This paper has been published as: Pablo Aragón, Karolin Eva Kappler, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado and Yana Volkovich (2013) Communication dynamics in twitter during political campaigns: The case of the 2011 Spanish national election. Policy and Internet 5 (2) 183-206.
Pablo Aragón, Barcelona Media Foundation
Karolin Kappler, Barcelona Media Foundation
Andreas Kaltenbrunner, Barcelona Media Foundation
Jessica G. Neff, Barcelona Media Foundation
David Laniado, Barcelona Media Foundation
Yana Volkovich, Barcelona Media Foundation
Introduction
Social networks have become repositories of Big Data that can be mined and analyzed to gain insights into the activities and preferences of Internet users. The present research relies on a large dataset from Twitter to examine emotional content, activity patterns and interaction networks of political parties and politically active users during the campaign for the Spanish national elections of November 2011.
Our results show remarkable differences in political parties according to the diffusion and communication dynamics within the microblogging network. The study of the networks generated by the main parties allows us to identify different strategies depending on the characteristics of the analyzed parties in the offline word. Furthermore, we discuss the adaptation of the political structures of the parties to this new communication and organizational paradigm emerged from Internet and online social networks.
