E-Campaigning on Social Media During the German Federal Election 2017: The Effectiveness of Parties' Campaign Strategies on Facebook and Twitter

Ever since the successful implementation of social media by the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012, Twitter and Facebook have become integral parts of electoral campaigning strategies. They allow for direct communication between parties, candidates and voters, mobilizing supporters and influencing the public agenda. Although the academic literature on e-campaigning on social media has grown substantially over the last decade, there is a lack of cross-media analyses of the actual content of e-campaigning messages, let alone its impact on electoral behaviour. Focusing on the German federal election of 2017, this paper compares the different e-campaigning strategies of the seven biggest German parties on Twitter and Facebook and investigates their impact on the propensity of users to express unsolicited voting intentions. We exploit content analysis to categorize information published on the official accounts of the CDU, CSU, SPD, AfD, FDP, Greens, Linke and Pirates. Thereby, we do not only focus on policy issues as such but also concentrate on valence issues. Moreover, we identify the direction of the e-campaigning messages, i.e. positive vs. negative. This allows us to map the evolution of issue saliences from when the campaign unfolds on August 1 until election day on September 24, 2017. To this end, we coded 13702 tweets and retweets as well as 1254 Facebook posts. In order to measure the relative effectiveness of the campaign strategies, we estimate unsolicited voting intentions using integrated Sentiment Analysis (iSA). The latter is run over the whole population of Tweets and Facebook comments on parties' posts, written in German and commenting on the elections in the same period of time. This allows us to grasp the aggregate distribution of users' opinions on the parties. Our preliminary results show that the amount of noise on the platforms is majorly driven by focus events, such as the face off TV debates of candidates, which resulted in a substantial amount of negative campaigning on all fronts. In this regard, criticizing opposing parties for non-policy-based valence issues, and thus attacking their credibility and competence, is the preferred strategy. The latter is especially employed by the AfD against parties located relatively close to it on the ideological scale. Also, we observe that parties react to their rivals' emphasis on certain issues, shifting their focus on the latter if it generates a broad audience. Our findings talk directly to the literature on issue competition and evolution, social media and electoral campaign. By using an innovative technique of sentiment analysis, our contribution is also methodological in nature.