Abstract
Online attention to parties is often read as a sign of their support. I compare two kinds of attention to 112 European parties in 17 countries from July 2015 to September 2020: views of their Wikipedia articles, in the local language and in English, from the Wikimedia pageviews data, and interactions with their Facebook pages, from CrowdTangle. The two were related but far from identical: within country-months, the median rank correlation between parties' shares of views and of interactions was 0.50. Both rose around national elections, with different timing. Facebook interactions rose by about 160% in the month before an election and stayed at about that level in the election month; Wikipedia views roughly doubled in the month before and were almost five times their usual level in the election month, when results bring people to look parties up. In 20 elections in 14 countries, parties' shares of Wikipedia views in the two months before the election month tracked their vote shares more closely than their shares of Facebook interactions (correlation 0.84 against 0.62, across the same 111 party-elections, with shares taken among the parties in the data), but less closely than their previous vote shares (0.92). Adding either measure to the previous result reduced the average error of out-of-sample predictions only slightly, from 4.0 points to 3.8 or 3.9. Parties without a previous result drew about twice as large a share of attention as of votes. Wikipedia attention was a better guide to parties' relative size than Facebook engagement, but neither added much to knowing how they had done last time.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Looking Them Up: Wikipedia Attention, Facebook Engagement and Votes for European Parties, 2015 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414630