Status

• Work in progress

• With Simon Kruschinski and Jörg Haßler

• Accepted at ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in April 2023

Abstract

While it has been argued that parties adapt their messages to target groups to maximise electoral support, we know little about the content of these ads. How do parties tailor the content of these targeted messages and how is this tailoring influencing their success? Based on theoretical expectations derived from the literature about group appeals and party competition, we will provide empirical answers to these questions. We first show how parties tailor the content of their targeted campaign messages. Second, we investigate if the tailoring of campaign content leads to greater success.

We tackle these questions using a manual content analysis of the Facebook and Instagram Ads by German parties (n=4200) during the 2021 general election and merging it with the novel Meta Ad Targeting Dataset. This gives us the opportunity to explore which target groups the parties selected to reach, and how they adapted the message content to these target groups. Lastly, we make use of the impressions of these ads as a measurement of success. The findings will provide original insights about the effects of modern election campaigns.

Keywords

Targeting, tailoring, modern election campaigns, campaign strategies, political parties