Parties often change leader hoping for a fresh start, and in an age of personalised politics a new leader might be expected to bring new attention. Is a change of leader followed by a change in the engagement the party gets on social media?

The paper
New Leader, New Audience? Party Leadership Changes and Facebook Engagement in Europe, 2010 to 2020
Read the paper (open access) · Abstract and PDF on my site

What I did

I compiled the dates of 106 changes of party leader in 15 European countries between 2010 and 2020. I followed the parties’ Facebook pages, collected through CrowdTangle (Meta’s former tool for tracking public pages), from twelve weeks before each change to six months after, and compared them with other parties’ pages in the same country over the same weeks.

What I found

In the week a new leader took office, a party’s page received about 2.4 times its usual engagement relative to other parties, and over that week and the next about 60% more. The median post drew about 13% more in the following ten weeks. But total engagement soon returned to its earlier level: from two weeks to six months after the change it was not detectably higher than before.

Where the new leader followed an interim leader (17 of the changes), engagement after the change was much higher than in the weeks before it. But a longer baseline shows that these parties’ engagement had fallen during the interim period, and after the change it returned to about its level a year earlier, with the party posting more.

A change of leader brings a moment of attention and a small rise in what each post receives, but on average no lasting new audience for the party’s page.

Caveats

The results are averages over 106 changes in 15 countries, and individual cases vary. 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 The paper is a preprint and has not been peer reviewed.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.