Abstract
Did the 2015 European refugee crisis show up on radical right parties' Facebook pages before it showed up in opinion polls? I compare 15 populist radical right party and leader pages in nine European countries with 68 other party and leader pages in the same countries, month by month from July 2014 to June 2016, using posts collected through CrowdTangle. Because CrowdTangle's capture of photo posts rose sharply in May 2015, I compare pages within the same country and month and check the results with a page-specific break and with link posts only. Compared with January to April 2015, radical right pages drew about 47% more interactions per post than other pages in the same country and month in September and October 2015, and about 26% to 42% more in later periods to June 2016. A smaller rise in July and August appears in all posts but not in link posts, so the change is clearest from September, at the height of the crisis rather than before it. Radical right pages did not post more, other populist pages saw no similar rise, and estimates are smaller without the pages whose classification is most disputed. Comparing each party's share of Facebook interactions with its polls in six countries shows no consistent order: Facebook moved earlier in Hungary and Flanders, at the same time in Norway and Slovenia, and later in Sweden. Facebook registered the crisis, but it did not clearly run ahead of the polls.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Ahead of the Crisis? Radical Right Parties on Facebook and the 2015 Refugee Crisis in Europe. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418584