Leader role and platform in electoral campaign communication

Whether the leader role and platform jointly structure campaign discourse remains unsettled in hybrid media environments. This study analyzes a balanced corpus of 340 leader-authored statements from Albania’s 2025 parliamentary election to test how four content dimensions: function, tone, frames, and focus, vary by leader role (incumbent vs. opposition), platform [television (TV) vs. Facebook], and their interaction. This study uses validated typologies to code statements, modeling functions and frames with multinomial logit, tone with ordered logit, and focus with binary logit. The models include a leader role × platform term and controls for message length and campaign phase. The results report effects as predicted probabilities and average marginal effects. Findings refine functional theory under hybrid media conditions. Defenses are rare, and near parity between acclaims and attacks reflects offsetting tendencies by leader role. Leader role conditions platform differences rather than producing uniform platform effects. Overall policy focus is higher on television, and the platform effect on focus reverses by leader role (policy emphasis increases for the incumbent on Facebook and decreases for the opposition on Facebook). Framing mirrors these logics: the opposition emphasizes anticorruption on Facebook, the incumbent increases economic framing online, and integration remains the incumbent’s dominant frame without a platform shift. Temporal probes show modest late-campaign increases in television attacks and conflict without altering the core leader’s role through platform patterns. By integrating four content dimensions within a single, leader-constant, cross-platform design, the study demonstrates that platform effects are conditional on leader role. Results advance accounts of hybrid media and provide replicable evidence from a leader-centric, polarized context, with implications for theory, campaign strategy, and media practice.