Cheers to 10 great days of political science conferencing in Spain 🇪🇸

After all the sun ☀️ I’m looking forward to a cooler Belfast for next year’s @epssnet.bsky.social already.

Thanks to @marcgeddes.uk and the organisers of @sgparliaments.bsky.social for a great conference in Barcelona!

This has tremendously important consequences for who is controlling the narrative of online campaigning (probably also in many other contexts!), and how this goes on to affect voting behaviour.

In particular, we compile unique evidence from Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok find that while centrist voices generally engage with more voters across more platforms, it was the extremist Eurosceptic politicians who dominated the online campaigning in the 2024 elections.

In newly published research just out at @wepsocial.bsky.social, we show that legislators are not only diversifying their social media platforms to reach constituents across a number of apps and websites, but they are not all doing so in the same way.

🚨New Elections Article Alert!🚨

Lukas Obholzer and I have been writing about online campaigning in European elections 🇪🇺 since 2014. This past year, we broadened our focus from Twitter (now X) to see where else Members of the @europarl.europa.eu were campaigning.

Fancy a cheeky discount to add it to your summer reading list? Find a friends and family code below. You can also recommend it to your library. It's been out in Oxford Online since February, if that's your preferred medium!

One of the key findings of the article was that parties that were 'second order' in their national electoral importance focussed disproportionately on keeping their top leaders in European office.

News of 🇫🇷 Marine Le Pen's temporary barring from seeking public office for diverting of 🇪🇺 European Parliament funds to national work, reminds me of an article that I wrote for the @jei-publication.bsky.social about a decade ago.

Looks like Oxford snuck in the e-book publication day for our new gender quotas book without telling Andrea Aldrich or me! Time to request a copy of your libraries and reading lists :-)

What leads candidates to diverge from stated party messaging strategies during election campaigns?

I examine the drivers of candidates' toxic campaign discourses during the 2022 🇫🇷legislative elections with Laurence Rowley-Abel, Elise Frelin, and Max-Valentin Robert.

doi.org/10.1080/014023…