Full edition for scientific use. The AUTNES dataset on party Facebook pages contains information on parties’ Facebook posts during the six weeks of election campaign for the Austrian general election in 2013. Data collection took place in autumn 2015. We retrieved posts for all parties that passed the threshold for entering the parliament in 2013. Each post constitutes a unit of analysis. The coding procedure applies the AUTNES relational approach of recording subjects, predicates, and objects to party Facebook pages. The subject is the party or candidate that operates the Facebook page and is coded with the name (if an individual is present), organisational affiliation and appearance in the coding unit (text only, text and image, image only). There are two types of objects: issues and object actors. Issues are recorded by coders selecting from the AUTNES issue coding scheme the dominant policy issue and the dominant campaign issue in the coding unit. The issue predicate numerically records whether the subject’s position towards the policy issue is one of support, rejection, or conveys a neutral/ambivalent stance. Up to ten object actors are recorded from each coding unit in the same way as the subject actor, supplemented with an evaluation by the subject actor (positive, negative, or neutral). In addition to the basic subject–predicate–object structure we code several additional variables: character traits, party records as well as a description of every actor’s outfit. Moreover, the dataset contains variables describing the Facebook page, the coding unit as well as images and calls for (preference) votes or campaign participation. Variables: Variables referring to Facebook posting: URL; type of Facebook page (party or candidate page); timestamp (date when the posting was published); text of the posting; links that were published in the posting; hashtags; number of likes, comments and shares of the posting; variables referring to posting: technical problems with coding; call for vote (for the author of the page); call for a preference vote with the name of the respective candidate; call for campaign participation in general and on Facebook; content of the posting: continuous text, picture, video; variables referring to the author of the Facebook page: author’s organization; author’s name; mention of the author in the posting; author’s outfit; author’s characteristics; author’s record; variables referring to issues: campaign issue; predicate; policy issue; reference to policy issue at the EU level; variables referring to object actors: object actor presence; object actor’s name; object actor’s organisation; appearance; predicate; object actor’s outfit; reference to the coded campaign issue and to the coded policy issue; object actor’s characteristics; object actor’s record; number of additional object actors that were not coded; variables referring to pictures: pictures of individuals that were not coded as object actors; description of individuals; number of people; reference to a party.

Total universe/Complete enumeration

Content coding