“We Have Taken a Major Step Forward Today”: The Use of Twitter by Spanish Minor Parties

Abstract

Minor parties—also known as “third parties” in the US—are integral components of democratic systems. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media, contemporary Spanish politics reveal that minor parties may challenge the hegemony of traditional organizations, and even enter parliamentary politics. This paper analyzes Spanish minor parties’ social media communication in the context of the April 2019 election. A sample of 1,498 tweets was content-analyzed, gathered from the official Twitter profiles of the four main national minor parties: PACMA, the Communist Party of the Spanish Peoples, Zero Cuts, and VOX. Results indicate a lack of party-citizen interaction, as well as a meta-campaigning approach whereby the tweets’ topics and functions are mostly related to the parties themselves and campaign behavior.