Mobilization in the Context of Campaign Functions and Citizen Participation

Mobilization strategies are an essential part of political parties’ campaign communication. By mobilizing voters and supporters, parties promote civic participation in politics, the forms of which have multiplied given the possibilities of user activities on social media. To define their online mobilization strategies, parties have to choose which forms of participation (e.g., voting, donating, or liking or sharing a post) they will seek to mobilize. Understanding mobilization as a communicative appeal to engage audiences in participatory actions, in our study we conceptually linked parties' mobilizing appeals with three campaign functions - information, interaction, and mobilization - to systematize different types of mobilization. We applied that categorization to the social media campaigns of parties and top candidates in Germany and conducted a manual quantitative content analysis of 1,495 Facebook and 1,088 Instagram posts published in the run-up to the 2021 federal election. Results show that parties primarily mobilized their audiences to vote and seek out more information (e.g., on the party’s website). Although user reactions are generally an important factor of performance on social media, parties mostly avoided calls to like, share, or comment on posts. When compared, the strategies of parties and candidates indicate that mobilization is more the task of parties than of candidates. Differences between Facebook and Instagram can be attributed to the different technical affordances of the platforms. Because Facebook, unlike Instagram, supports clickable links in posts, parties are more likely to encourage users on Facebook to seek out more information online

Influence of the pandemic lockdown on Fridays for Future’s hashtag activism

Social movement organizations (SMOs) increasingly rely on Twitter to create new and viral communication spaces alongside newsworthy protest events and communicate their grievance directly to the public. When the COVID-19 pandemic impeded street protests in spring 2020, SMOs had to adapt their strategies to online-only formats. We analyze the German-language Twitter communication of the climate movement Fridays for Future (FFF) before and during the lockdown to explain how SMOs adapted their strategy under online-only conditions. We collected (re-)tweets containing the hashtag #fridaysforfuture (N = 46,881 tweets, N = 225,562 retweets) and analyzed Twitter activity, use of hashtags, and predominant topics. Results show that although the number of tweets was already steadily declining before, it sharply dropped during the lockdown. Moreover, the use of hashtags changed substantially and tweets focused increasingly on thematic discourses and debates around the legitimacy of FFF, while tweets about protests and calls for mobilization decreased

Missed opportunity to connect with European citizens? Europarties’ communication on Facebook during the 2019 European election campaign

The digitization of political communication and major transformations in the European Union (EU) have altered the conditions for European election campaigns. Whereas national political parties remain highly visible political actors in the EU, Europarties attract relatively little attention from the media and citizens. Social media could provide Europarties with an opportunity to raise awareness among European citizens. In our study, we investigated the social media campaign strategies of Europarties by conducting a manual quantitative content analysis comparing their Facebook posts with the posts of national parties from 12 European countries, focusing on the communication elements used to inform and mobilize citizens, especially in relation to the lead candidates. Our results revealed that some Europarties employed the concept of European lead candidates by emphasizing their candidates in their Facebook posts. However, in their relative inactivity on Facebook compared with national parties, Europarties did not seem to counteract the oft-cited lack of a European public sphere

Keep Them Engaged! Investigating the Effects of Self-centered Social Media Communication Style on User Engagement in 12 European Countries

On Facebook, patterns of user engagement largely shape what types of political contents 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

Between anger and love: A multi-level study on the impact of policy issues on user reactions in national election campaigns on Facebook in Germany, Hungary, and Norway

Eliciting user reactions is an important tactic for political actors using social media like Facebook to seek attention for campaign messages on policy issues. Still, little is known about policy issues’ effect on user reactions and how structural factors play into this relationship. Applying a standardized manual content analysis on Facebook posts from political parties and their top candidates during the German, Hungarian, and Norwegian national election campaigns in 2021/2022 (N = 4988), we investigate the relationship between policy issues and two of Facebook’s “emotional reactions” (“angry” and “love”). We find that posts addressing the economy, energy policy, and foreign policy drive more “angry” reactions, while environmental posts drive more “love” reactions. While effects are largely uniform across different party types, there are more variations between countries. Our analyses suggest that differences between individual parties and candidates and situational factors are vital to understanding the relationship between policy issues and user reactions.publishedVersio

Theoretical and experimental investigation on laminar boundary layer under cnoidal wave motion

Land-use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity loss. However, understanding how different components of land use drive biodiversity loss requires the investigation of multiple trophic levels across spatial scales. Using data from 150 agricultural grasslands in central Europe, we assess the influence of multiple components of local- and landscape-level land use on more than 4,000 above- and belowground taxa, spanning 20 trophic groups. Plot-level land-use intensity is strongly and negatively associated with aboveground trophic groups, but positively or not associated with belowground trophic groups. Meanwhile, both above- and belowground trophic groups respond to landscape-level land use, but to different drivers: aboveground diversity of grasslands is promoted by diverse surrounding land-cover, while belowground diversity is positively related to a high permanent forest cover in the surrounding landscape. These results highlight a role of landscape-level land use in shaping belowground communities, and suggest that revised agroecosystem management strategies are needed to conserve whole-ecosystem biodiversity. Land use intensification is a major driver of biodiversity change. Here the authors measure diversity across multiple trophic levels in agricultural grassland landscapes of varying management, finding decoupled responses of above- and belowground taxa to local factors and a strong impact of landscape-level land use

Guidelines for the use of flow cytometry and cell sorting in immunological studies

International audienceThe classical model of hematopoiesis established in the mouse postulates that lymphoid cells originate from a founder population of common lymphoid progenitors. Here, using a modeling approach in humanized mice, we showed that human lymphoid development stemmed from distinct populations of CD127(-) and CD127(+) early lymphoid progenitors (ELPs). Combining molecular analyses with in vitro and in vivo functional assays, we demonstrated that CD127(-) and CD127(+) ELPs emerged independently from lympho-mono-dendritic progenitors, responded differently to Notch1 signals, underwent divergent modes of lineage restriction, and displayed both common and specific differentiation potentials. Whereas CD127(-) ELPs comprised precursors of T cells, marginal zone B cells, and natural killer (NK) and innate lymphoid cells (ILCs), CD127(+) ELPs supported production of all NK cell, ILC, and B cell populations but lacked T potential. On the basis of these results, we propose a "two-family" model of human lymphoid development that differs from the prevailing model of hematopoiesis