Abstract
The personalisation of politics suggests that leaders increasingly overshadow their parties, and social media might be expected to speed this up. I compare the Facebook engagement received by party leaders' pages with that received by their parties' pages, for 53 leader and party pairs from 44 parties in 11 European countries between 2010 and 2020, using posts collected through CrowdTangle and counting a leader's page only while that person led the party. On average, leaders' pages received 43% of the combined engagement of leader and party, while making about a third of the posts: the median leader's post drew about 1.8 times as much as the party's. The split varied enormously, from leaders who took less than a fifth of the engagement, such as Christian Levrat of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, to those who took more than four fifths, such as Kyriakos Mitsotakis and Alexis Tsipras in Greece. Leaders of larger parties took a larger share. But there was no sign of growing personalisation over the decade: comparing the same leader and party over time, the leader's share did not rise, and a rise of more than about six points over the decade can be ruled out. During election campaigns, leaders posted somewhat more and the gap in engagement per post narrowed. On Facebook, leaders were often the main draw, but the balance between leader and party was a persistent feature of each party, with no sign of a rising trend.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Leader or Party? How Facebook Engagement Divided between European Party Leaders and Their Parties, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414616