Political Advertising in the 2014 European Parliament Elections

The common timing of European Parliament elections presents a unique opportunity for international comparisons of the political process across countries and thus to determine what are general trends and what are peculiarities of individual countries or regions. This study focuses on the role played by political advertising in the 2014 elections, specifically posters and commercials/spots. Based on a common data set derived from content analyses of spots and posters from all 28 EU member states, the chapters of this volume examine different aspects of the advertising used during the 2014 election campaign.

Since the first set of direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, no previous five-year interval between contests had been as dramatic or as fraught with such difficulty for the European Union (EU) as the years between the elections in 2009 and 2014. This period was singularly defined by a deep economic and financial crisis. The political and policy response to this unprecedented downturn impacted not just on the campaign in May 2014 but also on political advertising across all member states. This chapter briefly outlines the context to the 2014 elections and the background in which electoral television advertising and posters were conceived in the 28 EU member states. This chapter focuses on the economic crisis that engulfed EU member states before considering the political fall-out. The chapter also references Eurobarometer survey data to illustrate the importance of economic issues to public opinion as well as the depth of negative sentiment towards the EU as the May 2014 elections loomed.

The production of electoral advertising such as television and radio spots or newspaper ads is controlled by parties and candidates and their campaign advisers and therefore does not underlie any changes by journalists as is the case, for instance, with news reports. Spots and ads are delivered to the media which simply distribute them but do not have any say in their design or contents. However, advertising, in general, and electoral advertising, in particular, has to follow certain rules and regulations established either by the media companies and/or by law. The fact that European countries see a need to regulate television advertising reflects a culture where responsibility for individual well-being is not completely left to the citizen and the state takes on the role of a protector. This chapter provides an overview of the regulations drawn up for electoral television advertising and posters in the 28 European Union member states. The data presented refer to the regulation in effect for the European election in 2014. They were collected by means of an online questionnaire that was answered by political communication experts in the respective countries

This chapter reports on the results of a content analysis of campaign posters and videos issued by the political parties competing for the European Parliamentary elections of 2014 in each of the 28 EU member states. We looked at the portrayal of the European project by comparing the Union’s sub-regions (Continental, Northern, Southern, and Eastern Europe), by contrasting Eurosceptic and Europhile countries, and by looking at the differences between debtor and creditor countries engaged in the 2010 sovereign debt shock. Political advertising in Southern Europe contained more negative attacks than other continental regions, reflecting the hot reaction against austerity policies in Mediterranean countries. Despite their historical low participation in EP elections, the political propaganda in Eastern European member states contained few negative statements and ushered in plenty of national but also European symbols. Surprisingly, the comparison between Eurosceptic and Europhile member states (defined by their degree of approval of European integration in Eurobarometer surveys) offered few differences, perhaps because the economic crisis contributed to subduing the Euro-enthusiam of traditionally supportive member states. Negative statements about the euro were as frequent in Europhile as in Eurosceptic countries, and they were also evenly present in debtor and creditor countries. This might be indicative of a lack of identification between the common currency and the sovereign debt crisis. The EU, however, was more heavily criticized in debtor and creditor countries than in the rest of member states, which reveals that the European project was naturally more contentious among those countries directly involved in the sovereign debt crisis that marred the eurozone after 2010.

In our study, we focus on negativity in different member states in the 2014 campaign as well as the main targets of this negativity through a concentration on political advertising, both video commercials and posters. In defining negative ads, the different cultural, social and historical context that is embedded in them by the different member states must be recognized. Based on our content analysis study of poster and videos in the 2014 European Parliament elections, we make use of data related to negativity to determine to what extent parties and candidates ‘went negative’ in this campaign.

The European Parliament elections in 2014 ended in momentous gains throughout the continent for several groupings that have explicitly questioned the form, and even the very existence, of the European Union (EU) itself. This growth in discontentment presents a potentially formidable challenge to the integrationist agenda that has hitherto largely prevailed in Brussels. The orthodoxy that states could achieve so much more by working closely together is now under threat. So it is perhaps somewhat paradoxical that what are often labelled ‘Eurosceptics’, or self-identify as ‘Eurorealists’, have exploited the European Parliament as a major campaigning platform from which to express themselves. Moreover, these parties have achieved representation and thereby gained practical resources that have in turn helped them further mobilize support within their respective member states. Perhaps one of the few comforts for adherents to what was once the seemingly hegemonic Europhile consensus that still dominates the Council of Ministers and European Commission is that the various sceptical forces ranged against them are ideologically divided and agree on little save their desire to hasten the end of the euro, the EU or both. This chapter considers messages produced and disseminated by the various sceptical parties during the 2014 elections, specifically through examination of their own political advertisements. The primary focus is on parties that have been labelled as ‘radical right’. The rise to prominence and 2014 campaigns by leading members of these tendencies will be discussed, with a focus on the Freedom Party of Austria, the UK Independence Party and the Hungarian nationalist Jobbik.

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.

This chapter focuses on a group of European Union (EU) member states located in Central and Eastern Europe. All are post-communist countries, although they can better be described today as emergent democracies with shared histories. They have some common political dynamics and share similar attitudes towards the EU including a desire to be seen as relevant to the Union as the ‘old’ member states. In our analysis, we are concerned with identifying similarities and differences in political advertising in this group of member states in the 2014 European Parliament elections. We have chosen these countries for several reasons. First, all countries in Central and Eastern Europe come into the category of ‘new EU members’ in that they joined in the years 2004–2013. Second, in their pre-accession period (and for some time afterwards) these countries were part of a series of specific organizations and agreements that contributed to shaping a distinct political and socio-economic regional identity.

This chapter explores the 2014 European Parliament election campaign in Croatia as a new member state of the European Union (EU). In 2014, Croatian political parties competed for the first time in the context of EU-wide elections to represent Croatia as an EU member state in the European Parliament. The campaign in 2014 lasted from 7 April until 24 May 2014, the longest ever campaign in Croatian electoral history. Competing for 11 seats in the European Parliament were 25 lists consisting of single parties or coalitions. In total, 17 out of those 25 lists did not produce any traditional promotional materials (posters and commercials). Furthermore, of the 11 candidates ultimately elected to the European Parliament, only one featured in a television spot. Therefore, the sample for analysis of political advertising in the 2014 elections in Croatia included in the overall content analysis for this book is quite modest, although that is not to say that the findings are not of interest.

In contests for the European Parliament, personalization does not lend itself as a strategy for campaigning in the same way as it is used in national election campaigns. This is due to the fact that EP members are organized in parliamentary groups which dominate the European political process. In addition, in the European system there is no president or prime minister who is determined by the vote. At the same time, candidates running for the European Parliament are often relatively unknown politicians and a personalized campaign is therefore not an appropriate strategy. In an attempt to make European elections more interesting but also in order to increase the influence of the parliament among the EU institutions, the European parties nominated European top candidates for the first time in 2014. This new development also suggested a more candidate-focused campaign than in earlier years. Against this background the chapter sets out to assess to what extent and in which form personalized strategies could be found in the advertising of the election campaign in 2014.

This chapter, stating that visual persuasion is an important feature of election campaigning, focuses on visual appeals in posters and spot ads by national parties in the 2014 European elections. It (a) describes to what extent and how different visual appeals were used and (b) examines the impact of political culture in member countries and political parties on visual strategies. The results show a widespread use of visual appeals in both posters and commercials throughout Europe. Party leaders, candidates and common people are often depicted, likewise national and European symbols. Although an Eastern European as well as a Eurosceptic visual style may be discernable, the findings overall point to a common visual campaigning culture in the EU.