Symbolic or substantial? German subnational parties' use of group appeals on Twitter

For parties competing in a volatile electorate, targeted appeals to social groups are becoming increasingly important. Yet, we still know little about how exactly parties use these appeals and what factors explain their use. Appeals to social groups can be symbolic, i.e., expressing a party's affiliation with or its dissociation from a certain group. But they can also be substantial, i.e., linked to a concrete policy statement. Our paper provides a conceptual clarification of these different modes of addressing social groups and combines it with dominance in the party system as well as temporal strategies as factors explaining their variance. Based on a novel dataset of approximately 200,000 tweets of all parties represented in the German state parliaments from 2015 to 2019, we demonstrate that the proximity to state-level elections, government experience as well as current government participation at the particular subnational level are indeed associated with a higher use of substantial group appeals. Our results have implications for understanding current trends in party communication and dynamics in party competition in general.