EU Campaign Race in V4 – Project Workshop

As part of the international conference “Media Studies: Studies and Perspectives 5 – Media in Crisis / Crisis in the Media”, held at the Institute of Journalism and Social Communication, University of Wrocław, we are pleased to invite you to a project workshop for EU Campaign Race in V4 – Political Communication in Social Media before the 2024 EP Elections. The workshop will take place on May 13, during the second day of the conference. During the session, we will present the first results of our research. 

Participation is free of charge, and the full event program will be available here:

https://idiks.uwr.edu.pl/2025/01/21/studia-i-perspektywy-medioznawcze-5-media-w-kryzysie-kryzys-w-mediach/

Project description

We are a collaborative team of researchers from Poland, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia who joined forces to conduct a comparative examination of political communication within the V4 region ahead of the EP 2024 elections. In alignment with the CamforS research initiative, we are employing a shared codebook for content analysis. Our focus is on enhancing the global understanding of political dynamics in our region and investigating illiberal social media practices across the Visegrad Group to gain insights into their impact on democracy and societal dynamics. Project EU Campaign race in V4 – political communication in social media before the 2024 EP elections is funded by the International Visegrad Fund.

This research project seeks to address the complexities surrounding the use of social media platforms by political actors for campaigning within the Visegrad Group (V4) countries. The study aims to fill a critical gap in existing body of research, which predominantly reflects perspectives from the US and Western Europe. To address the scarcity of comparative research on political campaigning research in Central and Eastern Europe, we advocate for a comprehensive examination of social media posts by political parties in each included country, employing a unified research tool (codebook) to ensure parallel analysis. With a focus on understanding how political entities leverage social media for campaigns, our initiative will explore commonalities and distinctions across the V4 countries. We are particularly interested in deployment of social media for anti-democratic campaigning, given the prevalence of illiberal political actors in the V4. Thus, the project also intends to investigate how social media functions as a tool to amplify illiberal tendencies, emphasizing the potential adverse effects of negative campaigning.