Does social media level the field between large and small parties, or do the parties that win votes also win attention online? Researchers call this equalisation versus normalisation, and most of the work has studied what parties do online rather than how audiences respond. I looked at the response.

The paper
Equal on Facebook? Engagement and Vote Shares of European Parties, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

For 107 party pages in 16 European countries from 2010 to 2020 (875 party-years and 431 million interactions, collected through CrowdTangle, Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages), I compared each party’s share of the interactions on its country’s party pages with its share of the vote at the last national election.

What I found

Engagement followed votes, but less than proportionally. A party with twice the vote share of another received about 1.7 times the engagement share. This came almost entirely from what each post received, not from how much parties posted, since small parties posted nearly as much as large ones. Parties with more than a fifth of the vote received a median of about 40% less of the engagement than of the vote, while those with less than a tenth received slightly more.

Engagement was about as concentrated across parties as the vote, but on different parties. The largest party by votes received the most engagement in only a quarter of country-years, well below what random variation around a proportional relationship would produce. Populist parties drew more than their vote share and governing parties less. These patterns did not change detectably over the decade.

On Facebook, the attention of party audiences was neither simply normalised nor equalised: it was reordered, with the largest parties rarely at the top.

Caveats

The sample is 107 pages in 16 countries. Engagement is attention, not support, and the paper is a preprint that has not been peer reviewed.

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