Negative and positive valence campaigning in a two-dimensional world: an application to the 2014 European Elections using data from Twitter

In the present paper we explore the relationship between spatial proximity and the incentives of parties to highlight character valence issues in a two-dimensional world. We also differentiate about the direction of valence campaigning, distinguishing between positive and negative valence campaigning. We expect an inverse relationship between the distance of a party from its ideologically adjacent competitors and its incentive to engage in valence competition. We also expect that such relationship to be conditional on institutional and electoral factors. We then test these hypotheses by focusing on the 2014 European elections. In particular, we collected and manually codified all the messages posted in the Twitter official account by each party in 8 countries in the last week before the election-day. Our preliminary analysis confirms our theoretical expectation but only with respect to positive valence campaigning.