Election campaigns are the busiest time for parties on social media, but little is known about what happens to their audiences once the votes are counted. I followed 95 party pages through 229 party-elections.

The paper
After the Votes Are Counted: Facebook Engagement with European Parties around National Elections, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I followed 95 party pages on Facebook through 229 party-elections in 16 European countries between 2010 and early 2020, using posts collected through CrowdTangle (Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages). I compared each page in the weeks after a national election with the weeks before the campaign.

What I found

Engagement rose steeply through the campaign: in the final week it was nearly six times its level twelve weeks earlier. It fell sharply once the election was over. In the following months pages posted about a third less and received about 40% fewer interactions than before the campaign began.

Results were associated with the immediate response. For parties that gained two or more points of the vote, the median post in the election week and the week after drew about 2.7 times its pre-campaign level, compared with about 75% to 95% more for other parties. But the advantage did not last: in the following months winners and losers alike fell back.

From 2016, when Facebook’s emoji reactions became available, the emotional mix also changed with the result. On the pages of parties that stayed in opposition, Angry reactions rose by about 1.3 points of all interactions after the election, from a base of about 2%, and Sad reactions by 0.6 points, whether or not the party had gained votes. On the pages of the 12 parties that entered government, Love rose by 2.2 points and Angry fell.

Party audiences on Facebook mobilise for the campaign, respond briefly to good results, and anger rises on the pages of parties left in opposition.

Caveats

Only 12 parties in the sample entered government, so that part of the picture rests on few cases. Engagement is attention, not support. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

The views in this post and the paper are my own.