measures to study negative campaigning and its consequences in Austrian election campaigns. Investigating the incentives for negative campaigning among coalition parties, Study 2 reveals that coalition parties criticize each other abundantly, but refrain from ‘burning bridges’ towards their partners through virulent attacks. Different patterns for the tonality and frequency of negative campaigning reflect the ‘electoral dilemma’ of government parties. Study 3 links negative campaigning with research on issue-based campaign strategies. It finds that parties ‘go negative’ on issues with high media salience. Predominantly attacking their competitors’ best issues, parties also attempt to challenge their rivals’ issue advantages during election campaigns. Study 4 shows that negative campaigning increases the chances for parties to convey their campaign messages as journalists prefer positive over negative party messages. Beyond this, political actors profit from supplementing their negative messages with additional news factors, such as surprising issue associations. Turning to the perception of negative messages in the multi-party context, Study 5 demonstrates that partisan preferences strongly determine how voters perceive party communication. Partisans reject negative information about their favoured party, which points at limits and opportunities of negative campaigning as electoral effects could be limited to undecided or independent voters. The findings of this dissertation have implications for electoral competition, coalition politics, political communication and democratic politics, more generally. They speak to political practitioners, such as campaign advisors or journalists and raise broader societal questions concerning democratic quality and citizens’ trust in democratic institutions or political actors

Candidates rather than context shape campaign sentiment in French Presidential Elections (1965–2017)

The manuscript explores whether and how the strategic context of elections and candidate attributes affect campaign sentiment. Studying five decades of French presidential elections, it provides the first longitudinal test of campaign tone outside the USA. Thereby, the paper examines concerns of an increase in negativity due to changes in electoral competition. It takes leverage from the electoral system, to study whether the strategic environment of elections (first vs. second rounds of elections) or candidate characteristics (ideology and outsider status) determine the use of positive and negative tone. To this end, the paper applies sentiment analysis to personal manifestos (professions de foi) issued by all candidates running in presidential elections (1965–2017) and validates the French Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary for longitudinal studies of campaign tone. Results reject worries about an increase in negativity in French elections over time. Moreover, while context matters to some extent, candidate attributes are by far more important for explaining campaign sentiment in presidential races. The findings contribute to research on the role of sentiment in electoral competition and tackle broader issues related to the impact of positive and negative political communication for elections and democracies.publishe

Negative campaigning and its consequences : a review and a look ahead

Research on negative campaigning has grown rapidly in the past decades. This article reviews the literature dealing with this campaign strategy. It discusses its definition and measurement and stresses the mismatch between the academic literature and general perceptions. It then reviews why parties and candidates choose to ‘go negative’ with a particular focus on the rationales for negative campaigning under multi-party competition. The manuscript further discusses the literature on electoral effects and broader societal consequences of negative campaigning and emphasizes issues related to data collection and research designs. The conclusion summarizes the state of the art and outlines avenues for future research.publishe

Replication Data for "Friendly fire? Negative campaigning among coalition partners"

In democracies with multi-party competition, government parties face a dual challenge in election campaigns: on the one hand, they have to compete against and criticize their coalition partners. On the other hand, they should avoid virulent attacks on their partners to preserve their chances for future collaboration in government. Going beyond a dichotomous operationalization of negative campaigning, this manuscript analyses the tonality and volume of negative campaigning. Studying 3,030 party press releases in four national Austrian election campaigns, different patterns for the tonality and frequency of negative campaigning reflect the electoral dilemma of government parties. Coalition parties criticize each other abundantly, but refrain from ‘burning bridges’ towards their partners through virulent attacks. These findings have implications for studying negative campaigning and coalition politics

The German Political Sentiment Dictionary (SUF edition)

Full edition for scientific use. This dataset contains a German-language sentiment dictionary of 5001 negative words and their associated sentiment strength on a five-point-scale from 0 (not negative) to 4 (very strongly negative). The procedure for building the dictionary contains the following steps: (1) Sampling 12713 sentences from Austrian parliamentary debates (1995-2013), party press releases (2006-2013), and political news reports (2013), (2) Crowdcoding the sentiment strength of sentences, (3) Estimating a sentence tonality score (4), Estimating a word tonality score, (5) Discriminating between important and unimportant words