I argue that three factors are important here. First, strategic communication according to issue preferences requires coordination. Centralised communication in the hands of the central party office allows for better coordination and communication closer to the party line and issue preferences. Second, parties are in firm control in centralised channels, while decentralisation allows individual members to potentially circumvent partisan constrains and push their own preferences (Enli and Skogerbø Citation2013; Silva and Proksch Citation2022). Third, decentralised communication may also provide an incentive for parties to expand their appeal by focusing on a broader set of issues. Thus, decentralised channels may also be a strategic tool to focus less on issue preferences but on a variety of issues. Based on these considerations, I expect the communication of political parties to be more in line with issue preferences when communication is centralised than when it is decentralised.
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The third hypothesis deals with a channel’s degree of pre-structuredness and the influence thereof on issue communication. In highly pre-structured channels, the topical focus is pre-given to a certain extent, and parties only have limited control over issue selection. Hence, issue communication is pre-structured. Examples of such an environment are parliamentary debates. Parliamentary debates are one of the most important arenas of political communication and a key tool for parties to send policy signals in party competition (Proksch and Slapin Citation2015). This also applies to the issues discussed in parliamentary speeches, as recent research finds that parties and their MPs use speeches to advance their issue preferences (Debus and Tosun Citation2021; Ivanusch Citation2023). However, parliamentary speech-making is also substantially influenced by the legislative agenda. Most of the time, bills or specific topics are debated in parliament (Proksch and Slapin Citation2015). Certain issues are given from the start; these in turn structure issue communication during parliamentary debates. This is the process that is encompassed by the concept of pre-structuredness. Such an environment makes it more difficult for parties and their members to communicate according to their ideal agenda. Moreover, parties may have different opportunity structures to influence the pre-structuredness of a channel. For example, partisan control over the legislative agenda often provides government parties with more influence over the issues discussed in parliamentary debates than opposition parties (Cox and McCubbins Citation2005; Döring Citation1995).
These dynamics show that important party communication channels, such as parliamentary speeches, are subject to very specific institutional contexts. In these channels, issue communication is significantly pre-structured, restricting parties when it comes to discussing their issue preferences. Thus, although recent research shows that parties find at least some room to focus on their issue preferences in pre-structured channels (e.g. parliamentary speeches), I still expect issue preferences to be much less reflected here than in other communication channels.
For the analysis, I draw on a data set comprising a variety of texts produced by political parties in Austria, Germany and Switzerland between January 2019 and September 2021. I rely on this case selection for three main reasons.
First, the selected countries represent typical Western European multi-party systems while still allowing to control for potential variations stemming from different electoral systems and political cultures (e.g. government-opposition dynamics). While Germany uses a mixed electoral system, Austria and Switzerland use proportional systems. However, electoral districts and party lists play different roles in the electoral systems of Austria and Switzerland. Furthermore, Switzerland differs significantly from the other two countries when it comes to government formation and direct democracy. Switzerland has a strong tradition of consociationalism and therefore usually relies on a special formula (Zauberformel) to form a government. Additionally, Switzerland makes ample use of referenda, which is not the case in Austria or Germany.
Second, the broad time period covered (1 January 2019–26 September 2021) allows for party issue salience to be studied at multiple points in time and in different phases of political communication. The selected period covers one election campaign per country (Austria: 2019; Germany: 2021; Switzerland: 2019) as well as ‘routine times of politics’. Furthermore, it includes several months before and during the Covid-19 pandemic to account and control for potential effects of this crisis on party behaviour.
Third, all three countries studied are German speaking.Footnote1 As I employ quantitative computer-based text analysis, a mono-lingual analysis should ensure higher reliability and comparability. While comparing different types of texts is a significant challenge in itself, a multi-lingual analysis would create even more and yield potentially incommensurable results (Chan et al. Citation2020; Maier et al. Citation2022).
The main text corpus used in this article consists of four types of party communication channels: press releases, parliamentary speeches, tweets from party accounts and tweets from individual party members. As an additional data source for the analysis, I use labelled manifestos from the Manifesto Project (Lehmann, Burst, Lewandowski, et al. Citation2022). This channel selection is well suited for the purpose of this study because of two main reasons.
First, all the channels selected are important avenues for parties and their members to communicate with the public on a regular basis. Press releases are important and flexible tools for parties to inform journalists about specific issues and respond to daily developments (e.g. Dalmus et al. Citation2017; Klüver and Sagarzazu Citation2016). Furthermore, the content of press releases can potentially reach a large audience, if picked up by journalists (Hopmann et al. Citation2012; Meyer et al. Citation2020). Parliamentary speeches as well are an avenue for parties and their MPs to send policy signals (Proksch and Slapin Citation2015). Recent research shows that parties advance their issue preferences in parliamentary debates, making them an important tool in issue competition (e.g. Debus and Tosun Citation2021; Ivanusch Citation2023). How parliamentary speeches compare to other tools such as press releases is largely unclear, however. Tweets (and social media posts in general) are also frequently used by political actors to communicate with the public and to engage with or criticise political opponents (e.g. Gilardi, Gessler, et al. Citation2022; Russell Citation2018). For this case study, I choose Twitter, now X, for the social media channel because it is well suited to measure the content of broad national political debates. Previous research shows that Facebook, for example, is mainly used by political actors for (local) campaign-related purposes, whereas Twitter is the primary platform where contemporary political events are discussed on a national-level (Stier et al. Citation2018).
Second, the chosen channels differ in a number of dimensions. Crucially, at least one channel is different to all the others for each of the three channel characteristics introduced above. These differences are displayed in Table 1. The channels are assigned values of 0 or 1 for each of the three channel characteristics. While press releases are primarily targeted to journalists (i.e. mediated channel), the other channels are aimed more directly at the general public. Although Twitter has a more ‘elitist’ audience compared to Facebook, its architecture (i.e. hashtags, retweets) facilitates the diffusion of political information across the platform (Stier et al. Citation2018; Wu et al. Citation2011). Therefore, Twitter allows political actors to communicate political information directly to a broad audience without having to rely on journalists as gatekeepers. In terms of centralisation, tweets from party accounts are fully centralised, but the platform also facilitates decentralised party communication via the accounts of individual party members. Press releases and parliamentary speeches are a special case in terms of the centralisation characteristic. While individual members (regularly) draft press releases and give the speeches in parliament, the party leadership or party office retains a certain amount of control over the content.Footnote2 In terms of pre-structuredness, parliamentary speeches stand out due to the legislative agenda structuring the context and content of parliamentary debates.
The corpus covers the time period from 1 January 2019 to 26 September 2021 and was collected in the context of a bigger research project. The press releases contained in the corpus were published by the political parties and their parliamentary party groups (PPGs). For Austria and Germany, webscraping was used to download the press releases from a webservice of the Austrian Press Agency (https://www.ots.at/) and from the German party and PPG websites. In the case of Switzerland, the data was provided by the DigDemLab at the University of Zurich (Gilardi, Baumgartner, et al. Citation2022). The parliamentary speech data consists of an updated version of the ParlSpeech V2 data set (Rauh and Schwalbach Citation2020) for Austria and Germany and texts downloaded from the webservices of the Swiss parliament through the R package swissparl (Zumbach Citation2020). The tweets from party accounts (central office, PPG) and individual party members (party leaders, general secretary, all MPs) were collected through the Twitter Researcher API.Footnote3 Table 2 provides an overview of the complete corpus used for this study. Overall, the corpus consists of more than 571,000 individual documents.Footnote4
Measuring issue salience in such a voluminous variety of texts is a significant challenge. In this article, I use an advanced text-as-data technique to study multiple types of text in a coherent and efficient way, namely cross-domain topic classification. Cross-domain learning is a way to reduce the necessary amount of training data and resources required for classic supervised approaches. Supervised models require labelled training data to learn about the specific task at hand, and labelling is resource intensive. With several different text types, as in this study, a very large amount of labelled training data would be needed for each individual text type. Cross-domain learning can mitigate this problem. The basic idea behind cross-domain learning is that models are only trained on a single type of text, but the trained model can also be applied to other types of text (e.g. Osnabrügge et al. Citation2021). This way, researchers only need to develop one training data set or can even use existing labelled data for training the model. Therefore, a huge potential for the application of cross-domain learning exists in political science and the social sciences in general.
For the cross-domain topic classification, I rely on the state-of-the-art transformer-based model BERT (Devlin et al. Citation2019). BERT is elaborately pre-trained on vast amounts of unlabelled text and provides a very good general syntactic and semantic representation of words. To use BERT for a specific application, only some minor training (‘finetuning’) is necessary. For this training procedure, I adapt the approach developed by Burst et al. (Citation2023a, Citation2023b) and train the BERT model on labelled manifestos provided through the corpus of the Manifesto Project (Lehmann, Burst, Lewandowski, et al. Citation2022). The Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR) uses human coding to analyse party manifestos from all over the world according to a set coding scheme. The coders thereby assign each individual (quasi-)sentence from the manifestos to one specific category. Overall, the Manifesto Project coding scheme consists of 76 main codes plus one ‘NA’ category (code ‘000’). For this article, I use the labelled manifestos as training data and assign all categories from the Manifesto Project to 20 overarching issues.Footnote5 The final training data set used here consists of more than 728,000 annotated (quasi-)sentences in total.
The annotated manifestos constitute a well-suited training data set for the BERT model.Footnote6 During training, the BERT model uses the annotated training data to learn about the specific task. In this case, BERT learns about the relationship between specific text features and issue categories via machine-learning. I then apply the trained model to the unlabelled texts of interest (press releases, parliamentary speeches, tweets from parties, tweets from individual party members). I use the model to classify each document into one of the issue categories specified in the codebook.Footnote7
Compared to a manually coded gold standard,Footnote8 the BERT model achieves an accuracy of 58% for press releases, 59% for parliamentary speeches and 50% for tweets.Footnote9 These are comparatively good results for cross-domain topic classification of multiple categories (20 categories), especially applied to such a diverse set of texts as in this article.Footnote10
The main goal of the analysis is to identify the effect of each individual channel characteristic on political parties’ issue salience. In order to achieve this, I use regression analysis on different samples and combinations of communication channels.
Issue salience functions as the dependent variable in the analysis and is based on the results of the text analysis described above. It marks the percentage of attention a party devotes to a specific issue within a communication channel (e.g. press releases) over one quarter of a year. I choose to calculate issue salience by quarter as it allows a more reliable estimation than by month. Issue salience by month could be heavily influenced by external events and some channels do not produce consistent monthly communication.Footnote11 Thus, I use issue salience by quarter as the dependent variable in the regression analysis.
The first independent variable is manifesto salience. I use it to measure the influence of party preferences on issue salience within a communication channel (e.g. press releases). Manifesto salience refers to the percentage of attention a party devotes to a specific issue in its manifesto based on data from the Manifesto Project (Lehmann, Burst, Matthieß, et al. Citation2022). Manifestos are negotiated at length inside parties and are thus viewed as a ‘uniquely representative and authoritative characterisation of party policy at a given point in time’ (Budge et al. Citation1987, p. 18). Consequently, manifestos represent the ideal agenda of political parties and are therefore well-suited indicators to capture party issue preferences (Norris et al. Citation1999). As postulated in the hypotheses (H1–H3), the influence of manifesto salience on issue salience within a communication channel is expected to vary depending on the channel’s characteristics. To account for the potential variation in mediated, centralised and pre-structured channels, I use dummy variables as further independent variables (see Table 1).
However, simply comparing multiple channels in a single regression model is not enough to identify the effect of each individual channel characteristic. Rather, it is necessary to isolate as much as possible the potential effect of each channel characteristic. In order to achieve this for the three identified channel characteristics, I use different samples. To investigate the effect of a specific characteristic, I compare two channels that are similar with regard to several characteristics except the specific one under investigation. Based on the resulting samples, I run different regression models for each channel characteristic.
Bachelor Party Strippers ScottsdaleIn order to measure the effect of a primarily journalistic audience (mediated channels) on issue salience, I compare press releases with tweets from party accounts. Neither channel is directly influenced by any pre-given structure (e.g. legislative agenda), and in both cases the party office has a considerable degree of control.Footnote12 Press releases are primarily drafted for a journalistic audience, however, and thus deemed a mediated channel; while tweets allow direct communication with the public.
For isolating the effect of centralised communication, I compare tweets from party accounts with tweets from individual party members. Here, the only difference between the two channels is the authorship of posts. While communication through party accounts is firmly in the hands of the central party office or PPG leadership (i.e. centralised), this is much less the case for communication via accounts of individual party members (i.e. decentralised).
To measure the effect of pre-structuredness within a channel, I use parliamentary speeches and press releases. Communication in both these cases is to a certain extent decentralised, but party leadership retains some sort of control (see discussion in endnote 2). Parliamentary speeches are, however, influenced by the bills and topics on the legislative agenda. This pre-given structure does not exist in press releases.
Based on these different samples, I apply individual regression models to identify the effect of a specific channel characteristic. The first model investigates the effect of mediated channels, the second of centralised channels and the third of pre-structured channels. As model specification, I use OLS regression with fixed effects for country, party, issue and quarter to account for potential unobserved differences between these groups. I also control for the time passed since the last election (i.e. quarters since last election) as this may impact the influence of manifestos on party communication. Furthermore, the observations are not independent from each other as the dependent variable issue salience is measured in percent per party and quarter. Thus, the values for issue salience are dependent on each other. To account for this data structure, I use panel-corrected standard errors (Beck and Katz Citation1996, Citation1995) in a similar way as Wagner and Meyer (Citation2014).
In a first step, it is worth taking a look at the overall distribution of issue salience within each communication channel. Figure 2 displays the extent to which issue salience in press releases, parliamentary speeches and tweets (party accounts and individual party members) differs from manifestos (ideal agenda) across all three countries and parties. It shows the difference between manifestos and the other channels per issue.Footnote13 What becomes clear is that issue agendas vary considerably across channels. This is especially pronounced for the issues of ‘democracy’ and ‘political authority’. While they play comparatively small roles in manifestos, this is not the case in the other channels. Political parties use social media (tweets) in particular to discuss democracy in general and to engage with or attack political opponents, as indicated by the issue of ‘political authority’ (e.g. references to party or personal competence). Similar patterns apply to press releases and parliamentary speeches, but to a more limited extent. Hence, discussions of political processes and competition between political actors are much more prevalent in tweets, press releases and parliamentary speeches than in manifestos. This is not surprising as these channels allow political actors to discuss and comment on different stages of the political process on a regular basis. The same cannot be said for manifestos, which are generally negotiated at length inside parties and only published ahead of elections.
Conversely, issues that are comparatively important in manifestos (e.g. ‘labour’, ‘welfare state’) receive significantly less attention in the other channels. Press releases, parliamentary speeches and tweets from party accounts or individual party members, however, also show clear differences between them. While ‘European Union’ receives comparatively greater attention in press releases and tweets from party accounts, parliamentary speeches show a relatively strong focus on ‘equality’ and ‘foreign affairs’. Similarly, ‘agriculture’ is comparatively salient in parliamentary speeches and press releases, but not in tweets. Hence, we can clearly observe different issue agendas across party communication channels, lending further support to past findings (Elmelund-Præstekær Citation2011; Norris et al. Citation1999; Tresch et al. Citation2018).
In the next step, the analysis focuses on how different communication channel characteristics affect issue salience. Through the different samples introduced earlier, I compare channels that are similar on a number of dimensions except the specific characteristic under investigation in order to isolate the effect of a particular channel characteristic. According to hypotheses H1–H3, the influence of party preferences (ideal agenda) on issue salience within a communication channel should be moderated by the specific channel characteristics. As discussed earlier, the issue preferences of parties (ideal agenda) are represented by the variable manifesto salience in the models.
Table 3 displays regression results that measure the moderating effect of channel characteristics on the influence of manifesto salience.Footnote14 The first model compares tweets from party accounts (direct) and press releases (mediated), but it does not find any statistically significant differences between them, as indicated by the interaction term. Therefore, H1 cannot be supported based on this finding. This contradicts a common argument in the literature. Existing research argues that mediated channels, such as press releases, are tailored to the needs and interests of journalists, who are usually interested in issues that are already salient in the media and among other important actors, but not so much in the communication of issue preferences (i.e. ‘owned’ issues). This is the case because the latter offer nothing ‘new’ and therefore do not have a high news value (Dalmus et al. Citation2017; Meyer et al. Citation2020).
Although surprising at first sight, the lack of difference between direct and mediated channel fits well with hybrid media system theory. In hybrid media environments, actors simultaneously use ‘older’ and ‘newer’ logics in producing, distributing and consuming news and political information (Chadwick Citation2017). Journalists nowadays rely not only on traditional sources of information (e.g. press releases), but leverage alternative sources (e.g. social media) as well. Political actors, in turn, adapt to this new logic and now also address journalists through direct channels (e.g. Twitter aka X). Furthermore, the time and personnel required to draft social media posts is comparatively small. Parties can therefore discuss a broader set of issues and strict prioritisation according to the ideal agenda may not be highly relevant on many social media platforms. Therefore, hybrid media environments and the low costs of producing social media content can explain the lack of difference between direct and mediated channels observed in this study.
The second regression model evaluates the influence of centralised communication on parties’ issue salience. Although decentralised communication arguably can serve as an amplifier of central party messages, H2 still expects that party preferences have a greater influence on issue salience in centralised channels than in decentralised ones. This should be the case as centralisation allows better coordination and firm control of content by the party office. Furthermore, decentralised communication may also provide an incentive for parties and their members to expand their appeal by focusing on a broader or different set of issues. Therefore, communication along the ideal agenda should be more prevalent in centralised channels than in decentralised ones. In the model, I compare (centralised) tweets from party accounts with (decentralised) tweets from individual party members. The results indeed show a stronger effect of manifesto salience in the centralised channel (see interaction term). The effect is statistically significant and H2 can therefore be supported.
The guest list is one of the most crucial elements of a successful EVJF. So who should you invite to your special day? The first question to ask is: who are the people closest to the bride-to-be? Witnesses, bridesmaids, close friends and, of course, family members such as a sister or cousin are essential guests to consider. It's always a good idea to consult the bride-to-be directly to make sure the guest list matches her wishes. After all, it's her day, and nothing should be left to chance. This not only ensures that the right people are present, but also avoids any faux pas.
This is the first decision you have to make, and it's not always the easiest. Too soon before the wedding? You forget the final details of the big day. Too late? You run the risk of tiring out the bride just before the big day. The ideal time is often between one and three months before the wedding. You also need to take into account the availability of the participants. A doodle or Google Form can work wonders to simplify the choices. And if possible, plan a back-up date, because life is rarely a smooth ride.
Also look out for local events that could affect the booking of a venue or accessibility (festivals, bank holidays, school holidays...). In short, choosing a date requires a bit of flair, a lot of diplomacy and a pinch of luck.
The budget is often a tricky question, but one that is essential to the success of the EVJF. The first step is to ask the guests about their financial capabilities in order to establish a realistic budget. It's important to compare prices to choose options that suit everyone's budget and desires. The EVJF budget should be shared equally between all the participants, with the exception of the bride. It is advisable to collect the funds at least 2 months before the event to avoid any last-minute stress. In general, the budget per person for an EVJF varies between €75 and €150, or even more, depending on the activities planned.
For optimum management, draw up a detailed estimate and suggest price ranges when you do the survey: less than €100, between €100 and €200, and more. Planning staggered payments can also help to ensure that all participants can finance the event. Don't forget to include an extra margin of 20 to 30 euros for unforeseen circumstances.
This is probably one of the most important points: the location of the EVJF. It must be suited to the number of participants, the theme chosen and the type of activities planned. A villa with a swimming pool for a relaxing weekend? A cottage in the countryside for a nature EVJF? A stylish city-centre flat for a night out? It all depends on the atmosphere you want to create. Renting a place allows you to put down your suitcases, decorate to your heart's content, plan workshops or games without worrying about noise, and above all... live together for 24 hours or more.
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