Europeanisation through polarisation: Political parties' use of social media to talk about Europe during the EP elections (2019-2024)

This paper examines the evolution of political discourse in European Parliament (EP) election campaigns by analysing a novel, comprehensive dataset of Facebook posts from almost 300 political parties across all 27 EU member states between the 2019 and the 2024 electoral cycles. Despite their significance for EU governance, campaigns for EP elections have historically been characterised by a dominance of national issues over European concerns. Against the backdrop of increasing EU politicisation, this research investigates whether heightened polarisation correlates with greater Europeanisation of campaign messaging or whether it reinforces the traditionally observed second-order character of European elections. The study uses computational text analysis to examine a comprehensive corpus of social media discourse. It measures the extent to which parties frame issues through a European rather than national lens and relates this to the salience of polarising transnational issues such as migration, green transition, and military conflicts. The comparative timeframe allows for tracking changes in campaign strategies while controlling for country-specific factors. The main objective of the paper is to explore the relationship between polarisation and Europeanisation, while accounting for variations across geographical regions and party families. The paper expands our understanding of how contemporary political polarisation shapes transnational electoral competition, potentially transforms the European political space, and whether increased EU politicisation is shifting the second-order nature of these elections. The findings have implications for theories of European integration, political communication, and the evolving nature of political competition in multilevel governance systems.