DTIC MdM Strategic Program: Artificial and Natural Intelligence for ICT and beyond

H. Gallego, D. Laniado, A. Kaltenbrunner, V. Gomez, and P. Aragon (2017). Lost in re-election: a tale of two Spanish online campaigns. SocInfo ’17 – The 9th International Conference on Social Informatics, Oxford, United Kingdom.

In the 2010 decade, Spanish politics have transitioned from bipartidism to multipartidism. This change led to an unstable situation which eventually led to the rare scenario of two general elections within six months. The two elections had a mayor difference: two important left-wing parties formed a coalition in the second election while they had run separately in the first one. In the second election and after merging, the coalition lost around 1M votes, contradicting opinion polls. In this study, we perform community analysis of the retweet networks of the online campaigns to assess whether activity in Twitter reflects the outcome of both elections. The results show that the left-wing parties lost more online supporters than the other parties. Furthermore, we find that Twitter activity of the supporters unveils a decrease in engagement especially marked for the smaller party in the coalition, in line with post-electoral traditional polls.

Keywords: Twitter, Politics, Political Parties, Spanish Elections, Online Campaigning, Political Coalition, Engagement, Political Participation

Additional material:

• Postprint in the author's web and at UPF e-repository