Social media as space for center-regional political relations: the case of Spain

Abstract

The article is devoted to the comparative analysis of the practices of using social media in the context of center-regional political relations as understood by the chief executives of the autonomous communities in Spain - Galicia, Catalonia and the Basque Country. A comparative discourse analysis of materials published on Instagram profiles of the politicians was used as a key research method. The analysis allowed to reveal three models for understanding the relations between the center and the regions in the Spanish context: the model of public loyalty to the center and to the center-regional relations system (Galicia), the model of the absence of actualization of the centerregional relations problem combined with the actual legitimization of the existing political order (Basque Country) and the model of public confrontation with the center (Catalonia). The results of the study demonstrate that social media in the digital era are becoming a political space in the context of the center-regional relationship problem - they do not produce its new forms, but they create new opportunities for accentuating the forms existing in the offline mode.