Computational comparative analysis of the Twitter networks of the 2015 and 2016 Spanish national elections

Abstract

In the last years, Spanish politics have transitioned from bipartidism to multipartidism. This change led to an unstable situation which finally evolved to the rare scenario of two general elections in the period of six months. The two elections had a main difference: the two biggest 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 one million votes contradicting opinion polls. In this study, community analysis in the retweet networks of the two online campaigns is performed in order to assess whether activity in Twitter reflects the outcome or parts of the outcomes of both elections. The results show that the leftwing parties lost more online supporters than the other parties. Furthermore, an inspection of the 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. The clusters obtained with the community detection method are also used to situate in the ideological spectrum a set of Spanish media sources and to understand their audiences and behavioral differences when replying or retweeting them.