Where to talk about what? Party issue strategies across communication channels

Political parties communicate through multiple communication channels simultaneously. They try to reach different audiences and influence the public debate through these different channels. Political competition therefore happens in several venues. However, most research on issue competition between political parties has a narrow focus on a specific communication channel (e.g. manifestos, press releases) and only few researchers engage in comparison. Furthermore, the few existing comparative studies show a twofold research gap. Firstly, there is conflicting evidence as to whether and to what extent parties communicate differently across communication channels. Secondly, it is unclear which specific issue strategies political parties use in different communication channels and why. This paper takes a step towards closing the outlined research gap by analysing multiple channels of party communication with regard to issues. Theoretically, the focus is on aspects that influence party issue strategies and on the core characteristics of different communication channels (e.g. audience). The resulting theoretical framework captures why political parties might pursue different issue strategies depending on the type of communication channel. Methodologically, the paper uses an advanced text-as-data approach to study party communication in Austria, Germany and Switzerland between January 2019 and September 2021. I perform a computer assisted issue classification based on an adapted codebook from the Manifesto Project (MARPOR). The paper studies four types of communication channels: manifestos, press releases, tweets and parliamentary speeches. The statistical analysis focuses on potential differences in party issue strategies between the studied communication channels and the driving factors behind it. The results of this analysis will provide insights on how political parties communicate in different communication channels, which issue strategies they pursue within these channels and the reasons for this.