Same but different? Explaining issue agendas of right-wing parties’ Facebook campaigns to the 2019 EP election

Abstract

Social media are important for right-wing parties to communicate with and mobilize potential voters in election campaigns. Our study focuses on the Facebook campaigns of right-wing parties in six European countries and aims to understand which issues were transnationally shared and which ones emphasize national perspectives on the agenda of the populist actors. We ask what context conditions on the party- and country-level determine the individual issue agendas. Using structural topic modelling, we analyze the communication of the Austrian FPÖ, the German AfD, the French RN, the Italian Lega, the Polish PiS, and the Swedish SD during the 2019 EP election campaign. To explain their issue agendas, we run logistic regression models testing the influence of country-specific and party-specific factors. Our analyses establish that while right-wing parties across Europe are similar in pushing a few populist issues like blaming elites and immigration, they still engage in campaigning on national politics.