Abstract
When engagement with a party's Facebook page rises or falls from one month to the next, is that part of a Europe-wide movement, a national one, a movement shared by parties of the same family across borders, or specific to the page? Using 14,510 page-months from 173 party and leader pages in 20 European countries, January 2013 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, I split the variance of each page's deviations from its own trend into these four parts with nested fixed effects. In the main specification, the country-month accounted for about 26% of the variance, about 15 points above a random-label baseline; Europe-wide months for about 11% (between 3% and 17% across specifications); the party family for 3%, no more than random labels give; and the page for 60%. Pages co-moved with their own country and with Europe, but not with the same family abroad, and radical right surges were not synchronised across borders. National election windows went with interactions nearly three times as high as usual and account for about a fifth of the country component. The clearest Europe-wide months were the European Parliament elections of May 2014 and May 2019 and, less robustly, March 2018, March to April 2020 and September 2015. Apparent surges in May and June 2015 coincide with a break in CrowdTangle's capture of photo posts and disappear when it is allowed for.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). European or National? Common and National Swings in Facebook Engagement with European Parties and Leaders, 2013 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23416930