‘Follow the closing of the campaign on streaming’: The use of Twitter by Spanish political parties during the 2014 European elections

Abstract

The results of the elections to the European Parliament of 25 May 2014 marked a before and an after for Spanish politics. This influential European campaign took place at a moment when Internet use was well established as a tool, with political parties and candidates actively using social media. This article aims to research whether Spanish parties are using Twitter to develop interactive communication, or simply for broadcasting messages. Thus, the Twitter activity of various political parties during the 2014 European campaign is content-analysed. Results indicate that activity seems to depend on ideology, that parties are revealed to be committed to unidirectional communication/broadcasting, and that debate on Twitter is fundamentally between the politicians themselves. On a theoretical level, our data are in line with the idea that the normalisation hypothesis tends to prevail.