When Style Shapes Format: Populism, Euroscepticism, and Voter Engagement in Online Campaigning in the 2025 Kosovo National Elections

Online campaigning studies have repeatedly demonstrated that some content features, in particular, emotional and highly salient information, are some of the most significant triggers of user attention (Bene, 2025). The ability of posts to prompt responses is a decisive factor in determining the visibility within the content-dissemination framework of social media, which is based on the logics of algorithms and virality (Klinger & Svensson, 2015). In response, political actors advance by prioritizing the kind of content that has been successful in the past (Jost, 2022), that is, the receptivity of users to a specific format has system-wide consequences that are far-reaching in political communication (Gerbaudo, 2022). Although scholarly interest has increased, there are two limitations that have not been explored well. To begin with, in the literature, there is little systematic division between textual and visual political communication when looking at user responses to populist messaging. Visual communication is highly applicable to the transfer of emotional information (Coleman & Wu, 2015) and can potentially induce more emotion than strictly text-based information (Decadri et al., 2025). Although certain research supports the idea that visuals, in particular, images or videos, influence user engagement patterns, little is comparatively done against non-visual formats (Bossetta & Schmokel, 2023). Second, existing studies often presuppose the homogeneity of the way citizens are going to react to political content (Bene, 2025). Nevertheless, parties also vary greatly in their rhetorical appeals, especially populist and Eurosceptic appeals. People-centric and anti-elite rhetoric, which are the essential elements of populism, simplify conflict and resonate with emotion, which can increase engagement. Euroscepticism can also tend to work in situations where the issues of European integration and negotiation with the EU are sensitive in politics. Such styles of communication can thus be involved with textual and visual forms in influencing user responses (Rooduijn et al., 2019). The Kosovo 2025 national elections provide an interesting context to study these dynamics. Facebook remains the predominant communication platform for political actors. The relatively younger and unstable system of parties in Kosovo, accompanied by the continued discussion of the EU-mediated dialogue with Serbia, further enhances the topicality of the emotional and identity-oriented communication strategies. This study therefore investigates (1) whether visual political communication generates stronger engagement than textual communication, and (2) whether the effectiveness of these formats is conditioned by the degree to which parties employ populism and Euroscepticism. This study is part of the DigiWorld project and includes a period of four weeks (11 January-9 February 2025) of the campaign. The parties are chosen according to the representation in parliament and the experience of the governmental activity: Vetevendosje, Democratic Party of Kosovo, Democratic League of Kosovo, and Alliance for the Future of Kosovo. Through the Gerulata platform, 1,462 posts made by these parties on Facebook and Instagram were collected. Using the DigiWorld codebook, three trained coders coded each of the posts based on (a) the type of communication used: textual or visual (images/videos); (b) the extent of populist communication; and (c) the extent of Euroscepticism.