Research

Publications

Peer reviewed

Individual drivers of toxicity in radical right-wing populist legislative campaigns

with William T Daniel, Max-Robert Valentin, and Laurence Rowley-Abel in West European Politics

Most studies of political rhetoric examine only political leadership or treat parties as unified actors. However, what happens where electoral systems incentivise candidates to diverge from stated party messaging during campaigns? This article uses novel data on political experience and candidate backgrounds from the 2022 French parliamentary elections to explore the individual drivers of campaigning behaviour. The choice of France, with its multiple and prominent radical right-wing parties, allows for the consideration of both within- and between-party differences in individual campaigning. Using the salient example of toxic rhetoric, findings demonstrate that even when party leaders publicly urge moderation, individual candidates do not necessarily follow along. This implies the need for additional focus on the individual-level drivers of political semantics, especially where candidates are apt to campaign independently, using social media platforms to communicate directly with citizens.

Working Papers

Issue Communication Strategies Across Electoral Systems

(under review)

Party Unity in Campaign Messaging Across Platforms

Diverging from the Party Line: Candidate Messaging on Social Media Across Electoral Systems

Are campaign strategies structural, partisan, or personal? Individual-Level Evidence from French Legislative Elections

with William T Daniel, Laurence Rowley-Abel, and Max-Robert Valentin

(under review)

Political candidates on Twitter: How do social media campaigns respond to public preferences?

with Iasmin Goes, Zeynep Somer-Topcu, and Daniel Weitzel

Machine Minds and Political Divides: How AI-Generated Summaries Shape Our Understanding of Parliamentary Discourse

with Zachary Greene, James Cross, and Derek Greene

Changing the channel: Investigating the congruence in issue framing between party election manifestos and candidate tweets

with Louise Luxton

Thesis

In progress

Issue communication and party competition across communication channels during election campaigns

My thesis explores how parties and candidates compete during election campaigns across communication platforms. Diverging channel characteristics raise questions about whether candidates adapt their communication accordingly or whether parties maintain unity in their candidates’ social media messaging. My study employs different methods for categorising texts and similarity analysis to determine the similarity and issue overlap between party manifestos and candidate tweets of several recent Western European elections. The first chapter establishes the extent to which issues overlap in party manifestos and candidate tweets. Having established the fairly extensive overlap, the second paper seeks to understand how parties drive this unity examining factors identified in previous literature including incumbency and gender. Knowing that some candidates diverge more from their parties than others, the last chapter explores why they do this on salient issues.

Supervised by Dr Heinz Brandenburg and Dr Z Greene

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