Campaigning for European and National Elections. A Cross-Country Comparison between Germany, Hungary, and Romania

Delia, Cristina Balaban and Farkas, Xénia and Mihnea, S. Stoica (2025) Campaigning for European and National Elections. A Cross-Country Comparison between Germany, Hungary, and Romania. CENTRAL EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, 4 (38). pp. 429-446. ISSN 1899-5101

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Abstract

National elections – or “first-order elections” (FOEs) – are regularly the focus of research studying election campaigns, whereas supranational elections are often handled as “second-order elections” (SOEs). Social media tend to normalize existing power relationship and equalizing political competition during election. This paper analyzes political campaigns on Facebook during the European Parliament (EP) elections 2019 and the national elections held between 2020 and 2022 in Germany, Hungary, and Romania. From a cross-country perspective, the research investigates the volume of campaign content conducted on Facebook during the EP and the national elections. Results of a manual content analysis of (N=5934) posts of 20 political parties that gained seats in the EP and national parliaments suggest that Facebook contributes to equalizing political communication. However, the prevalent topics of the campaigns vary considerably across countries. Our research contributes to the discussion on normalization and equalization theses and addresses FOEs and SOEs from a comparative perspective.

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