Abstract
Parties often change leader in the hope of a fresh start, and in an age of personalised politics a new leader might be expected to bring new attention. Is a change of leader followed by a change in the engagement a party receives on social media? I compile the dates of 106 changes of party leader in 15 European countries between 2010 and 2020 and follow the parties' Facebook pages, collected through CrowdTangle, from twelve weeks before each change to six months after, comparing them with other parties' pages in the same country over the same weeks. In the week a new leader took office, a party's page received about 2.4 times its usual engagement relative to other parties, and over that week and the next about 60% more. The median post drew about 13% more in the following ten weeks. But total engagement soon returned to its earlier level: from two weeks to six months after the change it was not detectably higher than before. Where the new leader followed an interim leader (17 changes), engagement after the change was much higher than in the weeks before it, but a longer baseline shows that these parties' engagement had fallen during the interim period, and after the change it returned to about its level a year earlier, with the party posting more. A change of leader brings a moment of attention and a small rise in what each post receives, but on average no lasting new audience for the party's page.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). New Leader, New Audience? Party Leadership Changes and Facebook Engagement in Europe, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23414608