A distorted mirror? Intra-party Twitter communities in Spanish political parties

This paper aims at studying the composition and fragmentation of the Twittersphere around the five main Spanish political parties (PSOE, PP, Cs, Podemos and Vox). The first goal is to examine to what extent some formal organizational traits (party roles, territorial structure) are reflected on the partisan communities of the Twittersphere. The second goal is to use parties’ Twitter networks as indicators of the informal organization of political parties, which to some degree can reflect intra-party dynamics (especially, factionalism or latent conflict) beyond their formal structure, contributing to a better understanding of the proverbial intra-party black-box. We rely on a sample of partisan Twitter accounts (n=4066) built through a two-stage process and collected in 2021. We first identify an initial set of Twitter accounts for each political party, namely from MPs and official party accounts, and then, based on the assumption of homophily, build a broader sample by adding the most followed Twitter accounts for each political party. For the analysis, we use modularity algorithms to identify aggregations or communities based on the users’ online behavior, and manual coding to classify the accounts according to their role in the party. We expect to find differences in the composition of intra-party modularities, particularly between institutionalized and new parties. We expect the Twittersphere of older parties to be composed of a greater number of party officers and overlap with territorial divisions. Instead, we expect the Twittersphere of new parties to be more informal and more populated by sympathizers. The analysis of intra-party Twitterspheres can provide some insights on the strategies of political parties in the digital space, as well as their internal life and heterogeneity.