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 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.
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