Trending Campaigns? Party Line Volatility Across (Social) Media.

In the age of social media, political parties are faced with ever-increasing possibilities and challenges to tailor their messages to the preferences of the respective audience and platform-specific affordances. On the one hand, big data on public opinion can easily be harvested, analyzed and reacted to, the salient issues in the user community identified and put on the agenda, and the performance of contents evaluated and - if necessary - adjusted. On the other hand, social media carry distinct affordances that attract certain audiences. The Twittersphere, for example, is especially populated by journalists, politicians and highly-educated citizens who use it as a well-established news source with information spilling over to the offline media. Hence, it is often exploited as a broadcasting device and users get updates by simply following other profiles. Connections on Facebook, in contrast, are made by actively befriending or liking an individual or an organization. Parties’ target audiences are thus likely to be highly engaged partisans with whom they can interact in a more personal manner via long posts or comments, making a mobilization and get out the vote (GOTV) strategy more likely. Based on this, one would assume (1) parties’ issue agendas to become increasingly volatile responsive to the demands of the respective community they are publishing in and (2) parties’ political communication styles to differ according to the unique affordances of the platforms they are published and occurring on. The paper wants to test these claims by investigating the campaign messages of the seven biggest German parties published during the federal election campaign of 2017 on Twitter and Facebook and links them to the comments and responses by the respective communities. For that purpose, I collected and scraped all of the Tweets, Retweets and Facebook posts published on the official party accounts over a period of 55 days preceding election day. I exploit content analysis to trace and compare the evolution of issue saliences and link them to the sentiments as expressed by the users on each platform. According to the findings, the tone of and issues focused on by parties vary significantly across platforms but also depending on the party in focus. While mainstream parties’ agendas appear to be more volatile, niche parties are more coherent in their political communication across platforms. Emotional language and negative campaigning styles are particularly used by new and emerging parties, especially on the extreme right. The findings have implications for normative questions on party-voter distances pointing to the potential of closing gaps as some parties are aware of the different audiences and appear to shape messages accordingly. Simultaneously, the lack of coherent party lines may cloud the authenticity with which parties are perceived.