European Parliament elections are often called “second-order” national elections: less is at stake, and parties and voters invest less. Does that hold on social media, for what parties post and for how their audiences respond?

The paper
Second-Order Campaigns on Facebook? European Parliament and National Elections on European Party Pages, 2014 and 2019
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I compared the Facebook pages of national parties in the twelve weeks before the European Parliament elections of 2014 and 2019 (151 party-elections, 96 pages, 15 countries) with party pages before national parliamentary elections in the same countries (173 party-elections, 79 pages). The posts come from CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages.

What I found

In national campaigns, parties posted about 84% more in the final four weeks than in the weeks before, and received more than three times the interactions. In European campaigns they posted about 54% more and received about twice the interactions. The European multiplier was more than a third lower, and the percentage rise less than half as large. The gap held for pages observed in both kinds of election, and with national elections from 2013 onwards.

Much of the gap was in the audience’s response. In national campaigns the median post drew about 40% more than before the campaign. In European campaigns it drew about 8% more, a rise that could not be told apart from zero. Eurosceptic and populist parties, which might be expected to treat European elections as first-order, showed no detectably larger surge, though those estimates are imprecise.

On Facebook, European Parliament campaigns were real but second-order, for parties and even more for their audiences.

Caveats

The estimates for Eurosceptic and populist parties are imprecise. Engagement is attention, not votes, and the paper is a preprint that has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.