PhD Summary: Crafting campaigns, messages, and identities: Belgian parties in a digitalized political arena

Digital media have reshaped the way in which party organizations communicate with the public. Yet, digital partisan communication still reflects established patterns of interparty competition. The dissertation examines two distinct but related aspects of political parties’ uptake of digital media for communication purposes. First, building on the literature on party digitalization and digital campaigning, it seeks to determine the extent to which political parties – as strategic but constrained actors – embrace or reject digital media for partisan communication, and how this is shaped by intra-organizational dynamics. Second, it investigates the content of their digital communication, by examining patterns of strategic political messaging across the political spectrum, and how these are shaped by parties’ inherited attributes, but also by the broader institutional framework in which they operate. Thanks to an in-depth case study of Belgium and its fragmented, duplicated party system, the dissertation unravels how organizational- and system-level characteristics shape parties’ diverse approaches to digital communication, but also their messaging strategies regarding negative campaigning, issue ownership and group cues. Overall, findings indicate that Belgian political parties’ adoption and use of digital media reflect the country’s unique institutional context.