Annabel DeChant

In a recent effort to blend my majors of Political Science and Strategic Communication, I’ve been interested in political communications regulation. 

It’s well-known that political advertising is a huge factor in US election campaigns. We saw this very clearly as the 2024 presidential election was going on. Political communications are also important in the EU. It has long been known that corporate PR managers engage in continuously-developing tactics and networks for political lobbying. The EU’s own decision-making institutions – the Council of the EU, the European Parliament, and the European Commission – take part in “strategic communication management” themselves. 

As political communications have evolved in the European Union, political advertising has become an increasingly major concern for election integrity. The EU has struggled to effectively combat this issue because it was handled heterogeneously, with different Member States taking different approaches. As a result, political advertising services haven’t had much certainty when it comes to legal issues, and the European Single Market was disrupted by the different legal and financial regulations between states. The passage of the Digital Services Act was a step towards progress, but it was aimed at general advertising and did not do much to deal with political misinformation. The EU has recently made more significant progress with the 2024 implementation of the Political Advertising Regulation (PAR) . Under the PAR, many entities who engage in political advertising, including PR firms, are subject to various regulations. For the most part, the PAR doesn’t necessarily control content, but it sets up a sort of set of procedures, including requirements such as the following: “prohibition on discrimination,” “prevention of foreign interference,” “due diligence, transparency and record-keeping,” “transmission of information,” “European repository for online political ads,” and “framework to indicate non-compliant political ads.” Some further obligations include identifying political advertising services, establishing protocols for targeting and ad delivery techniques, and creating responsibilities for transparency and labeling.

There are several key ways through which the EU is trying to address the issue with political advertising, especially when it’s happening online. First, they want to address “technology misuse.” This includes regulations on data collection, micro-targeting, and disinformation. They also want to make political advertising transparent so that the public doesn’t perceive something to be neutral and become misled by that. Additionally, they want to protect the principle of freedom of expression; as a result, they’re regulating how ads are displayed rather than the content they include. 

It’s clear that online political communications are important in the EU. Many citizens are using online channels to get political information on the EU. Asked for the news source they use to get information on European political matters, 52 percent of respondents said they used “the internet,” and 25 percent said they used online social networks. With so many citizens getting their information from these sources, it’s important for the integrity of democratic debate and elections that there be measures in place to ensure that people are able to access and assess quality information. 

Further, political advertising is a major tactic of political organizations in the EU. Both EU governing institutions and EU-level political parties make large use of political advertising and communications tactics. For example, one can look at the European Parliament, which spent 1,480 thousands of euros on online advertising from February to May of 2019 and had 292 million ad impressions in that time. Over the same time period, it’s also possible to see spending and impressions by political parties. The SPD spent 1,180 thousands of euros and got 58.7 millions of impressions, while the European Greens spent 315 thousands of euros and got 53.9 millions of impressions. 

Overall, the EU demonstrates a growing effort to effectively address and regulate political communications. Perhaps one of the most interesting insights is how they’re aiming to avoid too much content-specific regulation, instead setting up procedures and disclosure rules.