In varietate concordia?! Political parties’ digital political marketing in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign
| Author | Márton Bene,Simon Kruschinski |
| DOI | 10.1177/14651165211040728 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
In varietate concordia?!
Political parties’digital
political marketing in the
2019 European Parliament
election campaign
Simon Kruschinski
Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg University,
Mainz, Germany
Márton Bene
Centre for Social Sciences, Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre
of Excellence, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of how parties across 28 countries use
digital political marketing on Facebook by drawing on the example of the 2019 European
Parliament election. We introduce a theoretical model of political Facebook marketing
and compare the paid media activity (sponsored posts, ads) of 186 parties to their
owned media (posts) and earned media (user reactions,comments,shares).Ourresults
concerning cross-country patterns indicate that differences in European parties’paid
media activity exist and only a few parties leverage sophisticated targeting strategies.
Regarding temporal dynamics, we find that paid media is used to supplement owned
media during similar campaign phases. In terms of engagement-triggering effects, we show
that sponsoring posts is a suitable tool to increase earned media. Overall, paid media activity
on Facebook is largely embedded into parties’overall marketing strategy and national coun-
tries’regulatory settings. Our results have implications for the understanding of public opi-
nion, voting behaviour and the regulations of elections in modern European democracies.
Keywords
Big data analysis, digital campaigning, European Parliament elections, party campaign
communication, political marketing
Corresponding author:
Simon Kruschinski, Department of Communication, Johannes Gutenberg University, Jakob-Welder-Weg 12,
55128 Mainz, Germany.
Email: simon.kruschinski@uni-mainz.de
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(1) 43–65
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211040728
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
In the wake of increased politisation of European affairs and accompanied by fundamen-
tal changes in the media landscape Facebook became one of the most important cam-
paigning channels for digital political marketing (DPM) of political parties
participating in the 2019 European Parliament (EP) election. This is especially due to
Facebook’s platform architecture, which provides marketing affordances for campaigns’
electoral goals: it allows for bypassing news media and the direct reach of users who
follow parties’Facebook pages with organic posts (owned media), the targeting of well-
defined audiences with tailored sponsored posts or ads (paid media), and the indirect
reach of new audiences through parties’followers who react to, share, or comment on
their messages (earned media).
This article investigates how European parties use paid media in comparison to owned
and earned media for their marketing activities on Facebook. The study of this question is
relevant because paid media is an inherent element in parties’marketing toolkit on
Facebook and allows them to find receptive audiences for their messages by drawing
on the platforms’unprecedented amounts of user data (Andreou et al., 2019).
However, while parties’owned and earned media activity are extensively studied, their
paid media activity has long been a black-box for research because publicly available
data was lacking until Facebook launched its Ad Library which records sponsored
posts and ads (Leerssen et al., 2019). Therefore, only a few studies exist which mostly
examine single countries often focusing on the United States (US) (e.g. Anstead et al.,
2018; Fowler et al., 2020; Ridout et al., 2021). Since cross-country differences may
exist in parties’Facebook marketing, we see an urgent need for comparative research.
Furthermore, scholars investigate parties’paid media activity separately although its
use should be interpreted and understood in relation to parties’owned and earned
media activities.
To fill these research gaps and add to the existing literature, we introduce a theoretical
model for DPM on Facebook that guides our explorative comparative analysis of parties’
owned, paid, and earned media activity in the context of the 2019 EP election campaign.
We draw upon a dataset containing all Facebook posts (N=24,938), sponsored posts and
ads (N=66,806) plus their respective metadata (e.g. reactions, comments, shares, spend-
ing) from 186 parties running in the EP election within the 28 countries of the European
Union (EU). This enables us to provide novel, quantitative and comparative empirical
insights on paid media’s cross-country patterns, temporal dynamics, and engagement-
triggering effects considering owned media and earned media.
Our theoretical argument is that parties in different European countries use Facebook’s
marketing affordances in different ways for reaching their individual goals in dependence
of contextual factors, such as resources or regulatory settings. Most of these practices
enable parties to communicate with voters in a personalized, data-driven, and non-
transparent way. Thus, the understanding of how various types of DPM may take
place on Facebook is crucial for the assessment of their possible implications for
public opinion,vote behaviour, and electoral regulation in Europe –especially, in
times of heightened conflict and increased politicization.
First, Facebook allows to target negative or divisive messages regarding European
conflicts which might contribute to further politicizing them (Nai et al., 2022) or feed
44 European Union Politics 23(1)
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