1 The practice of Facebook during the 2019 European elections
Which practices of social media campaigning did the political parties exercise in using Facebook during the 2019 European elections campaign?
University of Amsterdam
Graduate School of Communication
MA Journalism Globalisation and Media, Erasmus Mundus Master’s Thesis
Arthur Huxham
Student ID: 120846805
2 TABLE OF CONTENT ABSRACT 3 INTRODUCTION 4 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 6 METHODOLOGY 13 ANALYSIS 17 DISCUSSION 26 LIMITATIONS 30 RECOMMENDATION 30 REFERENCES 32 APPENDIX 36 INTERVIEW GUIDE 36 CODING 38 INVIVO CODING 38 AXIAL CODING 68 TRANSCRIPTS 71 End--- 96
3 Abstract
The European elections of 2019 has been labelled as the most politically fragmented EU election to date. The surge of the minority Eurosceptic and Europhile parties has ended the traditional dominance of the centre-left and centre-right majority parties in the European Parliament. The triumphant performances of the far -right, the Green and the liberal parties were masterminded through well managed social media campaigns that rallied voters to advocate national political issues to a European level. This article shows firstly, how the political parties exercised social media campaigning, notably using Facebook through the publication of advertised content. Secondly, it shows how social media increased the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten with the support of the affiliated parties. Thirdly, it sheds light on the pan-European collaboration of parties based in Brussels and from the member states implementing communication strategies to influence the mobilization of citizens to turnout and vote in the European elections.
Keywords: European Elections; Social Media; Political Parties; Campaigning
4 Introduction
The European elections of May 2019 was considered a pivotal election for the European Union (Bevelander & Wodak, 2019). With an overall turnout of 50.62%, this was a significant increase over the 2014 European elections, the lowest ever recorded turnout of 42,61% (European Parliament, 2019). This outcome can be attributed to the combined roles of the pan - European political parties based in Brussels and the national parties from the member states (Samos, 2020). Advertising the profiles of politicians using social media was used to rally constituencies in motivating citizens to vote at the ballot box. The 2019 European election results were influenced by the concerns of rising populism in Europe, Brexit, the immigration crisis and climate change that together had the effect of restoring citizens’ trust in the EU institutions; Eurobarometer reported support for the EU was up by ‘45%’ (Andreeva, 2019). The results indicated a positive view towards the EU in implementing transnational policies to establish a new common asylum agreement, pledging to the 2015 Paris Agreement to end greenhouse gases emissions by 2050 and further reforming the EU into an effective political global power (European Parliament, 2019). The 2019 EU elections also witnessed the majority centre-right and centre-left groups losing seats in the European Parliament, whilst the new far-right Eurosceptic group ‘Identity and Democracy’ had surged, posing challenges to the ‘cordon sanitaire’ to exclude far-right populists holding institutional posts with the increase of populist forces inside mainstream groups. The end of the traditional ‘cordon sanitaire’ coalition has forced the centre-right and centre-left groups to join with minority pro-European Liberal and Green groups to preserve the ‘cordon sanitaire’ strategy (Servent, 2019).
This study analyzes the use of social media during the 2019 European elections, investigates the communication and political strategies adopted by the European political parties and national parties applying social media to maximize reaching out to voters, advertising the chosen Spitzenkandidaten and assesses the types of content published on social media and how
5 this contributed to increase voter turnout. This research is especially relevant because social media is now considered the new main vehicle for modern political communications as political parties increasingly rely on it to reach out directly to their electorates and to advertise policies to encourage citizens to vote in the elections. As the European elections happened only a year ago and there are still few studies focused on the use of social media during the 2019 EU elections, this study draws on existing literature from case studies on their use during the EU elections in 2014 and more recent national elections in the western democracies to make relevant comparisons to the 2019 EU elections.
The theory will focus on the concept of social media campaigning based on existing literature from Nulty, Theocharis, Popa, Parnet, & Benoit’s (2016) study that covers social media campaigning during the 2014 EU elections. Secondly, it applies Karlsen & Enjolras’ (2016) study drawing the concept of social media campaigning through the two concepts of the party centered campaigning and individual politician campaigning. Then, it draws on Lilleker, Michalska, Negrine, Gibson, Vedel & Strudel (2017) study on the role of Facebook and Twitter used by parties in mobilizing voters on election day. Finally, it draws on Auter & Fine’s (2018) study on the significance of cost-effective social media campaigning.
The chosen research question for the study is "Which practices of social media campaigning did the political parties exercise in using Facebook during the 2019 European elections campaign?"
To answer the overall research question, it applies three sub–questions based on the use of social media advertisement, the extent Facebook helped increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten and the collaboration of the European and national parties in influencing the mobilization of citizen turnout in the elections which are fundamental to gathering relevant
6 data in understanding the various political and communication motivations of the political parties and identify their social media campaigning strategies.
The main findings in the study are that the five interviews from representatives of political parties from the European People’s Party group of the European Parliament (EPP Group), the party of the European Socialists (PES party), the European Green party, the Danish Radikale Venstre party and Venstre party demonstrated the increasing relevance of Facebook for the election campaigns and how the various practices of social media campaigning affected the outcome of the 2019 EU elections. The contribution from these representatives of the political parties helps to understand the strategic decision making and reasons for using Facebook for the purpose of building awareness of the party brand and winning votes.
Theoretical Framework
The first sub-question asks: “How did the political parties advertise online content on Facebook during the election campaigns?” This question is designed to investigate the role of social media advertisement, content (photos, videos) that were published by political parties for the sole purpose of promoting policies and target audiences during the election campaign. Then the second sub-question asks: “To what extent did using Facebook help increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten for the European Commission Presidency of 2019?” To assess whether the political parties relied solely on Facebook to increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat. The last sub-question asks : “How did the combined communication strategies of the European political parties and the national parties influence the mobilization of citizen turnout in the elections?” To examine the working relationship between the European political parties and national parties from the member states in promoting the campaigns of politicians and rallying the regional vote in favour of the elected candidates.
7 This study relies on the concept of social media campaigning set out in the Nulty, et al. (2016) study that covers social media campaigning during the 2014 EU elections. The definition of social media campaigning in Nulty, et al. (2016, p.431) is “the adoption and usage of social media for campaigning can be explained by preferences on European policy, versus national (left-right) policy. This would be evidence that the elections, and by extension, political communication during the elections is linked through policy preferences.”
The concept identifies the relevance of social media as a powerful interacting tool to engage directly with citizens, providing politicians with a concise, direct method of sharing messages to enhance their public image and how it helps citizens feel personally connected to government and its leaders (Glantz, 2013). Social media gives an equal medium for all political parties to advertise their election campaigns, without having to spend huge budgets on newspapers and television commercials (Nulty, et al. 2016). The outcome of the EU elections of 2014 saw the impact of social media campaigning propelling the rise of Eurosceptic parties into the European Parliament (Alujevic, 2016). Despite the lowest turnout to date and the lack of awareness of the Spitzenkandidat procedure, Nulty, et al. (2016) argued that the role of social media can potentially fix the transnational language barriers and transform the EU elections from a second order election to a first order election (Nulty, et al. 2016).
The first section of this study investigates the use of Facebook advertisements by the European political parties. Facebook is the biggest and oldest social media channel, it has the most followers, the technical capability to target specific communities and publish global and local sub-pages to translate content into multiples languages, designed to appeal to politically interested citizens within the EU member states. As the use of Facebook during EU elections is a relatively new concept, drawing on Stier, Bleier, Lietz & Strohmaier’s (2018) case study on politicians using Facebook and Twitter during the German federal election campaign in 2013. Stier et, al. (2018) argue that social media provides a direct interaction platform for
8 politicians to craft and manage online content messages to targeted audiences within the demographic structure through micro-targeting citizens to build closer relationships and trust (Stier et, al., 2018). This can be compared to Karlsen and Enjolras’s (2016) case study of Norway’s general elections in 2013 which argues that Twitter is considered the most reliable communication tool for candidates in their campaigning efforts to communicate directly with citizens and win votes (Karlsen and Enjolras, 2016). Then linking to Bolin, Falasca, Grusell & Nord’s (2019) study identifies Facebook as a network hub uniting all party affiliated members together that share the same values, essentially connecting all the Facebook pages of the national parties to the affiliated European political party (Bolin et al. 2019). During elections, Facebook advertisements help parties to distribute and share content with specific target groups and in return save data based on consumer’s personal interests and most importantly political beliefs which through Facebook’s algorithm share future content with the same users (Dommett & Temple, 2017). Another positive aspect of social media advertisement gives politicians the financial means to maximize audience reach instead of depending on expensive traditional television and newspaper advertisements (Bright, Hale, Ganesh, Bulovky, Margetts & Howard, 2019). This gives an incentive to European political parties to invest more financial resources in social media for future election campaigns with the reassurance of the long-term advantages of social media advertisements in performance efficiency and being cost-effective (Alujevic, 2012). During and after election campaigns, expenditure on Facebook ads guarantees long term growth in loyal supporters and increases engagement with the distributed online content that is published or shared on Facebook, which can encourage followers to share content with contacts and communities who share similar political and policy interests that overall benefits the political parties (Lilleker et al., 2017).
9 One important feature of Facebook might be to increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten conducted in a pan-European political environment campaigning in 28 member states, lacking a common European language and transnational lists. The Santana and Camaj (2015) case study assesses the use of Facebook during the 2012 US Presidential elections is a relevant case study to be compared to the Spitzenkandidat procedure. The study examines the impact social media had in strengthening the presence of politicians during electoral campaigns and argues that the majority of registered voters use the internet to search information on the candidate’s profile and share data with networks and communities (Santana & Camaj, 2015). The success of social media comprises four key aspects that are : network structure that influences users to identify and connect to the political accounts; functionality that governs how content is distributed across platforms; algorithmic filtering that controls what content users are exposed to and datafication that allows for politicians to target voters publicly on social media (Bossetta, 2018). Facebook’s public pages provides an open network structure with easily searchable accounts which are accessed by many followers. It consists of sophisticated matching, targeting, and analytics suites that can be distributed to strategic regional locations (Bossetta, 2018). Politicians can use Facebook or Twitter to control the message, present themselves from a professional and informal norm that is now a new medium to reach out to millions of potential voters (Enli, 2017).
The Spitzenkandidaten procedure is designed to overcome the democratic deficit and European elections being labelled as ‘second order elections’ by increasing candidates’ profile and putting European level issues across at a national level that can only be achieved through the strong personalization of candidates and through the support of national party affiliations that operate the campaigns at a national level (Braun & Schwarzbözl, 2019). The importance of online personalization of politicians on social media operates through three dimensions: professional, emotional and private communication. These factors are fundamental attributes
10 to improve citizens’ awareness of the Spitzenkandidat and identify the policies the candidate advocates (Metz, Kruikemeier & Lecheler, 2019). The personalization of politics is a paramount aspect for the parties to present themselves in an informal style through social media (MCallister, 2007). Through social media, politicians can communicate directly with citizens, control media messages, circumvent the interference of journalists and news coverage and present themselves in a more personalized and individualized campaign style (Hermans & Vergeer, 2012). Through this personalization of politics through social media parties can also reconnect with the younger generations that have never voted or have broken away from the traditional institutional practice of personalized politics (Bennett, 2012).
In the case of Facebook, it is the responsibility of parties to manage and translate content on the pages to the local regions across the whole EU, addressing the challenges of not having a common European language. However, despite the potential capabilities of Facebook, the last Spitzenkandidat elections in 2014 primarily relied on television broadcasting and debates to advertise the lead candidates, broadcasting in only three languages French, English, and German that overall did not raise much awareness or interest amongst citizens (Schmitt, Hobolt & Popa, 2015). Another challenge was some national parties’ commitment to the campaigns of the lead candidates. The Spitzenkandidat 2019 elections saw liberal parties, notably Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche Movement, refusing to campaign due to not supporting the model of the Spitzenkandidat procedure (Russack, 2019). Ultimately, the failure of the 2019 Spitzenkandidaten elections was not due to the lack of social media drive to advocate the candidates, but due to the behind closed doors decision by the European Council to nominate a compromise candidate, Ursula Von der Leyen, who symbolized political competence in the eyes of EU leaders, but not directly elected by the electorate (Sydow, 2019). The media coverage of the 2019 Spitzenkandidaten elections was more extensive across Europe partially
11 as a result of the impact of social media campaigning, but ended with none of the candidates getting elected putting the whole Spitzenkandidat procedure into question (Gattermann, 2019).
Another important feature in the collaboration between the European political parties and the national parties’ communication strategies to mobilize citizen electoral turnouts. The function of the European political parties is to facilitate the connection, the cooperation and integration of all national party members and in return collectively implement a consensus manifesto within the European party organization and provide financial and expertise assistance to national parties during European elections (Hecke, 2018). The function of the national parties is to mobilize, represent and socialize with the population: connecting citizens to the election campaign and advertising the candidates (Hecke, 2018). Although it is the national parties that dominate the selection of candidates and the electoral conduct of European elections, they have the potential to further advance the Spitzenkandidaten process and establishing transnational electoral lists could expand the role of European political parties that could considerably increase turnout and mobilization (Hecke, 2018). Comparing again the EU elections to the US presidential elections, Auter & Fine’s (2017) case study makes the case for applying cost effective social media campaigns to organize party supporters and mobilize them efficiently to reach new supporters. In other words, using social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter foster campaigning that specifically ought to create a bigger audience reach. Incorporating online and offline mobilization encourages public donations and fundraising to finance effective political campaigns (Auter & Fine, 2017).
This concept of online and offline mobilization was proved effective by the Eurosceptic parties during the 2019 EU elections (Chen, 2020), through the use of a social media and populist communication rhetoric which emphasized supporting the people, blaming the elites and
12 mobilizing the people to fight for restoring sovereignty back to the control of the people. During the 2019 EU elections, the far-right populist parties across Europe found common ground under the guidance of Italy’s Lega leader, Matteo Salvini, successfully expanding Eurosceptic influence within the EU institutions (Coroban, 2019). The success of the far-right Eurosceptic parties was in collaborating to motivate voters to turn out to vote so putting national issues onto the European level. The greater party polarization on the European issue not only offers voters greater choice on that dimension, but also increases the salience of European issues to voters and makes it more likely that they will vote on this basis in EP elections (Hobolt & Spoon, 2012).
Historically, mobilizing citizen turnout in EU elections had proved to be a long-term challenge for political parties, especially in engaging young voters with the EU (DeBardeleben & LeDuc, 2009). Through social media, repeated reminders of posts over an extended period of time has been found to be instrumental in fostering internal efficacy and effective at increasing turnout (Haenschen, 2016). It increases citizen familiarity with the political actors, gives voters confidence in distinguishing the different candidates for a political election and so to cast a vote (Moeller, Kühne & Vreese, 2018). It provides exposure to civic norms and encourages young voters to engage in developing their political identity that can often be triggered by discussions about politics that can deepen their identification as an interested and active citizen. (Moeller, Kühne & Vreese, 2018). In return, parties can receive feedback on policy actions, discuss policy proposals and then measure political discontent from citizens (Zhuravskaya, Maria & Ruben 2020).
Finally, in terms of the outcome of the citizen mobilization of the 2019 EU elections, Sio, Franklin and Russo’s (2019) case study demonstrates that parties performance on policy and engaging citizen turnout in the European elections 2019 indicated there was a higher turnout across the EU, as well as revealing a fragmented geographic division between central-northern
13 and eastern countries, in terms of the salience of the type of issues. In the Centre-North, the majority of the youth vote and educated citizens voted for environmental solutions, pro-cultural integration and defending the welfare model, demonstrating particularly an urge for a ‘green wave’. Whereas in the South and East of Europe, pressure for more authoritarian stances on controlled immigration and to a certain extent right-wing positions on the economy (Sio, Franklin, Russo, 2019).
Methodology
Procedure
The chosen empirical method for this research was a qualitative inductive study that conducted audio recorded interviews from a software called ‘Zoom’. It began by interviewing social media managers from the European political parties responsible for advertising content on social media across a pan-European political sphere and for promoting the campaigns of the Spitzenkandidaten across the whole European Union (Hecke, 2018). Then there were interviews with social media managers from the political groups of the European Parliament, the political parties at European level responsible for shaping EU legislation. During the 2019 elections, the political groups can only advocate the achievements of the elected members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and publish the election results on election day (Johansson & Raunio, 2019). It was appropriate to interview them because the social media managers provided advice to the teams working for the Spitzenkandidaten, some of whom were chairmen/chairwomen of the political groups in the European Parliament. Lastly, interviewing politicians who campaigned during the 2019 EU elections that either operated their own social media channels or were supported with a team of volunteers that campaigned on behalf of the politicians to win votes within the member state country.
14 The decision to focus only on Facebook for this study was because all the political bodies’ Facebook pages have more followers than Twitter or Instagram combined (Bolin et al., 2019). Furthermore, Facebook has existed much longer than the other two social media platforms. In particular, the parties, the groups and politicians used Facebook as the main social media channel for elections because it has the capacity to publish multiple sub-pages that can translate content, connect to target communities in different regions and countries across a pan-European environment.
In terms of the interview procedure, all the Zoom interviews were audio recorded, conducted remotely from Amsterdam and all the interviewees based in Brussels and in Denmark were contacted via email to arrange interview dates and each of them were invited to participate in the interview.
The decision to apply interviews for this research in accordance with Davis & Sutton’s (2011) study was to secure the advantages of achieving direct personal contact between the researcher and the interviewee and the possibility of gathering invaluable data especially when coming from the personal experiences of the interviewees who were personally responsible for making all the decisions and implementing strategies in the interests of the political party in the hopes of securing votes and winning the election.
Sample
The decision was taken to focus only on European and national parties that were campaigning in the EU elections and supporting the Spitzenkandidat’s campaign. The sample consists of five interviewees from five political parties that participated in this study. The interview process was carried out by interviewing one person per party, that consisted of four political ideologies : the centre-right conservatives, the centre-left socialists, the greens (left) and the liberals (centre) which was relevant to have a broad variation of party ideologies for the purpose
15 of identifying the different political agendas of the parties during the elections. Specifically, interviewing two Danish politicians, one from the Danish Liberal centre right party (Venstre) and one from the Danish Social Liberal Party (Radikale Venstre); two social media managers from the European political parties, the Party of European Socialists (PES Party) and the European Green Party and finally one social media manager who campaigned for the European People’s Party Group (EPP Group) from the European Parliament. The interviews were conducted between April and May 2020.
Data Analysis Plan
During the interviews, data was collected from the politicians and the social media managers from the parties. The design of the interview guide was to record interviews between 30 to 45 minutes long, structured to answer the three sub-questions on the practice of social media advertisement, the extent Facebook helped to increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten and the collaboration of the European and national parties in influencing the mobilization of citizen turnout designed to answer the overall research question. The interview guide (see Appendix) was structured in two separate sets of interview questions for the social media managers and for the politicians.
Firstly, for the social media manager interviews, questions were asked whether Facebook was a fundamental communication campaign tool for the European elections. This was followed by clarifying the identity of the followers being either loyal supports or active citizens interested in the EU. Then it inquired into the decisions about publishing content on the Facebook pages designed to promote key messages, policies and convincing potential voters to vote which also inquired into the extent to which it impacted the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat. It assessed how the collaboration of member parties over which social media campaigning had most influence in mobilizing the voter turnout. For the politicians’
16 interviews, questions were posed related to whether the outcome of the election campaign had been a political success/failure for them and the political party and hypothetically asked them to reflect on what changes to strategic social media campaigning could have been considered if running for another election.
Steps of Analysis
When all the interviews were recorded, transcripts were written, detailing the precise time codes, questions posed from the researcher and the reactions from the interviewees designed to record the entirety of all the interviews, that will be used for the coding process. With this procedure, in vivo coding selects relevant data referring to terms that are in the language of the interviewee related to the practice of advertisement, the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten and the parties mobilizing citizens to turn out and vote.
Once the in vivo coding was accomplished, the next stage was to apply Axial coding for the purpose of creating categorical themes from the data. Based on the David and Sutton (2011) study, the axial coding establishes patterns across the data, identifying themes that appear significant that can lead on to selecting a core set of themes and core issues at play from the data. Once the core set of themes were identified from the axial coding, they were structured to one of the three sub-questions to determine the outcome of whether all the parties practiced only Facebook advertisement, used Facebook to increase the Spitzenkandidaten’s visibility and mobilized the citizen turnout during the 2019 EU elections.
Once the in vivo and axial coding processes were concluded, the selected themes identified from the axial coding were fully analyzed in the results section to establish whether these main themes within the three sub-questions hold true to answer the overall research question.
17 Analysis
Use of social media
In the results, all the political parties in this sample advertised most of their content such as videos, photos and crafted messages through social media during the 2019 EU elections campaign to reach out to citizens and promote their policies. Examples of social media given in all the interviews were the use of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. It was reported by all the parties that Facebook was the most commonly used platform because Facebook was regarded as having the most members, was the easiest to navigate and was affordable to advertise visual content to create exposure to the voters.
The social media manager from the PES Party declared: ‘With Facebook, you have already a broad base’, confirming that Facebook was the best platform in attracting a wide audience. Similarly, other parties like the EPP Group, the social media manager confirmed: ‘Our Facebook page is our biggest audience’ (EPP Group). Then the European Green Party also declared: ‘Most people are on Facebook’ (European Green party), whereas one politician from the Liberal Radikale Venstre party stated: ‘Facebook is a platform where we are used to communicate with each other’ (Radikale Venstre).
Confirming that most parties invested financial resources towards Facebook during the campaigns because Facebook is considered a very reliable social platform that has the most people and parties can target the communities to whom they most want to advertise their content. Unique to Facebook in its advertisement are global and its sub-pages. Three of the European political parties declared that the success of running a pan-European social media campaign across the EU was achieved through publishing content through the local sub-pages with political members of the political party translating languages and publishing types of content that interested their followers. As one social media manager stated:
18 ‘With Facebook, we were trying to reach maximum users in their native languages’ (PES Party).
The other parties would operate global pages as their main Facebook page with all the content such as videos, posts and banners published in English, being the most common spoken language in Europe, then they used the local sub-pages to publish content in Italian, German, Spanish, French or Croatian to reach out to the local regions across the whole European Union. The use of social media in the 2019 European election has increased the maturity in the strategic thinking and the communication approach by all the parties (Valentini, 2019).
In the interviews, Twitter was also identified as a relevant social media platform, specifically designed as a broadcast channel to engage the politicians, politically-minded journalists, stakeholders and active citizens to debate directly with the political parties. A social media manager reported:
‘Twitter is breaking news, its designed for journalists, stake holders and opinion leaders’ (EPP Group).
This confirms that Twitter serves as a news channel platform for journalists and politicians to retrieve updated information from the political parties. Secondly, Twitter was considered an alternative to Facebook, depending on the preferences of followers from the member states. One social media manager stressed:
‘There is a lot of different social media exposure, for example in Spain most people there use Twitter’ (The European Greens Party).
Twitter is a platform designed more for the politically engaged individuals from journalists to pro-active citizens that opt for direct communication with the parties that offers a forum for political debate.
19 Then Instagram was identified as a social media platform predominately targeted at young voters. Some of the parties declared that young voters were moving away from Facebook towards Instagram which has put pressure on the parties to invest more content suited for Instagram to appeal to young voters that are first time voters or don’t vote. One social media manager stated: ‘We see a lot of youth voters flocking away from Facebook onto Instagram’ (European Green Party).
During the build-up to the campaign, several parties confirmed that their Instagram pages had doubled in more followers than on Facebook, majority coming from young voters who advocated popular policies like climate change and affordable housing. One social media manager stated:
‘On Instagram, we had dramatic growth, for example before the election campaign we had something like 10,000 followers only, then by the end of the election we had 33,000’(European Green Party).
Although Instagram has been owned by Facebook since 2012 (Liebhart & Bernhardt, 2017), most young voters were exposed to types of content like 24-hour Instagram stories, images and infographics that gained a huge traction with viewers. As a result, the Instagram page’s growth mostly came from young voters who were politically engaged and wanted to read more information about the party and the policies through Instagram.
Next, the sub-category theme of advertisement was fundamental to the use of social media as social media adverts achieved maximum audience reach with a huge growth of followers whilst the parties spent a low budget investing in Facebook, Twitter and Instagram adverts. One social media manager reported: ‘Social media ads allow you to get to the people you want to target’ (PES Party). All the parties used social media advertisements to reach out to the targeted audiences from members to sympathizers that will most likely vote for the party in the election
20 and have an affordable budget plan. One politician stated:‘ It’s way cheaper than having posters or leaflets’ (Venstre Party).
It shows a shift away from the use of traditional communication advertisements on television, radio and billboards towards social media that arguably achieves a higher engagement of voters and required spending a lower budget. However, it was revealed from most of the interviews that during the early stages of the EU elections, Facebook and Twitter introduced stricter rules to combat fake news, limiting political parties advertising content outside one country, providing verification information and could only nominate one social media campaigns expert in one country. The EPP group stated ‘It was impossible for us to do any ads besides in Belgium’ (EPP Group). Justifying the difficulty circulating ads and campaigning on a pan-European level, the interviews concluded that the issue of the new advertisement restrictions was temporarily put on hold in the very late stages of the campaigns (early May 2019) due to the intervention of the EU institutions that prevented Facebook from implementing the new regulations until after the EU elections. However, this last-minute solution between the EU and Facebook was too late for the parties to materialize any effective social media adverts for the campaigns.
Visibility of the Spitzenkandidat
Most of the European political parties reported that one of the main priorities within the use of social media during the 2019 elections was primarily to increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat in the hope of electing the new President of the European Commission. Analyzing the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat theme was structured from the sub-category themes of pan-European campaigning and the importance of languages.
21 European political parties reported that the prime responsibility of the political party was to facilitate pan-European campaigning, applying social media to advertise the visibility of the leading candidate across a transnational campaign by touring member states all across the EU. The parties intended to encourage social media coverage of the Spitzenkandidat at local events, meetings and greeting citizens that was designed to break the traditional label of politicians as bureaucratic civil servants and instead meeting citizens on a personal level to create awareness and increase the Spitzenkandidat’s popularity. One social media manager reported:
‘Frans Timmermans was a very popular politician outside the Netherlands. We wanted to broaden his profile by doing this tour de France where he visited 16 or 17 of the 28 countries in the EU.’ (PES Party).
During the campaign, the PES party supported Dutch EU Commissioner Frans Timmermans, who is famed for EU regulations on rule of law and climate change. The European Green party campaigned for two leading candidates, Ska Geller from Germany and Bas Eickhout from the Netherlands (Sydow, 2019). The EPP Group supported chairman Manfred Weber, the Spitzenkandidat for the centre-right party, although the political group was prohibited from campaigning for Weber because of the strict EU financial regulations and was only allowed to advocate his achievements on social media.
The European parties reported that the implementation of the pan-European campaigning was done through publishing content (videos, photos and infographics) that boosted the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat during the European elections, building a stronger personalization of the candidate at the expense of the parties (Rahat & Sheafer, 2007). For example, as one social media manager stated:
‘We wanted people to become aware of the European Greens, our leading candidates and what our priorities were. We used the videos, visuals and so on to make awareness of Green success stories’ (European Green Party).
22 Publishing content on social media was the campaign objective of all parties to build public awareness of the party, promoting the policies and expanding the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat. Furthermore, this strategy of publishing content significantly assisted the election campaign of politicians who exercised personal social media pages to connect to citizens. One politician stated:
‘I published short videos on Facebook and also pictures with direct quotes from myself’ (Radikale Venstre Party). Similarly, another politician stated:
‘If we go to a city in Jutland, in Esbjerg or Aalborg, we would do a video shoot there or photo shoots at some landmark where I am visiting (Venstre party).
This shows that the use of videos and photos were paramount to the campaigns of the candidate politicians in promoting their visibility across the whole member state. Unlike national elections that operate campaigns on a constituency basis within selected regions, the EU elections function on a proportional representation system that allows politicians to win votes all over the member state (Stockemer & Blais, 2019).
The importance of language is another important sub-theme in promoting the visibility of the Spitzenkandidat through the political parties’ long-term ambition in ending the EU’s democratic deficit and the transnational language barrier by supporting a lead candidate who has the ability to communicate directly with the citizens in the native languages. Furthermore, the parties published content in multiple languages designed to reach targeted multi-national communities and raise awareness of the candidate and political party across the EU. One social media manager reported:
‘We were communicating in different languages, so we published content in English, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Croatian’ (PES Party).
23 Similarly, another social media manager reported: ‘We usually translate our posts and try to adapt it to the culture of that country’ (EPP Group). The parties reported that the necessity of translation was a strategic campaign element to achieve connecting the citizens to the lead candidate, fully understanding the policies published from the Euro-manifestos and to build trust between the citizens and the candidate who is not resident within the member state. Translating languages through social media, addresses the procedure’s existing lack of an EU-wide common public sphere with a common media and a lack of a common language that has labelled EU elections as second order elections (Schmitt et al., 2015).
However, in the interviews, most of the political parties reported that they were disappointed that not any of the Spitzenkandidaten were elected as President of the European Commission, as the appointment of Von der Leyen by the European Council frustrated the campaign efforts and financial resources of the political parties.
Mobilizing Citizens To Vote
All parties confirmed the use of social media was to an extent effective in mobilizing citizens to turn out and vote in the European elections. These citizens can be identified into three different categories, the sympathizers of the party, the proactive citizens who vote based on agreeable popular policies and the first-time voters. This mobilization was achieved through collaboration with the national parties from the member states hosting workshops, recruiting volunteers to support politicians and parties reaching out to voters, advertising policies from the Euro-manifestos and propelling efforts for a positive election outcome. Analyzing the mobilization of citizens to vote was intrinsic to the sub-category theme of targeting audiences and policies.
24 Micro-targeting audiences was a significant factor for the parties using social media to reach out to target voters. The principal objective was relying on targeting sympathizers of the party, the pro-active citizens and first-time voters to share the party’s content to other networks on social media in the hope of building a base so that followers would turn out to vote in the elections. The advantage of Facebook was its regional targeting of audiences, so as one social media manager confirmed: ‘The strongest suit of Facebook is the regional targeting’ (EPP Group). During the campaign, all the parties used Facebook, Instagram and Twitter primarily to target firstly members from national parties, then active citizens interested in EU politics and the young voters who were registered for the first time in European elections. Another social media manager reported:
‘These people were either members of Green parties as well or people who are generally interested in politics’ (European Green Party).
This attracted a broad spectrum of voters from dependable loyal supporters to like-minded citizens in the hope of not only relying on engaging loyal supporters, but for achieving the mobilization of all citizens to turn out. For the politicians promoting individual campaigns, selecting a target audience based on age range was a strategic decision in advocating policies that most interested voters such as climate change, education and employment to ensure a positive probability of securing enough votes to win the campaign. One young politician stated:
‘I targeted mostly the doctors, the students who studied medicine in Aarhus. With my social media campaign, I could target everybody’(Radikale Venstre). Similarly, another young politician stated: ‘My prime focus was on youngsters from ages 18 to 35’(Venstre Party).
The young politicians had a particular opportunity to attract voters from the same age group, whereas more experienced politicians appealed more to citizens from the ages of 35-65. Political parties based their campaigns on their loyal voters who were aligned with the party
25 values and policies. Specifically, the EPP Group targeted the regions, specifically small businesses, farmers and those working in agriculture. The PES party reached out to young voters, the traditional working class and the trade unions. The liberal parties appealed to voters interested in trade and more transnational regulations. The European Green Party counted on young voters concerned with climate change and pushing for a radical green economy (Blomgren, 2015).
The policies that all parties advocated were based on Euro-manifestos that represented the core identity of the party’s values and principles in the build-up towards the elections. One social media manager stated: ‘These policies were obviously climate change, tax justice, nature and bio-diversity, food, GMOs, pesticides, housing, feminism, fighting gender-based violence and privacy’ (The European Green Party). Climate change was the party’s main policy, advocating transitioning towards a radical green economy, pledging to commit to low emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050. Then the PES party advocated policies related to anti-austerity and the rule of law; as the social media manager confirmed:
‘We were trying to be on the side of the workers, protecting young workers employed in the digital economy, for example the food delivery people. Housing was also an important topic, equal rights for men and women and the respect for democracy’ (PES Party).
Policies traditionally championed by the centre-left were based on protecting human rights, the rule of law and more funding for the welfare state. For the Liberal parties, policies were focused on reforming the current EU treaties, expanding European membership, more global trade and more institutional regulations. The Danish politician from Radical Venstre stated: ‘We should have a common asylum system in the EU that we should have a key in how we put different asylum seekers into different countries, so we do that as a common goal as in
26 decentralizing that and my third priority was more fair trade with Africa, more fair trade agreements’ (Radikale Venstre).
This underlined that the issues of the EU’s immigration crisis and that the asylum system is not working could only be solved through consensus from all the member states to ratify a reformed common asylum treaty that safeguards protecting human rights and the rule of law.
The politician from Venstre stated: ‘We should have a common European fuel tax for aeroplanes to build a stronger union and in how to trade with other people not just the EU, but also with the global south’ (Venstre). By implication, this politician’s remarks focused on helping industries, more global trade outside the European Union with Africa and Asia and pushing towards a stronger EU as a political identity. Then, the EPP group prioritized policies towards helping small businesses and agriculture, as the social media manager stated: ‘Our farmers and agriculture is always a priority for the group and the economy like small businesses and small enterprises’ (EPP Group). Its policies focused on protecting farmers, the agriculture industry and building a pragmatic economy. With every party promoting policies to win votes and encouraging a higher turnout, it leads to a final section on the European election outcome.
Discussion
This study aims at broadening the knowledge of the use of social media during the 2019 European elections, predominantly drawing on the experience of participants working in European political parties in Brussels and across the European Union who were responsible for running the social media campaigns whether through a pan-European or a national environment. The results show three main themes that were significant to the political parties’ use of Facebook in campaigning during the EU elections of 2019.
27 Referring to the use of Facebook advertisement sub-question, the results showed Facebook was identified as the most commonly used social media platform for all of the political parties, as most people are on Facebook, although all the parties used Twitter and Instagram to achieve maximum reach to citizens from all age groups and regions who do not always get all their information from Facebook. The parties advertised and shared different types of content coverage mainly through Facebook throughout the whole duration of the campaign. Despite the drawback of Facebook implementing stricter advertisement regulations in combatting disinformation and fake news, allocating only one verified party representative to promoting adverts within one country, this in the end did not prevent the parties running social media campaigning to its full capacity. Effectively helping parties to use Facebook in targeting content at highly localized audiences with greater precision (Dommett & Temple, 2017).
The results for the second sub-question confirmed that Facebook, to some extent, did increase the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten, despite the challenges of the pan-European campaigning environment of the European elections. Facebook provided a platform for the European political parties and the national parties to advertise content through local sub-pages in the translated local languages to enhance exposure of the Spitzenkandidat. The results clarified that only the PES party and the European Green party actively promoted the campaigns of the Spitzenkandidaten, whereas the EPP Group of the European Parliament was prohibited from campaigning by the strict EU rules not to spend public funds towards member parties, only to use Facebook and other social media channels to advocate the achievements of the group’s chairman Manfred Weber. The two Danish liberal parties (Venstre and Radikale Venstre) didn’t participate in the Spitzenkandidat campaigns because the two politicians were local candidates running for EU campaigns in Denmark. Prioritizing campaigning to be elected as the next MEPs representing Denmark, both politicians confirmed Facebook played a pivotal role in their individual campaigns in increasing their candidate visibility and winning lots of
28 votes. The combination of social media with the informal communication style of the politician paid off in building the personalization of politics to the citizens (MCallister, 2007).
Then lastly for the final sub-question on mobilizing citizens to turn out to vote, the results confirmed the collaboration of the European parties and national parties in achieving the mobilization of citizens through the communication strategies of targeting audiences through social media, the parties promoted their policies from the Euro-manifestos focused on climate change, human rights, immigration, trade and anti-austerity. The parties reported that collective cooperation effects of the European/national parties implementing communication strategies with social media had a huge impact on the overall voting turnout in the 2019 EU elections. The greater party polarization to a degree helped increasing the political salience of European issues to citizens that encouraged a higher voting outcome (Hobolt & Spoon, 2012). Especially the success for citizens to be able to distinguish different parties and political actors did prompt citizens to vote, not only for the party, but significantly increasing a higher turnout in the EU elections (Moeller et al., 2018).
Prior to the election results, the parties reported the polls predicting a significant surge in Eurosceptic influence and a significant decline for all the pro-European parties leading towards a more fragmented European Parliament. All the parties claimed that the outcome of the 2019 EU elections was a political success for them with the EPP and the socialists retaining the majority positions, the Eurosceptic surge had been contained, the Greens achieving a historic win, known as ‘the green wave’, forcing the majority parties to provide political influence towards shaping the future of the EU. The Danish liberal parties also claimed the campaign was a political success, as Denmark saw an historic high turnout with 66.08% (European Parliament, 2019). In particular, they considered it a success because citizens voted for the parties that were committed towards policies such as climate change and the economy on an EU-level.
29 Furthermore, the aftermath of the elections has forced all the parties to invest permanently with Facebook and the other social media channels. Concretely, the outcome of 2019 EU elections has given credibility to Facebook as the main communications channel for future elections. As the current state of the parties’ communication system is in paralysis due to the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, they now depend solely on social media to convey messages to followers and citizens on critical information concerning the future state of the economy, healthcare, security and employment.
This is not the case for the Danish Radikale Venstre party who question the social media’s reliability to increase the voting turnout. They have opted for offline campaigning in distributing leaflets, hosting public debates and knocking on doors of voters as a vital factor to build trust and recognition with the citizens (Chen, 2020). They have adopted a more pragmatic campaign strategy to win the trust of voters, although they do not exclude social media as they accept that Facebook initially increases visibility to the public, but they do not accept that it is the campaign tool to win votes or increase the election turnout (Lilleker et al., 2017).
The practices of social media campaigning confirm that the political parties used Facebook as the main social media channel that consisted the most number of people. Facebook was a platform designed for publishing and sharing content through its cost effective and efficient advertisement to target groups of audiences, although Twitter helped engage the politically active groups like journalists and active citizens and Instagram engaged young voters. All the parties practiced social media advertisement through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Additionally, all three social media platforms to a degree increased the visibility of the Spitzenkandidaten through the parties’ efforts in running a pan-European campaign by circulating content translated in many languages across the whole European Union. The strategic practices in advocating manifesto policies and targeting audiences from the
30 collaboration of European and national parties politically helped influence the mobilization of citizen turnout in the 2019 EU elections.
Limitations:
This study came with several limitations. Firstly, the five interviewees comprised only one representative from each party that questions the external validity of this research. External validity confirms the extent to which the research findings can be generalized to a larger population (David & Sutton, 2011). This was also case as other representatives within the parties declined to participate. Secondly, the sample of the qualitative study are parties that are labelled pro-European and there is a lack of political ideological balance without including participants from the Eurosceptic parties. Attempts were made to contact and invite parties from the far-left and the far-right, but all declined to participate. Furthermore, at the early stages of the interview process, a number of participants from all parties declined to take part in the study. Lastly, the coronavirus lockdown prevented arrangements to conduct face-to-face interviews that would open interviewees to an unstructured interview to provide answers that allow greater depth in data (David & Sutton, 2011).
Recommendations/Conclusion:
The results of this study demonstrate that politicians and the political parties now use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram as their main communication medium for their election campaigns. Replication of this study might be done with a larger sample of representatives from national parties across the EU and not just based in Brussels. It would be preferable to expand the study based on the use of Facebook and social media in all the 27 member states. Were this to be done, the validity of results might become more robust. This recommendation to scholars to
31 conduct more research in the field of social media campaigning in the 2024 European elections is made, as this can be considered as a new phenomenon in political communications that could significantly enhance future turnouts in elections, both European and national and become one of the biggest and most decisive factors in Western European democracy in the future.
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36
APPENDIX
INTERVIEW GUIDE
EUROPEAN POLITICAL PARTIES - Social Media Managers
Why Facebook has become a fundamental communication campaign tool for political elections? Especially for the EU elections?
Why does the Facebook page have more followers than on the Twitter and Instagram pages combined? Are these followers’ supporters of the political party or proactive citizens interested in the EU?
During the election campaign, what were the main strategic reasons to publish types of content (posts, videos, posters, banners, pictures) on the Facebook page that was designed to promote key messages, policies and convincing potential voters to support the party?
To what extent did using Facebook helped broaden the political profile of the Spitzenkandidat for the European Commission Presidency of 2019?
How did the combined joint effort of the European political party and the other national parties used social media campaigning to influence mobilizing the citizen turnout in the 2019 elections?
When the election results were published in May 2019, to what extend was the outcome of the election campaign a success and a failure for the party?
For the next five years (2019 - 2024), what are now the main political objectives and how will Facebook contribute advocating the work of the political party?
37 NATIONAL POLITICAL PARTIES
- Politicians
Why social media (Facebook/Twitter/ Instagram) has become a fundamental communication campaign tool for young politicians like yourself in the 2019 EU elections?
During the campaign, when you were a candidate representing your party, what were the political priorities (policies) you wanted to advocate?
With those priorities, how did you use social media/ advertisement/ traditional media/events to communicate (promote) them?
To what extent did using social media helped broaden your candidacy during the European election campaign of 2019?
When the election results were published in May 2019, to what extent was the outcome of the election campaign a political success/failure for yourself, your party and the pro-EU vote in your country?
In your opinion (as a politician), what was unique about this 2019 EU elections in terms of the citizens’ voting turnout in your country and in all of the EU?
To what extent did social media impact the citizens’ voting turnout in Denmark?
For this parliamentary term (2019 – 2024), what issues (policies and regulations) you hope to see accomplished by this European Parliament?
If given the opportunity, if you stood again as candidate for your party in the 2024 EU elections, how would you campaign and use social media differently?
