Abstract
European parties and political groups aim to represent and express the will of EU citizens and to organise the parliamentary work of their affiliated parties. However, they play a rather minor role in the public consciousness of the member states. This chapter describes current developments and the composition of European parties and political groups and sheds light on their campaign strategies. In the 2019 EP election campaign, European parties and groups emphasised the concept of ‘Spitzenkandidaten’ by focusing on their top candidates. In general, European parties and groups multiplied the campaign messages of national parties rather than truly complementing national strategies on a supranational level.
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Notes
- 1.
From RQ2 on, parliamentary groups and their corresponding parties (e.g., Group of the Greens/EFA together with EGP and EFA) are grouped together.
- 2.
The median of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ is an indicator of the posts’ reach on Facebook that is robust to the highly skewed distribution of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ among the posts. Many posts have relatively low numbers, and few have high numbers of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.
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Wurst, AK., Schlosser, K., Haßler, J. (2021). European Party Groups: Transnational Continuation or Complement of European National Parties?. In: Haßler, J., Magin, M., Russmann, U., Fenoll, V. (eds) Campaigning on Facebook in the 2019 European Parliament Election. Political Campaigning and Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73851-8_16
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