Short answer
Not reliably. New parties' posts drew about 32% more interactions, but the estimate is imprecise and its confidence interval includes no difference.
What the evidence shows
- The study uses 650,092 posts from 108 party pages and 186,939 posts from 74 party leaders' pages in 20 European countries, measuring a party's age from its first election recorded in ParlGov.
- The estimate depends on how a handful of parties are dated, is smaller once the size of a page's audience is taken into account, and shows no sign of the effect for populist parties or leaders' pages.
- Comparing parties with themselves, posts in a party's first years drew about 48% more than its later posts, but this honeymoon comes mainly from parties first elected around 2010 and from the early 2010s, and is not found in posts from 2013 onwards.
Caveats
The honeymoon cannot be separated from these parties' electoral fortunes or from the growth of the platform.