Abstract
Twitter as an electoral communication tool is determined by the objectives and the character of each political organization. This article analyses the communication strategies of the political organization Barcelona en Comú on Twitter for a better understanding of the way in which new political forces work in a digital environment. The case study is based on qualitative content analysis with several categories related to the message and the digital network possibilities. The amount of 1,840 tweets from two groups of Twitter accounts was analyzed. First, the tweets disseminated by the six parties that form the electoral coalition Barcelona en Comú. Second, the tweets disseminated by politicians and members of communication commission of the parties. The results allow us to conclude that one of the six parties centralised the communication of the confluence. Also, that the bidirectional communication process among parties and users took place in the second group of Twitter accounts.
Highlights
This article seeks to analyze the electoral communication characteristics on Twitter of the electoral coalition Barcelona en Comú from 8th to 22nd of May 2015
The main common issue disseminated by the six parties is a call for public meetings or speeches at the urban area, election debates in the mass media and another kind of announcement of the campaign (BeC=22.18%; Iniciativa per Catalunya Verds (ICV)=24.77%; Procés Constituent (PC)=42.10%; P=21%; EUiA=42.85%; E=27.27%)
As it has been observed, activism or citizen participation was the second common issue placed by the six parties (BeC=9.86%; ICV=7.76%; PC=7.23%; P=8%; EUiA=10.71%; E=18.18%)
Summary
This article seeks to analyze the electoral communication characteristics on Twitter of the electoral coalition Barcelona en Comú from 8th to 22nd of May 2015. The research interest in the use of Twitter as an electoral communication tool has increased substantially in last years (Fenton & Barassi, 2011; Vaccari, 2013; Bor, 2014; Jungherr, 2015; Campos-Domínguez, 2017) This has contributed to the debate on the potential of social networks as a communication channel in a hybrid media system (Chadwick, 2013), where offline and online forms of communication take place at the same time. Spanish social movements found in social media a complementary organization and communication channel in addition to mass media coverage (Linares & Pérez-Altable, 2015; Linares, 2017) These new left-wing political parties inhered the communication practices, tools as digital networks and most of the leaders of social movements (Borge & Santamarina, 2015) given its lack of hegemony at the public sphere
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