Transnational issue agendas of the radical right? Parties’ Facebook campaign communication in six countries during the 2019 European Parliament election

Abstract

In this study, we investigate to what degree radical right parties use social media for pushing a common issue agenda to mobilise voters on a pan-European scale. Using the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election as a case, we analysed radical right parties’ campaign agendas in Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland and Sweden and identified the transnationally shared issue repertoire in their Facebook communication. Based on the structural topic modelling we used for analysis, our results reveal a set of shared issues – immigration and blaming elites –which are typical of the populist core of those parties. Moreover, all parties use social media to draw attention to the election itself. While radical right parties mobilise their voters based on a transnationally recurring set of shared issues, national political opportunity structures account for party-specific topics and national adaptations of shared issues in their campaigns on Facebook.

Collecting migrants' Facebook posts: Accounting for ethical measures in a text-as-data approach

“…Although also not related to migrants' use of Facebook, other methodological solutions closer to the one described in this paper reveal similar ethical concerns and contend that they cannot guarantee anonymization despite measures taken by the researchers (Merrill and Åkerlund, 2018, p. 340), while others do not focus on discussing the data collection and storage procedures (Puschmann et al, 2020;Amara et al, 2021;Heft et al, 2022). Most of these analyses are based on "public posts" or "publicly available profiles", i.e., comments on Facebook pages of political parties and private organizations made by users who did not restrict who could view their posts.…”

The Right-Wing Perspective: Populist Frames and Agenda on Facebook in Central and Eastern Europe

“…Based on such discursive patterns, an analysis of possible common agenda was conducted. Research has studied political parties' agenda on Facebook during key events, specific politicians, or compared right-wing agenda in specific European countries with the US (Heft et al, 2022;Berti, 2020;Schroeder, 2019). The Eastern European context remains neglected regarding social media case studies.…”

“…Similar studies have examined shorter periods with broad topic modelling approaches on European and US far-right networks (Schroeder, 2019), mapped the main topics addressed by specific parties and movements on Facebook (Stier et al, 2017), examined alternative or right-wing news media (Boberg et al, 2020) or specific politicians (Berti, 2020;Lipiński & Stępińska, 2018). More constrained and western international contexts have been examined (Klein & Muis, 2018), as well as the RWP party agenda on Facebook during the European Elections (Heft et al, 2022), far right networks (Caiani et al, 2012) and topic-based networks (Ahmed et al, 2020).…”

Exploiting Sociocultural Issues in Election Campaign Discourse: The Case of Nyans in Sweden

“…In Sweden, as in many other EU contexts, the impact of right-wing populist parties is strongly felt, highlighting their adeptness in leveraging social media [3,4]. These parties rally around common themes, including immigration and the blaming of political elites, which constitute the foundation of their populist narrative [5]. To fully grasp the social media strategies and communication styles employed by populist parties, it is crucial to examine their political positioning and the different phases they experience within the life cycle model of such parties [6].…”