New parties are often said to do well on social media, which gives them an audience without the organisation and media access that established parties have. Do new parties’ Facebook posts really draw more engagement?

The paper
Is There a Newness Premium? New Parties and Engagement on Facebook in Europe, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I used 650,092 posts from 108 party pages and 186,939 posts from 74 party leaders’ pages in 20 European countries, posted between 2010 and 2020 and exported from CrowdTangle in 2020. I measured a party’s age from its first national or European Parliament election recorded in ParlGov.

What I found

Compared with other parties in the same country and month, and holding constant vote share, government status and party family, parties within five years of their first election drew about 32% more interactions per post. But the estimate is imprecise and its confidence interval includes no difference. It depends on how a handful of parties are dated, it is smaller once the size of a page’s audience is taken into account, and there is no evidence of it for populist parties or leaders’ pages.

Comparing parties with themselves, posts in a party’s first years drew about 48% more than its later posts. But this “honeymoon” comes mainly from parties first elected around 2010 and from the early 2010s. It is not found in posts from 2013 onwards, and it cannot be separated from these parties’ electoral fortunes or from the growth of the platform.

New parties did not reliably out-perform established ones, and where they did, the advantage was brief.

Caveats

Party age depends on how a few parties are dated, and the estimates are imprecise. Engagement is attention, not votes. The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.

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