Browsing by Author "Toffert, Konstantin Florian"
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- The planning and implementation of the FDP’s political campaign in the 2021 german federal parliamentary electionPublication . Toffert, Konstantin Florian; Simão, João Duarte Borges Martins de VasconcelosContemporary political campaigning in research and practice encompasses a multitude of different challenges and opportunities driven by transformations in digitalisation, globalisation and societal pluralisation. Trends and dynamics such as professionalisation, marketisation, and hypermediatisation have contributed to a variety of strategies and communication tactics by integrating principles from subdisciplines incorporated within the concept of strategic communication. To provide a tangible perspective on this theoretical complexity, it seems valuable to examine a specific and contemporary political election campaign to grasp the evolving nature of political campaigning fully. This research aims to contribute to the body of knowledge on political campaign strategies by examining the political campaign planning, implementation, and execution of the liberal party FDP in the 2021 German federal parliamentary election campaign. This qualitative case study offers indepth and emic insider perspectives into the FDP’s internal processes and strategies obtained through semi-structured interviews with six campaign experts from the liberal party at the parliamentary level. Following the process of thematic analysis, six central themes from deductive and inductive code segments closely align with established theoretical frameworks. The study’s findings show a highly strategic and professionalised 2021 federal election campaign by the FDP, shaped by three distinct phases and supported by a federal and statelevel alignment of internal and external actors. Two core strategies emerged in the campaign: a personification strategy tailored to the lead candidate and party leader Lindner and the usage of the societal context caused by the coronavirus pandemic to promote liberal values. Hybrid political communication and mobilisation strategies, which were applied both offline and online, completed the election campaign. In summary, this study contributes to the broader discourse of political campaign research, offering significant insights into the strategic process of an election campaign on the federal level in the contemporary German party landscape.