Group Appeals in Electoral and Parliamentary Debates

• Applicant: Dr. Lena Maria Huber
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 562087492

This project explores why and how political actors appeal to social groups, and how these appeals influence political competition, voter behavior, and representation in Western European democracies. Previous studies show that political parties often refer to social groups in their campaigns to shape voters’ preferences for parties, candidates, and policies. However, we still know little about when, why, and how politicians appeal to different social groups, or how these appeals are affected by election results, public opinion, and competition between parties. Moreover, most research focuses on campaign periods, even though political communication continues to shape opinions and identities throughout the entire legislative cycle. This project fills these gaps by addressing three research questions: How do political actors use group appeals? How do these appeals differ between election campaigns and parliamentary debates? What effects do different types of group appeals, and the characteristics of the politicians making these appeals, have on voters? We argue that parties use group appeals strategically to build and maintain voter coalitions. They do this by targeting specific groups, but also by choosing how to talk about these groups and which aspects of their identities to emphasize. To better understand these strategies, the project introduces two main dimensions: the “constructedness” of appeals that reflects whether an appeal is based on clear social categories or more latent group traits, and the “inclusiveness” of appeals that indicates how inclusive or exclusive the group definition of an appeal is. We will analyze the group-based rhetoric used by political parties and their representatives in election manifestos from eight Western European democracies and in parliamentary debates in three countries. Harnessing recent advances in computational text analysis and neural language models, we measure which social groups are mentioned by political actors, what stances they take towards these groups, and how constructed and inclusive their group appeals are. Our conceptual framework and measurements will allow us to analyze how parties respond to changing environments across different countries, periods, and electoral and parliamentary contexts. Our analyses will offer important new insights into the role of social groups in political communication, behavior, and representation. Understanding these dynamics is essential as divisions between social groups pose significant threats to the cohesion and stability of democratic systems. Further, our project will contribute a valuable new database to the field. Our data will not only advance our understanding of how parties use group appeals, but it will also help shed light on how political elites’ group-based rhetoric influences societal fragmentation and political polarization.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Austria
• Partner Organisation: Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung (FWF)
• Cooperation Partner: Dr. Hauke Licht