Maximizing the Audiences

Maximizing the Audiences: Portuguese Parties’ Facebook Presence in 2019

Daniel Cardoso, N. Gizem Bacaksizlar Turbic, Jorge Martins Rosa and Marisa Torres da Silva

General Online Research Conference, thematic session «C7: Strategic Election Campaigning», Berlin, September 9 2022. Unpublished oral communication.

For this paper we investigate if the content of the posts with more shares reveals global thematic trends that shaped the political agenda during the electoral year of 2019, but also specific strategies from each party. In particular, whether the party’s foundation time, relative size or its political alignment can be correlated with distinct strategies and if those can be associated with positive or negative sentiments.
From a total of 6,905 posts, we have selected a subset of the 20 with highest shares per page, which were manually coded for content analysis using a coding scheme developed by the team, and automated sentiment analysis.

Subtopics within National Politics

Overall, the main topics found were: Self-Promotion, Fundamental Rights, International Politics and National Politics. National Politics and Self-Promotion are, across the sample, the most frequent. Differences between parties emerge, namely when considering subcategories, revealing classical ideological cleavages but also identity-signaling strategies. The left prioritizes Fundamental Rights and economic issues are approached from a social perspective centered on employment rights, while the right shifts the focus to economic liberties, and pushes back against taxation. Newer and fringe parties tend to define themselves around single issues (e.g. Animal and Environmental Rights). Right-wing parties also use more frequently a discourse about Corruption and Ethics or that embodies some kind of Confrontation with Opponents, through which they present themselves as Alternative, and emphasize Security and Justice.

Confrontational posts were also Inspected to determine to what extent they escalate into incivility or hate speech, though instances of appeals to Freedom of Speech were solely articulated by right-wing parties.

Sentiment levels by party