The construction of the political agenda on Twitter and Facebook during the 2016 Spanish elections: issues, frame and users’ interest

Abstract

During the last decades, the field of political communication has experienced a great transformation due to the appearance and consolidation of digital technologies. The aim of this research is to analyse the political agenda developed on Twitter and Facebook by the main Spanish political parties during the electoral campaign of June 2016, as well as to examine the users’ engagement to their messages. According to the results obtained, political actors prefer sharing content related to the strategic aspects of the campaign instead of sharing their political proposals. In addition, our research has detected strong discrepancies between the interests of political actors and the interests of users. In addition, a ‘more is less’ effect has been observed, in which the interaction that political parties get for each message is inversely proportional to the number of messages that they published.