by: Hanna Folsz
| How do opposition parties adjust their electoral strategies in response to the increasingly unequal electoral playing field in countries experiencing democratic backsliding? Opposition electoral victory is a necessary condition for restoring democracy. Yet, the literature on backsliding has primarily focused on the incumbent and voters, paying limited attention to opposition parties. My paper studies the campaign strategies of opposition parties in democratic backsliding elections. I collect novel data on Hungarian and Polish opposition parties’ and politicians’ social media posts and parliamentary speeches and use NLP methods to classify messages by whether they talk about their party’s ideology and policy, democracy, or the governing party. I show that, as backsliding progresses, the opposition talks less about democracy and their party, and more about the incumbent, with increasingly negative sentiment. Similarly, in electoral districts with stronger incumbent dominance, opposition parties use more polarising, anti-incumbent campaign messages to appeal to opposition supporters, rather than unifying, depolarising messages to attract defectors from the ruling party. I interpret my results as evidence to my theory that the opposition often contests elections with the goal of survival, not electoral success, in democratic backsliding, seeking to preserve capacity to contest later elections once incumbent support hopefully erodes. |
Authoritarian Political Systems Group 