Seeking visibility at last? Europarties’ digital advertising for the 2019 and 2024 European Parliamentary elections

With the increasing digitalization of contemporary society, political parties have been growingly relying on the internet for campaigning, with social media platforms becoming a major tool for political advertising. In principle, this would also hold for political parties at the European level, whose online activity may contribute to increasing their visibility, garnering legitimacy in the public eye, improving the truly European dimension of European Parliament elections, and indeed “contribute to forming a European awareness and to expressing the political will of the citizens of the Union,” as expressed in the Treaties. In this paper we focus on the Europarties’ campaigning strategies on social media. We built an original dataset collecting the online sponsored contents published by Europarties on Facebook and Instagram during the 2019 and the 2024 European Parliament election campaigns and analyzed the extent to which they relied on these tools, highlighting cross-party differences as well as transnational targeting strategies. By empirically addressing these questions, the paper opens new avenues for research on transnationalization of the European public sphere through social media advertising strategies.