EPS seminar series- STEFAN MÜLLER (University College Dublin): 'From Nostalgia to Tomorrow: Examining the Temporal Focus of Party Communication'

This event is part of the Seminar Series of the theme group European Politics and Society.

Abstract

In this presentation, I combine findings from two papers that investigate the temporal dimensions in political party manifestos. The first study uses supervised machine learning to analyse manifestos from nine countries since 1949, revealing that parties dedicate about half of their content to discussing past and present issues, while the remainder focuses on future promises. The temporal focus drives differences in sentiment between incumbents and opposition parties. The second paper examines nostalgic rhetoric in party manifestos from 24 European democracies over a similar period. Nostalgic appeals feature most prominently in the manifestos of culturally conservative parties, such as Christian democratic, nationalist, and radical right parties. The analysis also reveals significant variation across regions and policy issues. Together, these papers highlight the critical role of temporal framing in political communication. The presentation concludes by discussing avenues for future research.