European Elections, National Agenda: Facebook in the 2019 Romanian EP Elections

Abstract

Politicians and political campaigns are not inadvertent to the development of social media platforms as environments that allow access to a larger audience. Not relying solely on the traditional media as a mouthpiece for their messages and taking matters into their own hands off ers new segues for analyzing political communication. However, not all elections are of equal interest, both for the electorate and for the candidates, as second-order election theory suggests (Reif & Schmitt, 1980; Hix & Marsh, 2004). Th is paper investigates the area situated at the intersection of these two research directions. Th is quantitative study aims to analyze how Romanian political parties and candidates used Facebook in the electoral campaign for the European Parliament, in May 2019. Th e study follows the correlation between Facebook metrics, like frequency of posts and the popularity of the pages, and the political agendas refl ected in each party’s Facebook posts. Th e conclusions are consistent with second-order elections theory, but raise questions about the dependable nature of Facebook metrics.