Lost in Re-Election: A Tale of Two Spanish Online Campaigns

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: two important 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 1M votes contradicting opinion polls. In this study, we perform community analysis of the retweet networks of the two online campaigns in order to assess whether activity in Twitter reflects the outcome or parts of the outcomes of both elections. The results show that the left-wing 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.