Joren Vrancken is an independent security research. He holds a master’s degree in computing science with a speciality in cybersecurity from the Radboud University in Nijmegen. His research focusses on online political advertising, malware analysis and software vulnerability discovery.

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Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius is professor ICT and law. He works at the iHub, part of Radboud University in The Netherlands. The iHub is the interdisciplinary research hub on digitalization and society. Frederik is a law professor but teaches mostly at the computer science department. His research predominantly concerns fundamental rights, such as the right to privacy and non-discrimination rights, in the context of new technologies. He often enriches legal research with insights from other disciplines. He has co-operated with, for instance, economists, computer scientists, and communication scholars. He regularly advises policymakers, and has given expert testimony, for instance at the Dutch and the European parliaments, and committees of the Council of Europe and the United Nations.

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Online political advertising campaigns are often opaque, among other reasons because political parties can target their online advertising to specific groups. Therefore, it is challenging for citizens, journalists, and academics to understand what campaigns talk about, diminishing the public accountability of political campaigns.

Through the lens of issue ownership theory, this study explores which issues Dutch political parties advertised on Meta during the 2021 national election. Issue ownership theory (Petrocik et al., 2003) suggests that “some political parties are affiliated with specific issues and considered best able to deal with them” (Walgrave et al., 2015, p. 778). In other words, voters see certain problems (or issues) as a typical focus point for certain parties and may think that those parties can best address those problems.

The study uses a novel topic modeling process that is meant to limit human bias. We built a model that assigns issues to each ad (based on the ad text), creating a dataset of ad-issues matchings. The study is one of the first to present insights into the issues Dutch political parties communicated about during the national elections of 2021.

Our findings show that issue owners are not the biggest advertisers on their issues. The owned issue economy (owned by the VVD, a conservative liberal party) was claimed by CDA (a Christian party), who spent most money on this issue and reached most impressions. Similarly, the owned issue climate (owned by GroenLinks, a green party) was claimed by Partij voor de Dieren (an animal rights party), who spent most money on this issue and reached most impressions.

We also find that political parties do not limit their communication to only a few salient issues, since each issue was contested by a number of parties. Hence, this study suggests that political parties use online advertising to appeal to voters in a differentiated way. Where traditional advertising (for instance on TV) confines parties to only a few salient issues, online advertising enables parties to reach out to voters on more issues, including less salient issues. In addition, our findings reveal that private gifts enable some political campaigns to claim ownership of many issues. The paper also gives suggestions for further research.