More European but more negative. Political advertising in the 2014 European Parlianment Elections

This chapter draws on a study of poster and audiovisual spot advertisements in the 2014 elections (see Holtz-Bacha et al. in press). The project involved the collection of 1,023 posters and 422 videos produced by political parties and candidates in the 28 member states. Posters and spots were coded according to a common codebook. Despite the extensive collection, the database does not represent all electoral materials produced in the 2014 election and consequently cannot be considered fully representative. Nevertheless, this comprehensive database does allow for detailed assessment of the principal characteristics of poster and audiovisual commercials employed by political parties in the 2014 election and allows us draw some interesting comparative conclusions across the different member states. In section one of this chapter, relevant findings on the posters included in the study are discussed before the results for video spot advertising are examined in section two. The following section specifically explores how the EU and wider European issues were represented in these posters and videos.