The construction of the political agenda on Twitter and Facebook during the 2016 Spanish elections: issues, frame and users’ interest

ABSTRACT

During the last decades, the field of political communication has experienced a great transformation due to the appearance and consolidation of digital technologies. The aim of this research is to analyse the political agenda developed on Twitter and Facebook by the main Spanish political parties during the electoral campaign of June 2016, as well as to examine the users’ engagement to their messages. According to the results obtained, political actors prefer sharing content related to the strategic aspects of the campaign instead of sharing their political proposals. In addition, our research has detected strong discrepancies between the interests of political actors and the interests of users. In addition, a ‘more is less’ effect has been observed, in which the interaction that political parties get for each message is inversely proportional to the number of messages that they published.

KEYWORDS:

• Political communication
• agenda
• interaction
• social media
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (Spain) under Grant UJI-B2017-55 and by the State Research Agency (AEI) of the Spanish Government under Grant CSO2017-88620-P.

Notes on contributors

Laura Alonso-Muñoz

Laura Alonso-Muñoz is a lecturer at the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (Spain). She holds a PhD in Communication Science and her research has focused on the analysis of the impact of Internet on democracy and political activism, political communication and social media and populism in the digital environment.

Susana Miquel-Segarra

Susana Miquel-Segarra is a lecturer at the Universitat Jaume I de Castelló (Spain) and the Vice-Dean of Advertising and Public Relations at the same university. She holds a PhD in Company, Economy and Society and her research focuses mainly on the profile of professionals in corporate communication and Public Relations.

Nadia Viounnikoff-Benet

Nadia Viounnikoff-Benet holds a PhD with a thesis on the visual narrative of political leadership in the electoral campaign. Her research focuses on political communication, institutional communication and electoral communication.