Abstract
In July 2019 New Democracy won a parliamentary majority in Greece with 40% of the vote, ending four and a half years of SYRIZA government. I use 31,532 posts from the Facebook pages of five Greek parties and four of their leaders, from January 2015 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, to compare engagement with the vote and to follow the two main leaders' pages through the change of government. In the month before the 2019 European and national elections, the pages of SYRIZA and Alexis Tsipras drew 56% and 61% of the interactions on the five parties' party and leader pages, against 33% and 36% of the vote among the same parties. The pages of New Democracy and Kyriakos Mitsotakis drew 25% and 21%, against 46% of the vote. The gap is consistent with differences in audience size and posting volume rather than weaker posts: Tsipras's page had about three times as many likes as Mitsotakis's, the SYRIZA party page posted far more than New Democracy's, and Mitsotakis's posts drew more interactions per page like. Counting Tsipras's page, the SYRIZA side also drew about four-fifths of the two main parties' interactions before both 2015 elections. In both main parties the leader's page drew most of the engagement: between 74% and 90% of the SYRIZA pair each year and between 82% and 96% of the New Democracy pair once Mitsotakis led it. After Mitsotakis became prime minister, his share of the two leaders' interactions returned from 36% in the quarter before the election to between 51% and 64%, similar to his share in 2016. Angry reactions on Tsipras's page fell from 4.2% of reactions while he was prime minister to 1.0% in opposition, but much of the earlier anger came from a few episodes. On Facebook in 2019, the bigger page belonged to the party that lost.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Bigger Page, Fewer Votes: SYRIZA, New Democracy and Facebook in Greece, 2015 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396365