Lecture | April 21 | 10-11:30 a.m. | Zoom
Laura Jákli, Junior Fellow, Harvard Society of Fellows
Institute of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ISEEES)
This is the tenth lecture of the series 'Trends and Traditions in Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies,' a virtual lecture series hosted by ISEEES throughout Spring 2022. Each lecture in this series will be recorded and uploaded to the ISEEES YouTube Channel for later viewing.
The far right is the fastest growing party family in Europe. Although party messaging is important to understanding their increased electoral support, current data are not ideal for investigating how parties prioritize and frame issues in practice. This article is the first to examine party appeals through online political advertising, focusing on far right campaign strategies in particular. I argue that the far rights targeted online ad messages provide the most candid account available of what the party communicates to potential voters when ad content is neither publicly visible nor regulated. Using computational methods, I evaluate the content of more than 68,000 political campaign ads across 11 European countries and 79 political parties, fielded on Facebook in the two months leading up to 2019-2020 elections. Using this comparative campaign ads dataset, I examine three prominent theories on the rise of Europes far right. I find that only the far right campaigns heavily on immigration issues, and that the center-right has not `outbid' the far right on immigration in almost any country. I also find empirical support for the theory that the far right employs uniquely grievance-based mobilization strategies. I conclude with some implications for far right mobilization in the era of digital politics.
Zachary Kelly, ISEEES@berkeley.edu, 510-642-3230
Photo by Duy Ho