We would like to draw your attention to the course "Analyse des Social-Media-Wahlkampfes zur Bundestag Elections 2025" in the summer semester 2025. The course will be held jointly by Prof Melanie Walter-Rogg and Jakob Berg (M.A.) and will deal with the strategies of the digital election campaign for the Bundestag Elections 2025.
Due to the early Bundestag Elections, early organisation is required, for which we need the help of student participants even before the start of the semester.
Shortly after the election on 23 February 2025 (probably in March 2025), the Instagram accounts of the party candidates for the Bundestag Elections are to be researched and their posts collected or saved. Please contact Mr Berg (jakob.berg@politik.uni-regensburg.de) by 21 February 2025 at the latest. An organisational hybrid meeting will take place on 26 February 2025 to discuss the procedure and tasks. For the work already done before the semester, less effort must be put into the coursework during the semester.
Seminar description:
Following the failure of the Berlin coalition and the early elections in 2025, an exciting topic takes centre stage in the seminar: the digital election campaign. In addition to traditional election campaign tools, social media platforms are becoming increasingly important. Parties are using them specifically to address voter groups, organise campaigns and increase their reach. In this seminar, we will take a data-based look at the Bundestag Elections 2025 and analyse the social media communication of political actors. The focus is on the special challenges and strategies of digital election campaigns in an extremely short time frame.
Topics of the course:
- Theory and state of research on social media election campaign research
- Comparison between classic and digital election campaigns
- Introduction to the methods of computational social science (e.g. data scraping, eye tracking, machine learning)
- Data acquisition and evaluation of Instagram posts by candidates for the 2025 Bundestag Elections
Organisational/course achievements:
- Reading the theoretical foundations and application-oriented studies
- Researching the Instagram accounts of all candidates (expected to be over 6,000)
- Eyetracking experiments to investigate the effect of social media advertising
- Research or coding work as coursework
- Empirical and theoretical seminar papers or scientific posters as examination performance
The work already completed before the semester counts as coursework (those students who are unable to participate in the research work before the start of the semester will complete coding work during the SS 2025); the main, advanced or research seminar papers (10 CP) and the scientific posters (5 CP) count as examination work.
No special prior knowledge of statistics or programming is required for the seminar.
Please register for the course if you are interested in participating in exciting and practice-orientated research work in the context of the Bundestag Elections 2025!
