Social media has become a key mechanism for the
organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015
Barcelona City Council election, Barcelona en Com´u,
an emerging grassroots party, was the most voted one.
This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the
Spanish 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage
into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement
is based on a decentralized structure. On the other
hand, political science literature postulates that parties
historically ...
Social media has become a key mechanism for the
organization of grassroots movements. In the 2015
Barcelona City Council election, Barcelona en Com´u,
an emerging grassroots party, was the most voted one.
This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the
Spanish 15M movement in order to turn citizen outrage
into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement
is based on a decentralized structure. On the other
hand, political science literature postulates that parties
historically develop oligarchical leadership structures.
This tension motivates us to examine whether Barcelona
en Com´u preserved a decentralized structure or adopted
a conventional centralized organization. In this article
we propose a computational framework to analyze the
Twitter networks of the parties that ran for this election
by measuring their hierarchical structure, small-world
phenomenon and coreness. The results of our assessment
show that in Barcelona en Com´u two well-defined
groups co-exist: a cluster dominated by the party leader
and the collective accounts, and another cluster formed
by the movement activists. While the former group is
highly centralized like traditional parties, the latter one
stands out for its decentralized, cohesive and resilient
structure.
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