Direct and Indirect Measures of Political Distances Between Parties on Twitter. An Application of the RON and DRON Methods to the Activity of Spanish Deputies.

Abstract

Social media have been extensively used for political communication during the last decade. Research has shown that data from these platforms can help understand the process of interaction between politicians and the audiences and provide relevant information about how political information is spread and communities structured. In particular, the Retweet Overlap Network method (Guerrero-Sole, 2017) has shown how indirect relationships between users can help uncovering the community structure of political conversations. This research uses RON and a new version of the method, the Direct RON to show the community structure coming from the analysis of the activity of 295 deputies of the Spanish Congress. Results show that both methods are useful to uncover the underlying structure of the network, as well as to calculate the distances between the main political parties in Spain. This work adds new methods and knowledge about the information that can be obtained from politicians retweeting behavior.