Policy Issues vs. Documentation: Using BERTopic to Gain Insight in the Political Communication in Instagram Stories and Posts during the 2021 German Federal Election Campaign

Abstract

We give first insights in the political communication of the 2021 Federal election campaign in Germany. We focused on political messages found in ephemeral stories (n=2208) and permanent posts (n=718) shared in the last fortnight of the campaign. Topic modeling with BERTopic did not yield topics as finely grained as the categories of prior content analyses, yet two main themes emerged: The majority of posts deal with policy issues, while the majority of stories does not deal with policy issues. We found a large body of stories to be documentation of the rallies and campaign trail.