Abstract
Between 2016 and 2019 the French party system was redrawn. En Marche won the presidency and a majority within two years of its founding, La France insoumise overtook the Socialists, Marine Le Pen reached the 2017 runoff and her party's list came first at the 2019 European election. I use 54,226 posts from the Facebook pages of 17 French parties between January 2016 and September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, to ask how closely each party's share of engagement on these pages matched its share of the vote at the first rounds of the 2017 presidential and legislative elections and at the 2019 European election. The Front National/Rassemblement National page drew between 0.95 and 1.20 times its vote share. La France insoumise drew more than its vote share at all three elections, and the presidential majority's pages drew less. The largest gap was for the Union populaire républicaine, a small party campaigning to leave the EU: it drew 13% of party-page interactions in the month before the 2017 presidential first round, when its candidate won 0.9% of the vote, and 9% before the 2019 European election, when its list won 1.2%. That gap was not the product of a few viral posts. Its typical post drew about as many interactions as those of much larger parties, from a page with a fifth of the Rassemblement National's page likes. During the gilets jaunes protests, the far left and the Union populaire républicaine posted most about the movement, while the Rassemblement National mentioned it in under 2% of its posts. Engagement on party pages did not track the vote evenly, and the gaps were largest for small, highly engaged parties.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Loud on Facebook: French Party Pages and the Vote, 2016 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396232