8. Old Versus New Europe? Differences in Content and Style of Political Advertising

In this chapter, we focus on the idea that national electoral campaigns – and specifically political advertising strategies – differ according to the length of European Union (EU) membership along with other country characteristics. One of the EU’s main paradigms is to balance socio-economic disparities between member states. All other things equal, older member states should be more similar to each other than newer member states, at least in economic terms. We should therefore expect differences in political advertising that coincide with differences in the length of EU membership reflecting prevailing national socio-economic positioning. We explain content characteristics of all those political advertisements in 2014 through a comparative approach across member states and parties. Results of our multilevel models reveal that most of the variance is found at the party level. Only in a few instances, we could explain variation by looking at country characteristics. Length of membership only played a role in negative campaigning, with newer member states showing higher levels of negative campaigning.