Thursday seminars: Sara Pina & Lucas Kins

Extreme right use of social media in election campaigns: Countervailing strategies against mainstream political parties

by Sara Pina

This paper analyses the use of social media by extreme-right candidates during election campaigns. Because established traditional parties are more strongly rooted both socially and in the political system, something which makes them have wider access to the traditional mass media, extreme-right parties have made an especially intense and innovative use of social media, in order to compensate for some deficit of traditional media attention.

At the same time, literature is not consensual about the impact of these strategies in what is called the post-modern campaigns (Norris, 2000). On the one hand, it has been shown in some studies that traditional parties continue to have the same or even wider impact in the public sphere than newcomer parties, what is called normalization. On the other hand, it has also been argued that equalization of forces sometimes occurs, with smaller candidates gaining reinforced visibility thanks to the online use, approaching their communicational power to established ones (cf., among all, Gibson et al., 2003; Gibson, Lusoli and Ward, 2007; Wright, 2011; or Lilleker and Jackson, 2011).

In order to explain this variation, we test the degree to which there is a strong correlation between more extreme messages, their subsequent visualization and repercussion online, and their overall impact in the polarization of the public sphere. In order to test empirically these assertions, we will present a comparative study of the content and strategies developed online by the recently created Portuguese and Spanish newcomer extreme-right parties (Chega and Vox, respectively) during a series of national elections between 2019 and 2022.

Bio

Sara Pina is a professor at Lusófona University and at FCSH/Universidade Nova de Lisboa, in their Communication Sciences departments. Her main research areas are mass media ethics and law, political communication, and the political use of the internet and social media. She holds a PhD (2018, University of Lisbon/ICS) on the use of the internet and social media in election campaigns in Portugal and the United States.

Her academic and professional path has combined research with hands-on political and media experience. She volunteered in Obama’s 2012 campaign, was a Visiting Researcher at Georgetown University, and a Research Assistant at CUNY (City University of New York). From 2017 to 2021, she served as senior advisor to the Portuguese Minister of Justice, Francisca Van Dunem. Previously, she was an advisor to the board of the Luso-American Foundation (FLAD), where she managed several programs and scholarships in the political and media fields, and served as editor-in-chief of the Parallel newsmagazine for Portuguese and American readers. She has also worked extensively as a journalist and press and communication advisor, primarily in the justice and political fields.

She is the author of two books, co-author of two others, and has published scientific articles as well as short fiction. Her academic background also includes a Master’s in Media and Society from FCSH/Universidade Nova de Lisboa and a degree in International Journalism from the School of Journalism in Porto. She has completed specialization and postgraduate studies at several foreign institutions, including the French School of Public Management (ENA/Paris), the Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

https://www.ulusofona.pt/docentes/maria-sara-folhadela-figueiredo-pina-1641

Beyond Conflict: Cooperation Framing in Political Elites’ Communication

by Lucas Kins

Contemporary democracies are often portrayed as being weighed down by increasing animosity among elites and citizens. As a result, political communication scholarship has become increasingly precise in conceptualising and measuring how hostility manifests in elite discourse (Dodeigne, 2025). This focus on negativity is understandable: conflict is intrinsic to political competition and attracts significant attention from both traditional and social media (Poljak & Muraille, 2026). However, in most countries, day-to-day political communication is neither negative nor uncivil, the latter usually being driven by a handful of actors, and found especially in social (e.g., X) and/or partisan media (Druckman et al., 2019). Despite this, we know far less about how political elites represent positive social relations toward their opponents—a particularly important question as affective polarisation is increasingly shown to reflect out-party dislike rather than in-party attachment (Garzia & Ferreira da Silva, 2025). Drawing on party scholarship on elite cooperation cues (Wagner & Harteveld, 2024), I put forth the concept of affiliative framing, which describes communication that portrays interparty interactions in terms of cooperation, mutual respect or belonging, and depict political opponents as legitimate counterparts with whom positive social relations are possible. I distinguish affiliative framing from adjacent concepts such as positive campaigning and civility, and develop a multidimensional framework capturing the quality of the relationship, its basis of engagement, and its depth. By shifting attention from whether political actors cooperate to how relations between political opponents are represented, the concept provides a framework for analysing how positive cross-partisan relations are made visible in political communication.

Bio

Lucas Kins is a postdoctoral researcher in Political Science at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). He completed his PhD in 2025 with the support of an FNRS grant (Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique). His doctoral dissertation examined the digital communication strategies of major political parties in Belgium. More broadly, his research focuses on digital campaigning and its implications for party organisations, as well as on political cleavages, polarisation, and representation in partisan social media communication. In 2022, he co-founded the Social Media Lab at Sciences Po ULB.