Söders Ökofeuerwerk und die Grünfärbung der CSU: Diskursnetzwerke im bayrischen Themenwettbewerb

ZusammenfassungUmwelt- und Klimapolitik ist in den letzten Jahren zu einem äußerst relevanten Themenfeld des Parteienwettbewerbs in Deutschland avanciert, an welchem sich gut beobachten lässt, welche bedeutende Rolle spezifische Themen und Probleme im Wettbewerb um Wählerstimmen spielen. In diesem Artikel demonstrieren wir erstmalig, wie die Methode der Diskursnetzwerkanalyse zur Analyse solcher Themenwettbewerbe eingesetzt werden kann. Diskursnetzwerkanalysen verbinden die qualitative Inhaltsanalyse von Medienberichten mit Methoden der Sozialen Netzwerkanalyse und erlauben es so, über exakte Zeitfenster hinweg die Dynamik eines Themenwettbewerbs und die Interaktion von Parteien detailliert zu verfolgen und zu vergleichen. Dieses Potenzial demonstrieren wir am Beispiel des Issue-Wettbewerbs in der bayrischen Umweltpolitik in den Jahren 2018 und 2019. Ein besonderer Fokus liegt dabei auf der staatstragenden CSU, die im Landtagswahlkampf 2018 noch versuchte, mit ausgeprägten migrationspolitischen Forderungen Wähler der AfD abzuwerben. Ein Jahr später zündete Ministerpräsident und Parteichef Markus Söder hingegen ein ganzes „Feuerwerk“ an umwelt- und klimapolitischen Vorschlägen. Wie kam es zu dieser Neuausrichtung des Diskurses? Anhand von Zeitungsartikeln aus der Süddeutschen Zeitung und im Vergleich dreier Diskursperioden zeigen wir, wie sich die Salienz der Umweltpolitik im Diskursverlauf veränderte. Eine entscheidende Rolle spielte dabei vor allem das überaus erfolgreiche Volksbegehren „Rettet die Bienen“, infolgedessen sich der umweltpolitische Diskurs deutlich intensivierte und diversifizierte. Unsere Analyse zeigt, dass sich die CSU bedingt durch diese Dynamik und die Bedrohung durch die elektoralen Erfolge der Grünen, daraufhin gezwungen sah mit diesen in einen Wettkampf um die Issue-Ownership grüner Themen einzutreten.

STAYING IN THEIR LANES: ISSUE OWNERSHIP IN THE 2016 AND 2020 U.S. PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGNS ON FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

Prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with Republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and Democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare. Given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. Use supervised machine-learning and a lexicon approach to classify candidate posts on twelve different political topics, we analyze Facebook and Twitter messages from 17 Republicans and 19 Democrats during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Elections. We find that Democrats are more likely to post about the issues on social media, and Republicans and Democrats talk about significantly different topics. We also find that candidates of both parties tended to advocate for the issues they cared about, rather than attack opponents on issues.

Socially mediated issue ownership

Given the growing importance of issue competition and the growing use of social media during elections, this study seeks to create a better understanding of how issue dynamics relating to political parties play out on social media. It tests whether issue ownership theory can explain how parties and issues are being discussed on Twitter and to what extent a mediated form of issue ownership aligns with citizens’ perceptions of issue ownership. The results indicate that perceptions of issue ownership as measured in representative surveys correlate with variations of what issues parties are linked with on Twitter. Some deviations also emerged, which possibly reflect short-term changes in parties’ issue competition. Understanding how issue ownership mediates through social media platforms is important in order to evaluate the role of social media in contemporary opinion forming processes and sheds light on the issue competition among political parties in online fora.

South Africa’s 2016 municipal elections How the ANC and DA leveraged Twitter to Capture the Urban Vote

This paper focuses on how South Africa’s governing party, the African National Congress (ANC), and main opposition, the Democratic Alliance (DA), leveraged microblogging site Twitter. This was part of their urban election campaign arsenal in the 2016 local government elections (LGE) to promote party-political digital issue ownership within an urban context. Using each party’s corpus of 2016 election-related tweets and election manifestos, this three-phased grounded theory study found that each party used Twitter as a digital political communication platform to communicate their election campaigns. The DA notably leveraged the social networking site more for intense focused messaging of its negative campaign against the ANC while simultaneously promoting positive electoral messages around its own core issues and metro (urban) mayoral candidates. Furthermore, battleground metros were identified, narrow-cast and subsequently audience.segmented by the party in Ekurhuleni, Johannesburg, Tshwane (in Gauteng) and Nelson Mandela Bay (in the Eastern Cape). This led to an emphasised campaign to either activate the party’s own urban support base and/or to suppress the ANC’s turnout in these highly-contested areas. The results of this study further indicate that the ANC and DA both used Twitter to claim explicit and implicit digital party-political issue ownership in the 2016 LGE.

Israel

This chapter focuses on a case of nationwide proportional representation. In Israel, all members of the 120-seat Knesset are elected in a single nationwide district under closed party lists. Due to this electoral system design, the geographic location of votes does not matter for a party’s overall seat total, and candidates have almost no incentive to develop a personal vote. The chapter finds strong support for the expertise model in how the Labor Party assigns members to legislative committees, but relatively little support in the Likud Party. Both parties exhibit strong issue ownership tendencies.

Committees Type and the Expertise Model of Party Personnel

This chapter introduces the typology of committee types: high policy, public goods, and distributive. It develops the theory of party personnel strategy, consisting of two models political parties may use: the expertise model and the electoral–constituency model. The chapter derives testable premises for the expertise model, which states that parties assign legislators according to individual attributes (e.g., occupation, gender, and local electoral experience) that signal a background relevant to the type of committee on which they serve. The chapter argues that parties of the left and right will tend to differ in which committee types they emphasize, even in the same electoral system, according to their issue ownership. It summarizes the thirteen parties on their tendencies to have legislators with each of the key individual attributes.

New Zealand

This chapter focuses on the impact of electoral reform in New Zealand, which changed from first-past-the post (FPTP) to mixed-member proportional (MMP). The chapter analyzes the National and Labour parties under both electoral systems. As expected, the expertise model becomes more important to parties’ allocation of legislators to House of Representatives committees after the electoral reform to MMP, due to the move to a system in which votes cast anywhere count toward seat maximization. Parties also change how they assign members under the electoral–constituency model, as the system moves from one in which winning districts is the exclusive way in which a party maximizes seats to one in which legislators representing districts may be leveraged to help the party win more votes from the party list. Both parties show strong issue ownership tendencies before and after electoral reform.