In person icon Studying the 2024 European Elections in Ten Countries on Short-Video Platforms: Methodological Challenges and (Un)expected Results

Abstract

As audiovisual communication has become central in politics, researchers have to learn how to study politics on short-video platforms. This panel brings together scholars who took part in gathering and making sense of audiovisual data from ten different European countries on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube in the context of the 2024 European elections. In addition to discussing methodological challenges associated with building a database that combines pre-analysed videos both scraped by bots and screen-recorded by human researchers across Europe, the panel discusses the election results that were not, after all, that unexpected to those who were involved in data gathering. The panel provides insight into how complex social theory concepts – such as social contract, grievance politics and populism – can be studied in the age of big data and pervasive audiovisual political communication. By the time of the ECPR conference, the metadata of the dataset and country reports have been published, and the papers in this panel highlight different aspects of the research with insights around Europe.

Title	Details
Building a Dataset on the 2024 European Elections: How and Why to Study Politics on Short-Video Platforms	View Paper Details
Analysing Visual Politics of Populism in EP 2024 Audiovisual Data	View Paper Details
Political Discourse and the Social Contract Before the EP Elections: The Hungarian Case	View Paper Details
Within but Against the EU: Anti-EU and Anti-Globalist Narratives of the Intersectional Far-Right in the 2024 European Parliament Elections	View Paper Details
The Role of TikTok in Shaping Political Preferences During European Elections in Bulgaria	View Paper Details