Dissonant Public Spheres and Facebook Campaigning in Austria: A Cross-Level Study of the 2024 European and National Parliament Elections

Most research studying the content of political campaigns has employed cross-sectional, cross-national, or longitudinal designs. Although this research has enhanced our understanding of campaigns, there is still a lack of cross-level studies that compare the content of campaigns at different political levels. In this study, we employ a cross-level design by comparing campaign strategies in the 2024 European Parliament (EP) election and the 2024 National Parliament (NP) election in Austria. We focus on campaign strategies related to dissonant public spheres: Populist content, negative campaigning, and the polarizing issues of immigration and environmental policy. To do so, we apply a quantitative content analysis (N = 1,794) of the Facebook posts of political parties and candidates during both campaigns. Using binary logistic regression, we find that negative campaigning is significantly more likely and the issue of environmental policy is significantly less likely to occur in the NP campaign compared to the EP campaign. However, there are no significant differences between the EP and NP campaigns regarding populist content and the issue of immigration. Our findings demonstrate that the second-order elections theory may be less applicable to the analysis of digital campaign strategies. Instead, other frameworks—such as populist discourse as a global phenomenon, the transnationalization of issues like immigration, and the increasing salience of global concerns such as climate change—may offer more analytical traction.