Abstract
Does the state of a country's democracy show up in how people engage with its parties on Facebook? I use 184,317 posts from 35 official party pages in Finland, Lithuania, Portugal, Romania, Slovenia and Switzerland, posted between 2010 and October 2020, with 60.6 million interactions, collected through CrowdTangle. I join them to country-year indicators from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project: electoral democracy, polarisation of society and hate speech by political parties. Engagement is organised by audience and by who owns the page, not by the regime. One page held 72% of all interactions in Romania and one held 51% in Switzerland, against 23% to 39% in the other four countries. Across the six countries, no V-Dem indicator is clearly related to engagement per post, engagement per follower, the angry share of reactions or the share of interactions that are shares, and with six countries no rank correlation can be told from chance. Within countries over time, none of the 18 main estimates has a bootstrap p-value below 0.05. The nearest is a link between polarisation and engagement (p = 0.06 to 0.09), but it disappears when I drop 2020, the Covid year, and it weakens when I control for followers. With six countries the design can rule out only large associations. Engagement on party pages is not a usable measure of how democratic a country is.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Does the Democracy Matter? Party Facebook Engagement in Six Smaller European Democracies, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23400607