Joerg Hassler

• Ivanusch, Christoph; Luebke, Simon M.; Wurst, Anna-Katharina & Haßler, Jörg (2026). Social Media Savvy? The Use and Effectiveness of Political Parties’ Issue Strategies Across Platforms in the German Federal Election Campaign 2025. Political Communication. ISSN 1058-4609. p. 1–34. doi: 10.1080/10584609.2026.2715702. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  How does the ever-growing relevance of social media shape political campaigning? A vibrant public and academic debate addresses the role of social media in elections and democratic processes. Yet, despite a surge in research, we still know little about the extent to which political parties adjust established issue strategies to the priorities of different social media platforms’ audiences and how effective these are in generating user engagement. Drawing on theories of issue competition – issue ownership, riding-the-wave, and issue yield – we analyze parties’ social media communication during the 2025 German federal election campaign on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Combining manual quantitative content analysis of party and candidate posts with large-scale survey data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we assess both strategic use and effectiveness of issue strategies. Our results show that parties strategically prioritize owned issues and those salient on the general public agenda, often combining both dimensions in issue yield strategies. However, these strategies only partly align with what the specific platform audiences value and reward. User engagement is highest for posts that match platform-specific issue preferences, especially when the issues are salient both to a party’s supporters on that platform and to its wider user base. The findings offer new insights into the dynamics of contemporary digital campaigning and cross-platform party competition.

• Hassler, Jörg & Magin, Melanie (2026). Online Election Campaigning in Modern Democracies. In Wheeler, Mark & Iosifidis, Petros (Ed.), De Gruyter Handbook of Digital Political Communication. De Gruyter Brill. ISSN 9783111386171. p. 83–94. doi: 10.1515/9783111386034-008. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The digitalisation of political communication has diversified opportunities for political parties and politicians to communicate with voters and set the public agenda by either addressing or bypassing journalists. Specifically, the spread of social media platforms has created a digital public sphere where large audiences can be reached at extremely low costs. The digital architectures and affordances of social media platforms have the potential to determine political communication practices, e.g., making political campaigns increasingly visual or negative. From this, political campaigns as a whole and how their main functions are exercised—informing, mobilising, interacting—could be influenced. For example, implementing social listening and semantic polling as feedback channels could distort the image politicians have of the electorate in favor of active social media users. Approaches such as microtargeting offer politicians the opportunity to reach the electorate with finely tailored messages but could also further fragment democratic societies by presenting different groups of voters with different messages. In addition, the speed at which generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is transforming public communication has accelerated massively. Vast amounts of computer-generated text, images and even videos can be created without technical skills. In the truest sense of the word, images can be generated in election campaigns that can catch on with the electorate and influence attitudes, opinions and behavioural intentions. Against this backdrop, the chapter provides an overview of how election campaigns have changed, how the digital architecture and usage practices shape campaign content and what consequences this has for potential effects of campaigns.

• Paulke, Hanna; Kruschinski, Simon; Bene, Márton; Hassler, Jörg; Jackson, Daniel & Lilleker, Darren [Show all 8 contributors for this article] (2026). Does Negativity Pay Off? The Impact of Political Party Attributes on the Use and Performance of Negative Campaigning in Digital Political Advertising. Social science computer review. ISSN 0894-4393. doi: 10.1177/08944393261469406. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  While research has shown how different political actors adapt engagement-triggering strategies in organic election campaigns on social media platforms, we know little about how such strategies are used in paid political advertising and how they affect algorithmic ad performance. To address this gap, this study analyzes how party attributes shape spending on, impressions of, and the cost efficiency of negative campaigning in digital political advertising. Manually content-analyzing all Facebook ads from 48 parties across 10 countries during the European Parliament election in 2019, we find that, on average, parties do not allocate more resources to negative ads, which also do not achieve higher impression counts and are even associated with higher costs per 1,000 impressions (cost efficiency). However, party characteristics matter: Whereas opposition parties invest more in negative campaigning and consequently gain more impressions than government parties, negativity only pays off in terms of cost efficiency for extreme parties. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the interplay between advertiser characteristics and content strategies in shaping ad use and performance within commercial marketing infrastructure, emphasizing the need for greater transparency to ensure fair competition in digital political advertising.

• Larsson, Anders Olof; Alonso-Muñoz, Laura; Bene, Marton; Boulianne, Shelley; Fenoll, Vicente & Hassler, Jörg [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2026). Populism Across Two Continents : Assessing the Use of Populist Communication Styles on Facebook Across Ten Countries. In Bruns, Axel; Enli, Gunn; Larsson, Anders Olof; Robinson, Jessica Yarin; Bosch, Tanja & Kasianenko, Kateryna (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, 2nd Edition. Routledge. ISSN 9781003359524. doi: 10.4324/9781003359524-25. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This chapter examines the use of populist communication styles on Facebook by political actors across 10 countries in Europe and South America. It explores the prevalence of people-centrism, anti-elitism, and exclusion of out-groups in political messaging during recent elections. Through a standardized content analysis, the study reveals that populist communication is not exclusive to actors traditionally labeled as populist. The findings suggest that non-populist actors also employ these styles, challenging conventional classifications of political actors. The chapter highlights significant cross-national variations, and discusses the implications of these findings for understanding populism as a communication style and calls for a reassessment of how political actors are labeled. By providing a comparative perspective, the chapter contributes to the broader discourse on populism and political communication, offering insights into the strategic use of populist rhetoric in diverse political contexts.

• Schnurr, Daniel; Hartl, Philipp; Manzke, Leonie; Schmidbauer, Elisabeth; Hassler, Jörg & Tiefenbeck, Verena (2026). Data Donations: Data Disclosure for the Common Good. Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE). ISSN 2363-7005. doi: 10.1007/s12599-026-00989-z. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Similar to financial donations, which have developed into a multi-billion-dollar sector, data donations have the potential to advance public interest goals and promote the common good by enabling access to rich, individual-level behavioral data. However, the concept of data donation remains theoretically underdeveloped, and its practical implementation is still in its early stages. The paper proposes a definition of data donation that integrates different disciplinary perspectives and outlines the concept’s key characteristics. Furthermore, the paper outlines major challenges that currently prevent data donations from realizing their full potential. Specifically, it discusses issues related to public awareness, motivation to donate, ensuring continuity of data donations, privacy concerns, informed consent, data access and data quality. These are all challenges which call for further research to better understand the theoretical foundations of data donations and to explore how their potential can be effectively unlocked in practice. The paper argues that Information Systems scholars are well-positioned to address these questions, contribute to an improved theoretical underpinning of data donations, and promote their effective implementation in practice.

• Luebke, Simon M.; Ozornina, Nadezhda; Haim, Mario & Haßler, Jörg (2025). Climate Communication in the Hybrid Media System: Media and Stakeholder Logics on Social Media. Media and Communication. 13, p. 1–22. doi: 10.17645/mac.9892. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Climate change is a major political challenge affecting millions of people worldwide. Journalists—while following media logic—have a strong responsibility to inform the public of the scientific evidence on the causes and consequences of climate change and to explain the motivations driving the climate policies under discussion. However, within hybrid media systems, journalists increasingly compete for attention with climate stakeholders, who tend to follow a political logic in climate communication and bypass journalism to share their perspectives on climate change. Despite this dynamic, the extent to which the climate communication of media organizations and stakeholders diverges in terms of content and focus remains largely unexplored, as does whether their topics and communication styles show signs of convergence. This article addresses these gaps by comparing how journalistic media and climate stakeholders communicate about climate change on social media and by examining the user engagement their content creates. We conducted a manual quantitative content analysis of visual posts about climate change published by media organizations and climate stakeholders in Germany on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube during the 2023 UN Climate Change Conference in Dubai (<em>N</em> = 1,050). The results deepen our understanding of the national climate discourse in Germany and show that journalistic content in climate communication adheres strongly to media logic, presenting climate change in a more event-oriented, personalized, and negative manner. However, climate stakeholders’ communication is characterized by political logic, using strategic framing and focusing less on current climate events.

• Magin, Melanie Andrea; Hassler, Jörg; Larsson, Anders Olof & Skogerbø, Eli (2024). Walking the line of the double bind - A cross-country comparison on women and men politicians’ self-presentations on social media. Nordic Journal of Media Studies. 6(1), p. 157–184. doi: 10.2478/njms-2024-0008. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Political leaders play a crucial role in shaping societal perceptions and citizens’ expectations of gender roles. Through their self-presentation on social media, political leaders have the power to either reinforce or challenge existing gender stereotypes, thereby influencing how citizens perceive and interpret gender norms. However, research on how women and men politicians present themselves on social media is scarce. This comparative study contributes to remedying this research gap by content analysing the official Facebook and Instagram pages of 18 political leaders during the 2021 national election campaigns in Germany and Norway. In contrast to earlier research on gendered presentations of politicians in the news, we did not find strong evidence of gendered self-presentations in either country, neither in terms of personalisation nor in terms of gender issue ownership. This could be because gender roles in Germany and Norway have become more fluid, or because the successful politicians we have analysed have been successful due to their ability to “walk the double bind” of needing to conform to both masculine and feminine gender expectations. Our study calls for more comparative research into this field, including studies of lower profile politicians and politicians in countries with lower degrees of gender equality.

• Tønnesen, Hedvig; Bene, Márton; Hassler, Jörg; Larsson, Anders Olof; Magin, Melanie & Skogerbø, Eli [Show all 7 contributors for this article] (2023). Between anger and love: A multi-level study on the impact of policy issues on user reactions in national election campaigns on Facebook in Germany, Hungary, and Norway. New Media & Society. ISSN 1461-4448. doi: 10.1177/14614448231208122. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Eliciting user reactions is an important tactic for political actors using social media like Facebook to seek attention for campaign messages on policy issues. Still, little is known about policy issues’ effect on user reactions and how structural factors play into this relationship. Applying a standardized manual content analysis on Facebook posts from political parties and their top candidates during the German, Hungarian, and Norwegian national election campaigns in 2021/2022 (N = 4988), we investigate the relationship between policy issues and two of Facebook’s “emotional reactions” (“angry” and “love”). We find that posts addressing the economy, energy policy, and foreign policy drive more “angry” reactions, while environmental posts drive more “love” reactions. While effects are largely uniform across different party types, there are more variations between countries. Our analyses suggest that differences between individual parties and candidates and situational factors are vital to understanding the relationship between policy issues and user reactions.

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• Russmann, Uta; Hassler, Jörg; Magin, Melanie; Wurst, Anna-Katharina; Baranowski, Paweł & Fenoll, Vicente [Show all 24 contributors for this article] (2026). Do Nordic parties campaign differently? A cross-national comparison of visual political communication on Facebook in the 2024 EP election. Full text in Research Archive

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