Political agenda on Twitter during the 2016 Spanish elections: issues, strategies, and users’ responses

Abstract

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In recent years, political communication has been marked by an increased use of social media. Platforms such as Twitter have become an essential tool for political actors, especially during electoral campaigns. The aim of this study is to analyse the use of Twitter by Spanish political actors to build their agenda during electoral campaigns. The implementation strategy and users’ responses were also analysed. A quantitative content analysis was conducted, which was complemented by a metric evaluation. The sample was taken from the general election of 26 June 2016. The profiles of the four political parties most popularly represented in Spain (Partido Popular, Partido Socialista, Podemos, and Ciudadanos) and their leaders (Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, and Albert Rivera respectively), were analysed. A total of 9,049 tweets were studied and the results allowed us to detect various parameters of the management of political agendas on Twitter during the electoral campaign. Among them, it is worth highlighting: the existence of different forms of agenda-setting interactions built by the parties and articulated by the leaders, the low degree of thematic fragmentation, the prevalence of a game frame, the identification of three conditioning factors, and the detection of dissonance between the agenda built by politicians and the interests of the users of this platform.