Abstract
When a faction or a prominent figure leaves a party to found a new one, does the party's online audience follow the breakaway or stay with the parent? Screening splits in 20 European countries in CrowdTangle data on 1,712 Facebook pages, I found ten, in seven countries from 2011 to 2019, in which the parent's page and the breakaway's pages (new party or departing figure) are observed around the split. I compare each side's share of all interactions with tracked party and leader pages in the country in the 12 months before and after. The parent's share fell in six cases and rose in four. The breakaway's share rose in nine cases, but the typical breakaway held only about 5% of national interactions afterwards, and its median gain equalled about two fifths of the parent's pre-split share. The combined share of parent and breakaway rose in five cases and fell in five, with a pooled change of 2.6 percentage points (SE 3.2), so there is no consistent sign of new energy. Four parents saw falls in the bottom tenth of normal 12-month changes for party pages. Where the parent's share fell, the breakaway made up most of the loss in three cases and little or none in three. These are descriptive patterns from few cases. Breakaways' gains were mostly modest, and the only large breakaway audiences, around Farage and Gyurcsány, were ones those leaders had already built on their personal pages before the split.
Questions this answers
Cite
Hotham, T. (2026). Who Keeps the Crowd? Party Splits and Facebook Engagement in Europe, 2011 to 2019. Preprint, Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23418603