Abstract
Spain held four general elections between December 2015 and November 2019, as the two-party system gave way to five national parties. I use 74,884 posts from the Facebook pages of seven Spanish parties and seven of their leading politicians, from January 2015 to September 2020, collected through CrowdTangle, to ask two descriptive questions. First, how much of each party's engagement came through its leader's page? Less than one might expect for parties founded around prominent leaders: the Podemos party page drew between 51% and 83% of the engagement on the Podemos and Pablo Iglesias pages in every year, and the People's Party page drew more than its leader's in every year. Alberto Garzón (Izquierda Unida) drew more than his party page in every year, Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) from 2016 to 2018, and Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos) in 2018 and 2019, when his share reached 67% in the year his party's vote collapsed. Second, how did the parties' engagement compare with their votes? At all four elections, the pages of Podemos (from 2016, United Podemos) drew between 2.1 and 3.2 times their share of the vote, and Izquierda Unida's 5.8 times in 2015, while the PSOE and the People's Party drew between 0.21 and 0.45 times theirs (up to 0.63 when United Podemos is limited to two pages), including the PSOE when it won in 2019. Vox, which has no leader page in the data, drew 1.4 and 1.8 times its vote share in 2019. On Facebook, the parties that led Spain's governments were the quietest.
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Party Before Leader? Leaders' and Party Pages on Facebook in Spain, 2015 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23396523