Abstract
New parties are often said to do well on social media, which offers them an audience without the organisation and media access that established parties have. Do new parties' Facebook posts draw more engagement than those of established parties? I use 650,092 posts from 108 party pages and 186,939 posts from 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries, posted between 2010 and 2020 and exported from CrowdTangle in 2020, and measure a party's age from its first national or European Parliament election recorded in ParlGov. Compared with other parties in the same country and month, and holding constant vote share, government status and party family, parties within five years of their first election drew about 32% more interactions per post, but the estimate is imprecise and its confidence interval includes no difference. It depends on how a handful of parties are dated, it is smaller once the size of a page's audience is taken into account, and there is no evidence of it for populist parties or leaders' pages. Comparing parties with themselves, posts in a party's first years drew about 48% more than its later posts. This honeymoon comes mainly from parties first elected around 2010 and from the early 2010s: it is not found in posts from 2013 onwards, and it cannot be separated from these parties' electoral fortunes or from the growth of the platform. The evidence for a general newness premium on Facebook is therefore weak: new parties did not reliably out-perform established ones, and where they did, the advantage was brief.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Is There a Newness Premium? New Parties and Engagement on Facebook in Europe, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414592