Although images have always been part of politics, research on the visual aspects of political communication recently gained momentum, especially with the spread of social media–based political communication. However, there are still several significant research gaps in this field. The aim of this article is to identify and compare the patterns and effects of Hungarian politicians’ ( n = 51) image-based communication on Facebook ( n = 2,992) and Instagram ( n = 868) during the Hungarian parliamentary election campaign in 2018. By doing so, we shed light on two important dimensions of personalization: individualization and privatization. This work is designed to fill three gaps in the literature. We argue that existing research of visual political communication (1) treats images predominantly as illustrations, (2) is limited to single-platform studies, and (3) does not investigate the engagement effects of images. To move beyond these limitations, this study investigates images as objects of interest on their own; it adopts a cross-platform comparative approach and examines the engagement effects of visual cues by applying a combination of inductive and deductive qualitative content analysis. Our results show that images are often used to personalize communication. While on Facebook the individualization dimension of personalization is more common and popular, on Instagram its privatization dimension prevails. Furthermore, on Facebook, users like more politics-related candidate-centered images, but on Instagram we could not find similar effects for more informal visuals.

The study addresses the question of what type of political content can trigger reactions from electoral candidates’ followers on Facebook. Citizens’ reactivity is increasingly important in contemporary political communication. The politicians’ posts can reach the wider public through the citizens’ public reactions. While we have extended knowledge about mass media reactivity, citizens’ political reactivity on social media is highly underexplored. This study is intended to fill this gap by examining what type of political content can trigger reaction from followers on politicians’ Facebook pages. The data contain 7048 Facebook posts by 183 single-member district candidates posted during the Hungarian general election campaign in 2014. The unit of analysis is the individual Facebook post, and the dependent variables are the numbers of likes, comments, and shares. The independent variables are the structural (text, picture, video, etc.) and substantial (content, emotional tone, etc.) characteristics of each post, after controlling for, inter alia, a general follower-activity score on politicians’ Facebook pages. Results showed that citizens are highly reactive to negative emotion-filled, text-using, personal, and activity-demanding posts. Virality is especially facilitated by memes, videos, negative contents and mobilizing posts, and posts containing a call for sharing.

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political content citizens can see on the platform. Higher engagement leads to higher visibility. Therefore, one of the major goals of political actors’ Facebook communication is to produce content with the potential to provoke user engagement, and thereby increase their own visibility. This study introduces the concept of self-centered social media communication style which focuses on “salient” and “owned” issues with populist and negative appeals and investigates how user engagement is related to its main elements. We also explore how users’ receptivity to these content-related factors is shaped by country context. More specifically, we hypothesize that users are more likely to react, comment on and share posts focusing on salient topics or issues “owned” by parties rather than more permanent policy issues, and posts including populist appeals and negativity. Further, we test how these effects are moderated by geographical regions and the level of party system polarization. We manually coded 9,703 Facebook posts of 68 parties from 12 European countries in the context of the 2019 European elections. Our findings show that users are more likely to engage with immigration-related, domestic, populist and negative posts, but react less to posts dealing with environmental or economic issues. While issue ownership does not play a significant role for user engagement, country context plays a minor role. However, some populist appeals are more effective in more polarized countries.

This study is designed to contribute to the debate on whether Facebook is a normalizing or equalizing force in political competition in the context of the 2019 European Parliament elections. It argues that conflicting findings in the literature are due to (a) the lack of cross-country investigations, (b) the lack of a multidimensional approach to Facebook performance, and (c) the conceptual confusion around the normalization or equalization theories. This research tests both the absolute and the relative understanding of the hypotheses in all the visibility-related dimensions (adoption, activity, number of followers, user engagement, and ad spending) in a cross-country dataset that includes all the Facebook activity of 186 parties in 28 countries. Findings demonstrate that in absolute terms the equalization thesis prevails in activity and advertising, while the normalization thesis is confirmed in the dimensions of organic direct and indirect reach. At the same time, in relative terms, social media equalize political competition in each dimension.

This study investigates the political topics that triggered user engagement on candidates’ Facebook pages during the 2018 Hungarian general election campaign on a full dataset of politicians’ communication by using automated content analysis approaches. We have limited knowledge on what topics spread well on Facebook. This study aims to fill this gap by investigating the engagement-triggering effects of prominent topics of the 2018 Hungarian election campaign. It hypothesizes that salient issues (immigration and corruption) and campaign-related posts will obtain more user reaction, while policy topics and mobilization-related content will be less engaging. The effects of issue ownership on user engagement are also tested. For this, the study draws upon an extensive dataset that includes all Facebook posts of each candidate (511 candidates 38030 posts) running for MP positions, posted between the official starting day of the campaign and Election Day. Topics are identified by dictionary-based and supervised learning methods that allow us to categorize a larger set of data than earlier works. The results show that corruption, development policy, and campaign are the most popular topics with users. The most interesting finding, however, is related to the reversed issue ownership effect on user engagement.

The study examines the role and impact of Facebook as a central political information source within today’s high-choice information environment among university students. It assumes that the growing role of Facebook as a political information source means the return of the two-step flow of information model: political views and experiences of the less interested majority are largely shaped by the communication of the fewer politically interested peers. Based on a survey among university students in Hungary, the study confirms that Facebook is the primary political information source for university students. The results indicate that only a politically interested minority of university students post or share political content on Facebook. However, posting is shaped by dissatisfaction with the way democracy functions, and accordingly, obtaining regular information about politics through Facebook leads to more negative perceptions about the way democracy works. Based on these findings, it may be assumed that the negative evaluation of democracy by students who are informed about politics through Facebook results from the fact that on this platform information and opinions are mostly provided by their discontented peers. An important contribution of this study is that social influences resulting from using Facebook are not investigated in themselves, but are embedded into the modern information environment where several information sources are used simultaneously.