Abstract
Portugal's two main parties, the Socialists (PS) and the Social Democrats (PSD), won 70% of the vote among the parties studied here in 2019, but drew much less of the engagement with Portuguese party and politician pages on Facebook. I use 153,649 posts from 12 party pages and 63 politicians' pages, collected through CrowdTangle, and compare each party's share of interactions in the 30 days before the 2015 and 2019 national elections and the 2019 European election with its share of the vote. Because capture of photo posts rose about fivefold in May 2015, comparisons start in June 2015. In 2015 the PS and the PSD-led alliance drew 70% of interactions against 77% of the vote; in 2019 they drew 43% against 70%, and 32% against 62% before the European election. In the month before the 2019 election, small parties drew between 2.5 and 10 times their vote share, whether they entered parliament in 2019 (PAN, Liberal Initiative, LIVRE) or not (the far-right PNR, Nós, Cidadãos and Aliança), so engagement did not separate winners of seats from the rest. Chega, which did enter, has no page in the data. The Left Bloc was loud through its politicians: its eight politicians' pages, an eighth of all politicians' pages, drew 43% of the interactions on politicians' pages from 2016 to 2020, and its MPs other than the leader drew slightly more than the 26 PSD politicians' pages together. On Facebook, the centre of the Portuguese party system was quiet.
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Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). The Quiet Centre: Portuguese Parties and Politicians on Facebook, 2010 to 2020. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418588