Abstract
The Social Democratic Party (PSD) won 45% of the vote in Romania's parliamentary election of December 2016, more than the National Liberal Party (PNL) and the new Save Romania Union (USR) together. I use 36,922 posts from eight Romanian political pages, 2011 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, to compare engagement on the three party pages with the vote. In the 30 days before the 2016 election, the PSD page drew 7% of the three party pages' interactions against 61% of the three parties' vote, a ratio of 0.11, while the PNL page drew 2.8 times its share and the USR page 1.6 times. The PSD page drew less than its vote share at every election from 2014 to 2020, but the gap narrowed as its vote fell and its page grew more active, to a ratio of 0.70 at the local elections of September 2020. While the PSD led the government in 2017 and 2018, a period of large protests, its page drew 4% of the three pages' interactions and USR's 38%; in opposition from November 2019 the PSD drew 18%. Where page sizes are recorded, from 2019, the PSD page had the fewest likes but its posts drew more interactions per like, so its small share goes with a smaller audience and, at times, less posting. A May 2015 change in CrowdTangle's capture is documented. The list has no PSD leaders' pages, so this compares party pages with votes, not parties' whole presence on Facebook.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). More Votes Than Interactions: Romanian Parties and Politicians on Facebook, 2011 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418595