Leader role and platform in campaign communication. An analysis of function, tone, frames, and focus.

Whether 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 vs. Facebook), and their interaction. Statements were human coded with validated typologies and modeled using multinomial (function, frames), ordered (tone), and binary (focus) logit, including a leader role × platform term and controls for message length and campaign phase. Defenses are rare, and near parity between acclaims and attacks reflects offsetting tendencies by leader role. Platform differences are conditioned by leader role rather than uniform: in the aggregate, Facebook carries more acclaims and a slightly more positive tone, whereas television carries more conflict framing. Overall policy focus is higher on television, yet 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. By integrating four content dimensions within a single, leader constant, cross platform design, the study refines functional theory under hybrid media conditions and provides replicable evidence from a leader centric, polarized context with implications for theory, campaign strategy, and media practice.