Original scientific paper
Studying the 2024 European Elections through Short Videos: An AC/DT Approach
Mia Emilia Elisabeth Palonen
; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Alexander Alekseev
; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Tomi Toivio
; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Juha Koljonen
; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Kleber Carrilho
; University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
Vaibhav Agarwal
; Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany
Abstract
Short videos have become a prevalent platform for social and political communication, and they can tell us much about the social understanding of political legitimacy and open the discursive field for analysis. Typically, for the end user, short videos are organised into feeds. In this article, we offer a new method for social media analysis that can shed light on how the bases of our societies are negotiated between citizens: with cases from Central and Southeastern Europe (Bulgaria, Croatia and Hungary), where social media has been important in political discourses – as our colleagues in the other articles testify. The study draws on the context of the 2024 European election campaigns. The results highlight the challenge of imagining an implicit ‘social contract’ in which people take part in engaging in the European elections. It offers a comparative basis for the study set in the post-API environment, capturing how political content circulates within personalised, algorithmically curated environments. The particular value of the study lies in introducing the Anarcho-Computational Discourse-Theoretical (AC/DT) approach, an interpretivist, experimental, and iterative framework that integrates discourse theory with computational techniques – now in the context of a particular geographical region.
Keywords
Social contract; Political communication; 2024 European Parliament elections; Short-video platforms; Digital fieldwork; Algorithmic feed; Large language models; Discourse theory; Comparative politics; Post-API research; Social media research methods
Hrčak ID:
352155
URI
Publication date:
14.10.2026.
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