Abstract
The emerging grassroots party Barcelona en Comú won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement to transform citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement was based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postulates that parties develop oligarchical leadership structures. This tension motivates to examine whether Barcelona en Comú preserved a decentralized structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization. In this study we develop a computational methodology to characterize the online network organization of every party in the election campaign on Twitter. Results on the network of retweets reveal that, while traditional parties are organized in a single cluster, for Barcelona en Comú two well-defined groups co-exist: a centralized cluster led by the candidate and party accounts, and a decentralized cluster with the movement activists. Furthermore, results on the network of replies also shows a dual structure: a cluster around the candidate receiving the largest attention from other parties, and another with the movement activists exhibiting a higher predisposition to dialogue with other parties.
Highlights
The last decade has seen a global wave of citizen protests: the Arab Spring, the 15M movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, #YoSoy132 in Mexico, Occupy Gezi in Turkey, the Brazilian movement #VemPraRua, Occupy Central in Hong Kong, etc
Barcelona en Comú (BeC) was conceived as the confluence of (1) minor and/or emerging parties and, to a large extent, (2) collectives and activists, with no political party affiliation, who played a prominent role in the 15M movement
We find of interest to explore the behavior of Barcelona en Comú when discussing with other political parties
Summary
The last decade has seen a global wave of citizen protests: the Arab Spring, the 15M movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, #YoSoy132 in Mexico, Occupy Gezi in Turkey, the Brazilian movement #VemPraRua, Occupy Central in Hong Kong, etc All these movements share common characteristics such as the claim for new models of democracy, the strategic usage of social media (e.g., Twitter), and the occupation of physical public spaces. Other authors have defined this new model of social movement as a “change from logic of collective action, associated with high levels of organizational resources and the formation of collective identities, to a logic of connective action, based on personalized content sharing across media networks” [7] There, these can be seen as paradigmatic examples of how the Internet is able to alter the mobilizing structure for collective action [50]. Decentralization has been observed in [59] in which the 15M network is defined as polycentric
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