Abstract
Does social media level the field between large and small parties, or do the parties that win votes also win attention online? Research on this question, framed as equalisation against normalisation, has mostly studied what parties do online rather than how audiences respond. I compare each party's share of the interactions received by its country's party pages on Facebook with its share of the vote at the last national election, for 107 party pages in 16 European countries from 2010 to 2020 (875 party-years, 431 million interactions, collected through CrowdTangle). Engagement followed votes, but less than proportionally: a party with twice the vote share of another received about 1.7 times the engagement share (elasticity 0.79, SE 0.08), and 0.84 in the year after an election, when vote shares are freshest. This came almost entirely from what each post received rather than from how much parties posted, since small parties posted nearly as much as large ones. Parties with more than a fifth of the vote received a median of about 40% less of the engagement than of the vote, while at the median those with less than a tenth received slightly more. Engagement was about as concentrated across parties as the vote, but on different parties: the largest party by votes received the most engagement in only a quarter of country-years, well below what random variation around a proportional relationship would produce. Populist parties drew more than their vote share and governing parties less. These patterns did not change detectably over the decade. On Facebook, the attention of party audiences was neither simply normalised nor equalised: it was reordered, with the largest parties rarely at the top.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Equal on Facebook? Engagement and Vote Shares of European Parties, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414600