The Salience of Traditional Moral Values: Bolsonaro’s Electoral Competition Strategy on Twitter

This article analyzes the electoral competition strategy adopted by the Brazilian presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro on Twitter, supported by the saliency theory – where candidates compete by emphasizing different topics and selecting issues from a universal agenda to focus the campaign’s attention and efforts. The salience Bolsonaro’s winning campaign attributed to values during the 2018 presidential election. Values are attitudinal guidelines related to different social, religious, economic, and political concepts, covering various topics on views about what is desirable or undesirable in a society. The study used content analysis to explore and categorize a corpus of 809 tweets posted in the account @jairbolsonaro. The data was mined by applying computational intelligence methods and using the public API and the Python Twint library. Four dimensions of cultural variance found in the World Values Survey were used to establish the categories: traditional values, rational-secular values, survival values, and self-expression values. The results show that the content of Bolsonaro’s electoral competition strategy was based on traditional moral values and the campaign’s format was developed primarily via social media.

First avoidance, then engagement: Political parties’ issue competition in the electoral cycle

A major contradiction in party research is between the saliency theory and the logic of issue convergence, or what is often referred to as issue avoidance vs. engagement. Extant research shows that parties both emphasize only their own issues and engage each other’s issues. This study addresses this contradiction and argues that both perspectives have merits. The key to unlocking the puzzle is to unwind the electoral cycle. As far as possible into the electoral cycle, parties apply a long-term strategy and talk past each other. Yet, as the election draws closer, parties realize that they cannot change the agenda and therefore switch to a short-term strategy to engage rival parties’ issues. This argument is tested across multiple issues on a new dataset consisting of 19,350 press releases issued by the political parties in Denmark during several election cycles, 2004–2019.

Presidential Rhetoric and Nationalism: Evidence from Russia and Ukraine

This article leverages saliency theory to explore how regimes may use state-controlled media to intensify nationalism and gain legitimacy. I explore mainstream news coverage in Russia and Ukraine with a particular emphasis on how political leadership frames nationalist rhetoric in the two countries to emphasize certain issues over others. I focus on relevant media content that contains nationalist rhetoric before and after the invasion of Russia into Ukraine’s territory in the spring of 2014. Content analysis suggests that political leaders in both countries have focused on political issues, while largely ignoring economic issues in their nationalist rhetoric. The analysis also shows that state leaders can successfully promote nationalism by emphasizing cultural issues and concerns.

Bridging Spatial and Saliency Theory: Party Size and Issue Selection in Campaigns

I propose a unified explanation for parties' joint policy and emphasis decisions which bridges saliency theory and spatial analyses of party campaigns. Party platforms are anchored by the policy preferences of activists, core supporters and target voters, leading parties to disproportionately emphasize issues where their policies are popular with all key constituencies. However, which voters a party targets relates to its historical electoral performance (“party size”). Traditionally successful (“major”) parties emphasize issues where the policies preferred by activists and core supporters are generally popular, but smaller (“minor”) parties emphasize issues where their preferred policies may be unpopular but are distinctive. Using recent European data and various empirical strategies, I show that this account has significant explanatory power beyond existing party typologies and theories of issue selection.

AGENDAS, PREFERÊNCIAS, COMPETIÇÃO: PT e PSDB em disputas presidenciais

Há um debate na ciência política brasileira sobre a bipolarização do sistema partidário, decorrente da concentração da competição, nas eleições presidenciais, em dois partidos: PT e PSDB. O objetivo do artigo é identificar o conteúdo e os termos da competição entre tais partidos no que se refere às suas ênfases temáticas, através da comparação entre os programas de governo de cada um para as eleições presidenciais de 2006 a 2014. A hipótese, derivada da saliency theory, é de que a competição entre eles se baseia na seleção de temas específicos e agendas alternativas. O método utilizado para mensuração das agendas e preferências é a análise de conteúdo, com aplicação das categorias do Manifest Research Group/MARPOR. Os resultados revelam que as plataformas se aproximam por conterem os temas da agenda pública nacional, mas se distinguem nas prioridades que estabelecem e na direção em que adaptam suas ênfases ao longo do tempo.