Parties’ Issue Emphasis Strategies on Facebook

Introduction

Various factors are believed to influence the campaigning strategies of political parties. The contemporary context, parties’ issue ownership, and whether the party forms the government or acts as the opposition are believed to be the most important ones. In recent years, the development of the Internet in general and social networking websites in particular allow politicians to reach citizens easily and at a much lower cost than when using traditional mass media. It encourages parties to compete for votes not only during the most important pre-electoral period but also throughout the whole term. This means engaging in permanent campaigning. ¹ What parties say is transmitted to the public directly and without any significant interference from journalists. ² The contemporary effortlessness of Internet use also enables parties to demonstrate swift responsiveness to society’s problems. ³ However, according to the theory of issue ownership, parties differ in their potential to benefit from emphasising certain issues. ⁴

Taking all this into account, in this article I explore the consequences of the tension between the incentives created by the context of contemporary events, parties’ strengths and weaknesses associated with certain issues, and their participation in government. The empirical analysis presented here was performed using data from an exploratory study of the political issues raised in the contents published on Facebook by some of the Polish parties. I argue that their social media posts are particularly useful for studying the strategies of permanent campaigning. The results show that issues that the parties refer to depend both on the context and their own position and properties, and that their responsiveness is contingent on potential, derived from their past experiences, as well as their reputation with reference to certain issue domains. The contribution that this article makes lies also in the fact that it is the first study to analyse the programmatic contents published by political parties on Facebook from the point of view of strategic issue emphasis.

The article is structured as follows: First I discuss the influence of the context, party properties, and issue ownership on party strategies, and build hypotheses regarding their interactive effects on patterns of issue emphasis. Then, I proceed with a description of the collection of data from Facebook, coding, and the political context in Poland in early 2017. This, in turn, is followed by the presentation of the results of the study. The final part concludes and discusses the results, laying out the implications for future research.

Permanent Campaigning on Issues via Social Media

The seminal works of Robertson ⁵ and Budge and Farlie ⁶ —as well as subsequent research projects—determine that the primary mode of party programmatic competition for votes is based on drawing the attention of the public, that is, the electorate and the media, to a set of issues that confer a strategic advantage. According to this approach, a party succeeds when voters assess its politicians as more competent than their opponents in solving the problems that a given country faces. ⁷ The implication is that candidates should only talk about the issues that they “own,” ignoring others and avoiding topics raised by competitors. ⁸ A change with respect to issue ownership is possible by redefining a given problem through highlighting alternative aspects and making them critical from the voters’ perspective. ⁹

This said, parties are often forced to discuss issues raised by other actors in the political arena, since ignoring them can make them appear detached from the needs and concerns of the people. ¹⁰ Hence, the primary factor that undermines the logic of issue ownership is the context in which competition takes place (henceforth referred to as the context of the competition). Current events greatly contribute to the psychological availability and subjective importance of certain issues. ¹¹ Their influence on the political agenda is even stronger when they generate emotional tension and voters’ ambivalence towards political actors, leading to the loosening of partisan cues in voting decisions. ¹² The context also creates an opportunity to adjust the interpretation of a given subject in order to address a party’s needs. ¹³

What is crucial to the analysis presented in this article and to the selection of the source of the empirical material in particular is that contextual factors have a particularly strong influence on politicians’ social media activity, ¹⁴ because of the possibility of a quick reaction. ¹⁵ News also reaches the public much faster nowadays, due to widespread Internet access. Thus, social media constitute a good data source for the relationship between parties’ permanent campaigning strategies, the context of the competition, and the parties’ roles within the party system.

If parties cannot use a given issue to their advantage in a way that is consistent with their ideology, they will attempt to ignore it, even if it receives a lot of media coverage; they will instead try to direct the public’s attention to another issue. With all this in mind, the hypothesis constituting the point of departure for this study shall be as follows:

In other words, party behaviour on Facebook even outside of the pre-electoral period will reflect the campaigning strategies postulated by the issue-emphasis approach due to the convenience of the social-media realm, which taken all together leads to permanent campaigning. The choice of issues depends on the context of the competition and the party’s issue ownership. The latter is typically identified through surveys, ¹⁶ data that is unavailable for parties in Poland in 2017. However, the strengths and weaknesses associated with certain issues can be identified through the party’s history and its leaders’ record when in office. This would have been an overly simplistic approach for a longitudinal or a complex quantitative study, but is sufficient for an analysis conducted over a short period of time in a single party system.

Differentiation of Party Strategies

Here I argue that incentives with regard to both the context of the competition and the ability to react selectively to this context in a given party’s Facebook posts depend on the status of this party in the system. One significant dimension to consider here is the distinction between the government and the opposition.

Because the government is always responsible for the current situation in a country, it is expected to provide a solution to any problem that arises and thus is vulnerable to accusations of being unresponsive to the various needs of society. ¹⁷ This makes it particularly sensitive to events. ¹⁸ The opposition, on the other hand, can exploit crises either to reveal the incompetence and dishonesty of the ruling party or to demonstrate its policies’ ineffectiveness. This leads to the second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2 might be considered self-fulfilling if the policies implemented by government parties have a significant influence on the context. In reality, the government’s control over social reality is far from absolute. Ruling parties may indeed put more emphasis on issues associated with events resulting from their policies. However, unpopular policies cause backlash and are perceived as failures (e.g., the case of Lex Szyszko—see below), and so these are topics that government parties want to avoid. Other events either unfold randomly or are determined by fixed schedules, for example, the timing of the election of the President of the European Council was set by EU-level law, on which the Polish government had no influence in 2017; faced with that situation, Poland had to take action.

Another factor that differentiates parties’ strategies of issue emphasis is related to divisions among opposition parties. Namely, some belong to the mainstream (parties considered a plausible alternative to the existing government); usually these will constitute the largest section of the opposition. Other parties will be challengers, that is, those who do not seem to stand a chance of participating in the government in the foreseeable future.

The incentives that determine the strategies of the mainstream opposition resemble the ones underlying the actions of the government. Significantly, mainstream opposition parties tend to be responsive to what a given situation entails to a greater extent than other opposition parties. For a party to be a credible candidate for government in the future, they must demonstrate the ability to respond to every problem that arises. ¹⁹

Challenger parties, on the other hand, are not faced with such a prerequisite. To strengthen their position, they need to replace the topics dominating the political agenda at any particular moment with ones that would benefit them more. Fulfilling this objective requires a careful selection of issues— preferably those neglected by the mainstream, but at the same time visibly salient for the society. This, in turn, allows a party to distinguish itself from the mainstream and gather voters while focusing on a programmatic niche. ²⁰ Therefore, challenger parties do not need to react to the context of the competition as effectively as the incumbents and the mainstream opposition. They can also represent propositions and policies that are inconsistent with the views of the majority of the electorate. All these considerations lead to the third and fourth hypotheses:

To sum up, I expect that both party strengths and weaknesses regarding specific issues and contemporary events influence their Facebook posts. In other words, parties will react to those events that allow them to emphasise postulates that are consistent with their programme and image, neglecting those that are not. The propensity to refer to issues that are related to certain events and not others is further determined by the party position within the system. Namely, governing parties and mainstream opposition parties can be expected to devote more attention to issues that are connected with contemporary events; and challenger parties will instead focus on topical niches regardless of the context of the competition.

All of these hypotheses assume that parties act in their best interest and that their leaders are skilled enough to construct an effective communication strategy. However, in a young party system—particularly with regard to new parties—this assumption can be challenged, since these actors lack political experience and can be emotionally influenced by expectations. Therefore, the issue emphasis showcased by these parties on Facebook may be less structuralised and not entirely driven by the postulated mechanism.

The expectations regarding the strategies of each of the parties present in the analysis are gathered in Table 1.

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Table 1

Predictions with Regard to the Strategies of Issue Emphasis by Individual Parties

	Role in the Party System	Status within the Opposition	Leader Experience (Year of Party Registration)	Predicted Strategy
Law and Justice (PiS)	Government party	–	High (2001)	Primary focus on the issues associated with the context
Civic Platform (PO)	The largest party of the parliamentary opposition	Mainstream	High (2001)	Primary focus on the issues associated with the context, but demonstrates greater selectivity than the government party
Kukiz’15	Parliamentary opposition	Challenger	Low (2015)	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream
Modern (.N)	Parliamentary opposition	A challenger with aspirations to replace the Civic Platform in the mainstream	Low (2015)	Primary focus on the issues associated with the context, but demonstrates greater selectivity than the government party and the largest party of the parliamentary opposition
Green Party	Extra-parliamentary opposition	Challenger	High (2004)	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream
Left Democratic Alliance (SLD)	Extra-parliamentary opposition	A challenger struggling to re-enter the mainstream after a series of electoral defeats	High (1999)	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream to rebuild its link to the leftist electorate
Polish Peasants Party (PSL)	Parliamentary opposition	A niche party representing the rural electorate in the mainstream	High (1990)	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream
KORWiN	Extra-parliamentary opposition	Challenger	High (2015) a	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream
Together	Extra-parliamentary opposition	Challenger	Low (2015)	Selective emphasis, attempts to promote topics neglected by the mainstream

a.

The leader experience for KORWiN is considered high despite the fact that the party was formed only in 2015; its leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, has been an active politician since the early 1990s. He was a member of Sejm between 1991 and 1993.

Data, Methods, and the Political Context

So far, most researchers into political competition on social media seem to have ignored programmatic materials published online by parties. Even if one study has included this dimension, ²¹ a careful analysis of strategies underlying the tendency to emphasise some issues while neglecting others is yet to be performed. So far, the main conclusion seems to be that even though candidates refer to issues in their online posts, this is not central to their communication strategies, since they tend to focus more on traits such as integrity, competence, and responsiveness to the needs of the electorate. ²² This article aims at closing this gap.

In terms of data, Facebook posts are similar to party press releases issued to the traditional mass media. They do not follow fixed schedules, ²³ they are constructed strategically, and their content is independent of media interpretation. ²⁴ Facebook is a semi-public medium, which means that everyone can access the contents published by political parties on their profiles upon registration. ²⁵

Prior to data collection, official party profiles were differentiated from fan pages using party names but run by the supporters or opponents of a given party (see Appendix A). The contents of these can be incompatible with the parties’ official positions, even to the point of being deliberate disinformation. ²⁶ Using party profiles instead of sites dedicated to the promotion of individual politicians minimises the problem of candidate-centrism by which positive valence traits take priority over the party programme. ²⁷ Moreover, including all relevant parties is much more feasible than constructing a representative sample of individual politicians’ profiles.

Admittedly, focusing only on one social media site poses the question of the generalisability of the results. People who use one particular website may represent an entirely different social and economic profile than those using other social media. This can affect the modes of party communication. ²⁸ On the other hand, the sheer popularity of Facebook and its general appeal to various groups seem to be legitimate arguments for studying it. In the social realm, Facebook seems to have gained its own significance even though it is just one of many social networking sites.

The Investigated Period and the Political Context: Poland in Early 2017

The data used in this study encompasses a thirty-day period between 18 February and 20 March 2017. This allowed party behaviour to be studied outside the most intense campaigning period. Using data gathered in a period when no election was expected for at least a year provided good conditions for a conservative test of the hypotheses associated with permanent campaigning. Since citizens would not be making imminent decisions about supporting any of the existing parties, the parties were somewhat less concerned with their public behaviour. Therefore, if the hypothesized patterns develop nonetheless, this can be interpreted as compelling evidence for the tendencies under scrutiny. To further justify the choice of the period investigated, an outline of the political context is necessary.

The 2015 parliamentary election was the first in the history of Polish democracy that resulted in a single-party majority. Law and Justice won 37.58 percent votes and 235 of the 460 seats in the Polish lower legislative chamber (pol. Sejm). Beata Szydło became Prime Minister without the need to negotiate with any external partners ³² and remained in office throughout the data collection period and long afterwards. The leader of Law and Justice, Jarosław Kaczyński, did not take an official position in the government or the parliamentary group, but kept his status and became the most influential political figure in Poland. Earlier in 2015, Andrzej Duda—also from PiS—had won the presidential election. This allowed Law and Justice to establish effective control over both the legislative and the executive branches of the political system, except for the supermajority needed to amend the constitution.

The opposition in the Sejm consisted of the Civic Platform—the senior partner of the previous government coalition (24.09 percent votes; 138 seats)—as well as Kukiz’15 (8.81 percent vote; 42 seats), Modern (7.6 percent votes; 28 seats), and the Polish Peasants Party—the junior coalition partner before 2015 (5.13 percent votes; 16 seats)—plus the German Minority (0.18 percent votes; 1 seat). Since the 2015 election, politics in Poland has been characterised by sharp conflicts as numerous policies implemented by PiS have resulted in protests and public accusations of undermining both the rule of law and the standards of modern democracy. The period between 18 February and 20 March 2017 allows us to depict these conflicts. The majority of the parties (see Table 3) and the press (Table 2) were focused on a relatively narrow and highly divisive set of issues. The timing of the one matter that received special attention, namely the re-election of Donald Tusk as the President of the European Council, was beyond the control of the ruling party. This situation created a propitious environment to grasp and analyse issue-emphasis strategies as this event was exogenous to the political system. In order to take advantage of such a circumstance, the period investigated had to be short. If a longer period were chosen, this would potentially encompass more relevant events, thus hindering the analysis as the context of the competition would encompass more issues. Also, the study required a period of time when the heat of political competition was significant, causing parties to post a lot of content on their Facebook pages, thus providing sufficient material for analysis.

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Table 2

Topics Related to the Context and Identified Based on the Relative Salience of Issues in the Publications of Gazeta Wyborcza and Gazeta Polska Codziennie during the Period Investigated (18 February–20 March 2017)

	Gazeta Wyborcza		Gazeta Polska Codziennie
Topical Domain	Ratio of the Number of Articles Published During the Period Investigated to the Average Number of Articles per 30 Days During the Year Preceding the Study	Percentage of Articles During the Period Investigated	Percentage of Articles During the Period Investigated
Taxes	0.8	3.27	1.00
Social policy/public services	0.95	33.97	7.46
Inflation	–	0.77	0.00
Other economic performance	0.88	5.23	19.92
Centralisation vs. regional autonomy	2.15	0.18	0.41
The environment	1.17	1.84	2.22
Immigration, asylum, xenophobia	1.34	1.73	1.52
The justice system	0.95	4.94	2.50
Law and order, security, terrorism	0.31	9.46	14.24
The national way of life	0.63	1.31	6.03
Traditional morality, family values, religion	0.79	2.08	5.38
Europe/EU	1.09	14.63	14.59
Internationalism (not EU)	0.89	1.25	9.35
Agriculture/rural affairs	0.77	0.95	0.89
The Communist past	0.9	1.78	2.28
The Smolensk accident	0.83	0.42	1.89
Women’s rights	1.31	12.31	2.70
Politics of memory	0.91	3.87	7.63
Total number posts	1681	1681	522

Source: Calculations based on Gazeta Wyborcza’s archive (www.archiwum.wyborcza.pl) and coding of the content of Gazeta Polska Codziennie (https://gpcodziennie.pl/archiwum/).

The issues marked in bold were identified as related to the context of the competition based on the following criteria: an issue received (1) greater press coverage in Gazeta Wyborcza during the thirty days of the study than, on average, during thirty days of the whole year directly preceding the period studied; or (2) at least 10 percent of articles in both newspapers were dedicated to the issue in the period studied. The issues associated with the justice system and law and order are treated as one. Despite achieving a ratio of 2.15 in the second column, “Centralisation versus regional autonomy” is not considered associated with the context as the ratio is based on as few as four articles. More detailed information on the search results is presented in Appendix C along with a discussion of the differences between the issue scopes of the two newspapers.

It could be argued that a short period including of a sharp conflict is not representative of the phenomenon of permanent campaigning in Poland. I argue that there is no reason to believe that the patterns would be different if the competition were more moderate. Under such circumstances, the tendencies could be less pronounced and more difficult to distinguish. This said, the question of the intensity of issue competition is beyond the scope of this study. Identifying issues that received significant public attention at the time of data collection was based on articles published in two daily newspapers—Gazeta Wyborcza and Gazeta Polska Codziennie. These two represent opposing ideological and party affiliations; the former is supportive of the political opposition in Poland, particularly the Civic Platform, while the latter is linked to Law and Justice. In order for the researcher to identify context-related political topics in Gazeta Wyborcza’s online archive, each topic was assigned a set of keywords which were then used to search the archive and count articles related to a given issue in the period investigated and during the year preceding the data collection. The archive of Gazeta Polska Codziennie does not provide an adequate search feature. Therefore, two coders counted articles touching upon each of the topics and the average of the two distributions was used to measure the relative salience of issues. (See Appendix C for details.) A topic was considered related to contemporary events if it fulfilled either of the following conditions: it received (1) greater press coverage in Gazeta Wyborcza during the thirty days of the study than, on average, during thirty days of the whole year directly preceding the period studied; or (2) at least 10 percent of the articles were dedicated to the issue in both newspapers in the period studied.

This procedure enabled the researcher to identify the following topics as related to the context of the competition during the relevant period (see also Table 2):

The environment—on 1 January 2017, a new law came into force, allowing private owners to cut down trees on their premises for noneconomic purposes and without needing to obtain written permission from the local government. The regulation—referred to as the “Lex Szyszko,” the latter part being the last name of the current Minister of the Environment—resulted in the devastation of the landscape in various places, including city centres where parts of public parks had been granted to private owners through re-privatisation.

Immigration, asylum, xenophobia—the augmented interest in this domain can be attributed to the ongoing migration crisis in Europe. In spite of not accepting any refugees from the Middle East, Poland has experienced growing anti-immigrant sentiment as well as an increasing number of hate crimes. ³³

The justice system, law and order, security, terrorism ³⁴ —PiS introduced several amendments to the laws regulating the functioning of the Constitutional Tribunal, and they also illegally elected additional judges replacing those chosen by the previous parliament but not sworn by President Andrzej Duda. This resulted in a prolonged conflict engaging the opposition parties as well as common citizens and EU-level authorities.

Europe/EU—on 9 March 2017, Donald Tusk was re-elected for a second term as President of the European Council on receiving twenty-seven of twenty-eight votes from the member countries. The Polish government was the only one that voted against Tusk, questioning his impartiality. Tusk had publicly criticised some of the actions of the government directed at the Constitutional Tribunal. Polish officials then suggested that Tusk might also be guilty of serious negligence in the investigation into the 2010 plane crash in Smolensk, where president Lech Kaczyński died, along with ninety-five other passengers and crew.

Women’s rights—the elevated public interest in this domain is related to International Women’s Day, celebrated annually on 8 March. In 2017, this became an occasion for parties to emphasise their alleged commitment to women’s rights after nationwide unrest, the so-called Black Protests, caused by attempts to exacerbate abortion laws in Poland in late 2016.

Results

I shall begin to analyse the parties’ strategies by exploring whether the patterns of issue emphasis exhibited on their Facebook pages reflect the parties’ strengths and weaknesses regarding certain issue domains, as well as whether the issues related to the context of the competition described in the previous section are indeed the ones receiving the most attention (hypothesis 1). For general information on parties’ Facebook activity, see Appendix B. Because the Polish Peasants Party (PSL) published only eighteen posts related to any of the topics investigated in the relevant period, it has been excluded from further analysis.

The frequency of posts containing references to each of the topics in Table 3 show that parties are far from emphasising distinct sets of issues, which is something that the pure issue ownership logic would imply. Even cases of one party monopolising a certain domain are rare. Kukiz’15 devotes 34.43 percent of its posts to taxes—more than twice as many as KORWiN, an extra-parliamentary party with the second highest emphasis on this issue (14.71 percent); no other party seems to have dedicated more than 7 percent of their posts to it. PiS refers to Europe/EU-related issues in 63.33 percent of their posts, which is almost twice as often as Civic Platform (34.15 percent). Other than this, the Greens raise environmental issues in 61.54 percent of their posts. However, both the environment and the Europe/EU domain are related to the context of the competition. As shown in the penultimate column of Table 3, on the aggregate level parties devote more attention to issues brought to public attention by current events than to ones belonging to other issue domains. The highest overall percentage of posts in the period studied was devoted to Europe/EU (14.85 percent), taxes (13.32 percent), and the environment (12.66 percent). The aggregate category of social policy/public services received 13.97 percent of the posts, but only 4.15 and 5.16 percent of them were associated with education and health respectively. None of these figures indicates a strong focus on a single social policy. Among the topics receiving the most coverage in Facebook posts, only the domain of taxes is not context-related and its high total salience depends almost exclusively on the attention from Kukiz’15. The other issues are emphasised by more than one party. In total, 51.09 percent of posts were dedicated to issue categories associated with the context of the competition (environment; immigration, asylum, xenophobia; the justice system; law and order, security, terrorism; Europe/EU; and women’s rights).

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Table 3

Issue Emphasis of the Polish Parties during the Period Investigated (Percentage of Posts Related to Each Topic)

Code	Topic of the Post	Law and Justice (PiS)	Civic Platform (PO)	Kukiz’15	Modern (.N)	Green Party	Left Democratic Alliance (SLD)	KORWiN	Together	Total Number of Posts	Total Percentage
1	Taxes	0	2.44	34.43	5	0	3.57	14.71	6.82	61	13.32
2	Social policy/public services a	6.67	9.76	9.02	22.5	7.69	21.43	5.88	34.09	64	13.97
2a	Education	3.33	7.32	0.82	7.50	7.69	3.57	0.00	11.36	19	4.15
2b	Health	3.33	2.44	4.10	10.00	0.00	14.29	1.47	9.09	25	5.46
3	Inflation	0	0	0	0	0	0	1.47	0	2	0.44
5	Other economic performance	0	0	4.92	5	2.56	0	13.24	0	18	3.93
6	Centralisation vs. regional autonomy	0	4.88	1.64	2.5	0	3.57	0	0	8	1.75
7	The environment	0	14.63	1.64	15	61.54	5.36	5.88	11.36	58	12.66
8	Immigration, asylum, xenophobia	0	0	4.1	0	20.51	3.57	0	11.36	20	4.37
9	The justice system	10	0	8.2	7.5	0	0	5.88	0	20	4.37
10	Law and order, security, terrorism	3.33	4.88	6.56	7.5	0	3.57	17.65	0	28	6.11
11	The national way of life	0	0	1.64	0	0	0	0	0	2	0.44
12	Traditional morality, family values, religion	0	0	0	0	0	0	1.47	6.82	4	0.87
13	Europe/EU	63.33	34.15	9.02	17.5	0	14.29	11.76	0	68	14.85
14	Internationalism (not EU)	0	0	0.82	0	0	0	1.47	2.27	3	0.66
16	Agriculture/rural affairs	0	0	0.82	0	0	0	0	2.27	3	0.66
17	The Communist past	3.33	0	0.82	0	0	1.79	1.47	0	4	0.87
18	The Smolensk accident	0	2.44	0	0	0	1.79	0	0	2	0.44
20	Women’s rights	3.33	26.83	0.82	17.5	5.13	14.29	5.88	11.36	40	8.73
21	Politics of memory	10	0	2.46	0	2.56	26.79	13.24	9.09	35	7.64
99	Other issues	0	0	13.11	0	0	0	0	4.55	18	3.93
	Total number of posts with references to the topics investigated	30	41	122	40	39	56	68	44	458	100
	Posts with references to topics related to the context b	79.99	80.49	30.34	65	87.18	41.08	47.05	34.08	234	51.09

Source: Author’s calculations.

a.

Subcategories of the joint category “Social policy/public services” except “Education” and “Health” have been omitted owing to the very small number of posts dedicated to these issues.

b.

Issues related to the context: environment; immigration, asylum, xenophobia; the justice system; law and order, security, terrorism; Europe/EU; and women’s rights.

The next step necessary to verify hypothesis 1 is to explore whether the issues that parties emphasise the most can be linked to their strengths derived from their past performance. During the relevant period, the governing party seems to have focused predominantly on European politics (63.33 percent of the studied posts). PiS studiously avoided the topic of the environment as the media focused primarily on the devastation that the Lex Szyszko caused. Then, 13.33 percent of all their posts are related to categories connected with the justice system and law and order, these being the domains that Law and Justice (PiS) have associated themselves with since the beginning of their existence; the party founder, Lech Kaczyński, was a popular minister of justice in the early 2000s. Only one post is devoted to women’s rights as the party’s stance on abortion and other topics that are considered feminist is profoundly conservative. There are no references to immigration, although this could be a side effect of considering it a EU-related issue because of the refugee quotas that were imposed around that time by the European Commission. All in all, PiS exhibits great selectivity when deciding on the context-related issues it addresses. This remains in line with hypothesis 1, but undermines the assumption that the governing party ought to be responsive to all context-related issue domains.

The highest percentage (34.15 percent) of forty-one posts including references to the topics investigated from the main opposition party, the Civic Platform (PO), was devoted to European politics, mainly the re-election of Donald Tusk as President of the Council of the EU. Emphasising that a former leader of PO on the one hand and Prime Minister on the other holds such a position helps to promote the party’s image as a potent and internationally recognised political force. PO also devoted 26.83 percent of their posts to women’s rights, in connection with International Women’s Day. When in office, the party was reluctant to pursue what can be considered feminist postulates; simplifying access to emergency contraceptives in 2015 was a result of pressure from the EU. However, after the Black Protests all over the country against the bill proposing a total abortion ban in late 2016, the topic seemed to be just what the party needed to be perceived as a progressive force. Other than this, 14.63 percent of their posts were dedicated to protection of the environment; this area had not been the main focus of PO, but it is related to the context nonetheless. The posts published by the Civic Platform on Facebook in the period under study were distributed among the domains more evenly than was the case with the governing party. The general pattern remains in consonance with hypothesis 1.

Modern is a new party that emerged on the political scene before the 2015 election to represent the liberal electorate disenchanted with the Civic Platform. As such, it is difficult to classify with regard to the mainstream versus challenger dimension. Its newness and vote share suggest the latter status, but its issue emphasis strategies are similar to that of PO’s. This may be because, first, the two parties compete for the support of the same electorate and second, Modern was attempting to take over PO’s position in the party system. The party emphasised the following context-related issues (65 percent of posts): European integration (17.5 percent), women’s rights (17.5 percent), and the joint justice/law and order/security/terrorism domain (15 percent). Only 5 percent of their posts were related to taxes, although this could be a topic where a party with a liberal image could gain an electoral advantage. With this in mind, Modern’s emphasis on social policies (22.5 percent in total; 10 percent on health and 7.5 percent on education), is somewhat surprising as the party could be expected to avoid these issues. On the other hand, their investment in these topics might be an effort to demonstrate a commitment to domains of utmost importance to the well-educated middle-class electorate. The party actively supported the referendum on educational reform. The overall pattern somewhat contradicts the expectation expressed in hypothesis 1. However, the low political experience of the party leaders might have influenced the party’s engagement in a strategy not entirely consistent with the prerequisites associated with the party’s novelty.

The emphasis that Kukiz’15 put on the domain of taxes (34.43 percent) can be interpreted as an attempt to exploit a niche that is largely neglected by the other parties. The percentage of their posts related to context-embedded domains is the second lowest in the study (only 30.34 percent of posts): 9.02 percent on European integration, 14.76 percent in total connected with the justice system and law and order, and only 1.64 percent and 0.82 percent on the environment and women’s rights respectively. Based on hypothesis 1, this strategy neatly fits into the pattern expected of a challenger party.

A somewhat similar strategy can be attributed to KORWiN. This party also seems to dedicate a lot of attention to taxes (14.71 percent of sixty eight posts), while their most emphasised topic was law and order (17.65 percent). This was not related to the ongoing conflict around the Constitutional Tribunal but instead to the party’s long-standing support for severity in various kinds of punishments, including capital punishment. KORWiN appeals to conservative free-market supporters by emphasising economic performance (13.24 percent of posts) and politics of memory (13.24 percent—predominantly posts celebrating the National Day of Remembrance of the Cursed Soldiers). The emphasis on the European domain (11.76 percent) can be attributed to the fact that the party’s leader, Janusz Korwin-Mikke, was criticised for his extremely sexist speech in the European Parliament at the time of data collection.

The three remaining extra-parliamentary leftist parties are challengers, but their statuses vary. The Left Democratic Alliance (SLD) is a post-communist party that was part of five governments after the country’s transition to democracy. The greatest number of their posts was devoted to the politics of memory (26.79 percent), this being mostly about efforts to commemorate and promote historical figures connected with the leftist tradition in Poland as well as attempts to refute claims about the nobility of the so-called cursed soldiers. Then, 21.43 percent of posts concerned social policies (especially health—14.29 percent). With regard to context-related posts, the SLD seems to emphasise the European domain and women’s rights (14.29 percent each). Little attention is, in turn, devoted to the environment (5.36 percent). The party exhibits a strategy that involves reacting to selected issues raised by the context on the one hand (women’s rights, and European integration) as well as appealing to an electorate that values the leftist tradition on the other (the politics of memory and state-funded healthcare). This strategy is in compliance with hypothesis 1. The SLD pursues its own agenda somewhat disregarding the context of the competition, which is a strategy expected from a challenger party. The emphasis on the European domain can be attributed to the fact that the SLD takes pride in being the party that led the government when Poland joined the EU in 2004.

The Greens, in turn, were established in 2004, though they have never entered parliament, which is why they remain a challenger despite their relatively long existence. As they clearly define themselves in relation to environmental protection, it is hardly surprising that 61.54 percent of their thirty-nine posts under scrutiny were devoted to this particular issue. The second most important topic seems to be immigration (20.51 percent), which was described in terms of a humanitarian crisis. The Greens devoted more posts to each of these two issues than any other party, which should not be interpreted as simply a reaction to the context but also as pursuing the party’s agenda under favourable conditions. Focusing on the environment exploited the crisis created by the Lex Szyszko, while emphasising the humanitarian aspect of the refugee crisis translated into building support around a niche as the vast majority of the Polish citizens opposed the idea of admitting refugees to the country at the time of data collection. ³⁵ Other than this, 7.69 percent and 5.13 percent of the party’s posts were devoted to education and women’s rights respectively, both of which tend to be associated with the left. The selectivity of the Greens’ strategy manifests also in their neglect of the context-related issues of Europe, justice, and law and order (0 percent).

Together seems to have established a similar pattern with regard to the most emphasised issues. Most of their attention was devoted to social policies/public services (34.04 percent of forty-four posts; 11.36 percent about education and 9.09 percent about health). The environment, immigration, and women’s rights come in second, with 11.36 percent each. The data does not allow the researcher to determine more precisely whether this selection of issues depended on the context or whether it was connected with the long-term strategies of a party that has existed only since 2015; some of the emphasised issues are related to the context and some are not, but at the same time all of them reflect the agenda expected from any leftist party.

Finally, I will now proceed with a quantitative test of hypotheses 2, 3, and 4. The results are displayed in Figure 1.

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Figure 1

Percentages of posts by each of the parties in the study dedicated to issues associated with the context of the competition

In total, 79.99 percent of posts from Law and Justice are targeted at domains related to the context. This confirms hypothesis 2 as the average for all the remaining parties in the study is much lower, namely, 55.03 percent. The difference is significant at p <0.1 (χ² = 3.81, df = 1, N = 440). The difference between the attention given to context-related issues by PiS (79.99 percent) and the mainstream opposition parties (here: Civic Platform and Modern; 72.75 percent on average) is statistically insignificant, which confirms hypothesis 3 as the latter parties are expected to devote as much attention to the context as the governing party. The mainstream opposition parties dedicate 72.75 percent of their posts to issues associated with the context of the competition, while the average for the remaining challenger parties equals 51.41 percent, which confirms hypothesis 4, since the difference is significant at p <0.05 (χ² = 4.13, df = 1, N = 410).

The Green Party somewhat stands out from this pattern. Namely, 87.18 percent of the posts published by the Greens fit into context-related categories, but this seems to be a consequence of the party’s sharp focus on carefully selected issues, particularly the environment, rather than their general interest in a variety of themes.

Conclusion and Discussion

Political parties in Poland pursue various strategies of issue emphasis through their Facebook posts. There is a mixture of references to topics that are connected to the context of the competition on the one hand, and issues selected based on the parties’ strengths and weaknesses on the other. The online behaviour of the political parties investigated here confirms the main hypothesis of this study (hypothesis 1), namely, that in the contents published in social media, parties primarily emphasise those issues that are associated with the context of the competition that they themselves are able to use in an advantageous manner. The selection of strategies depends also on the parties’ roles within the party system: Opposition challenger parties are more selective when responding to domains related to the context (e.g., SLD, the Greens) than the mainstream opposition parties (PO and Modern) are. This confirms hypothesis 4. Some of them supplement the agenda with niche topics, as is the case with Kukiz’15 and taxes or the Green Party and immigration, the latter being described as a humanitarian crisis rather than a threat to national security. Meanwhile, the mainstream opposition parties are as inclined to emphasise issues related to the context as the governing party, confirming hypothesis 3. Comparison of the relative attention devoted to certain topics in the posts published by the governing party and the opposition on average leads to a conclusion that the former devotes more attention to the domains related to the context of the competition than the latter. This remains in line with hypothesis 2.

A somewhat puzzling result was obtained with regard to the governing party. In the period under investigation, Law and Justice devoted the vast majority of their posts to European politics. Their selectiveness in reacting to the context of the competition is greater than that of any other party. They remained silent about the environment or social policies, both of which were emphasised by the media and other parties. It seems that such a strategy was determined by European politics, allowing the party to argue that their actions were a success, which was not the case with many other context-related topics. To be more precise, the case of Tusk’s re-election (the EU-topical domain)—even though the Polish government lost the vote 1 to 27—was presented as a success because Poland did not succumb to pressure from other EU countries, which the party proudly described as a sign of Poland’s sovereignty. Tusk was presented by the politicians of Law and Justice as a representative of the interests of foreign elites, while Prime Minister Beata Szydło was publicly given the greeting of a victorious leader when she arrived back in Warsaw after the vote in Brussels. The government-controlled media followed this narrative. Along similar lines, the joint domains of the justice system and law and order also received some attention on the official profile of PiS. The conflict around the Constitutional Tribunal was presented by the government party in terms of cleansing the judiciary from the influence of the former, allegedly corrupted elites. Importantly, PiS ignored issues such as the environment or women’s rights, for engaging with them could hardly benefit the party.

The re-election of Donald Tusk had a strong influence on the issue emphasis strategies of the parties studied here. This can lead to a question of the generalisability of this observation across other issues. Despite the fact that his re-election dominated the rhetoric of the mainstream parties, the analysis has also demonstrated that events associated with other domains such as the environment, the justice system, or women’s rights also affected the choice of issues emphasised by the parties in their Facebook posts. These topics are related to various domains of social life. Therefore, it is justifiable to argue that the patterns described here apply to issues related to the context of the competition in general. For example, the topic of the environment was exploited by the Greens as belonging to the core of their traditional agenda and was avoided by Law and Justice, which was blamed for causing the crisis associated with Lex Szyszko.

The results of this exploratory study contribute to our knowledge about the mechanisms underlying the patterns of issue emphasis on the one hand and the processes behind social media campaigning on the other. This investigation into the behaviour of the Polish parties in early 2017 confirms that, even outside the pre-electoral period, competition depends both on the events that establish the context in which the competition takes places and on the parties’ roles within the party system. The prerequisites related to the context and issue ownership are inextricably linked, interacting with each other and influencing each other, which then leads the parties to refer to those context-related issues that can potentially offer future electoral advantage. However, it should be noted that some challenger parties do experiment with niche topics or alternative approaches to certain issues in order to attract the more neglected groups of the electorate.

The study demonstrates that the actual programmatic contents of social media posts that are published by political parties are worth studying, for they tend to exhibit distinct patterns. All of it certainly requires further explanatory efforts that would encompass greater empirical material to be subjected to relevant quantitative assessments.