Facebook and Twitter in Election Campaigns in Spain

Abstract

President Barack Obama has launched his re-election campaign by means of a digital video that he has sent over the Internet to 13 million supporters who helped drive his historical campaign in 2008. In the USA social networks are the main vehicles of election campaigns, but in Spain, for now, this is not the case. This aim of this investigation is to analyse the use that the leaders of the main political parties have made of social networks in the last municipal and regional elections held in Spain on 22 May 2011, taking the Madrid Autonomous Region candidates for the PP (People’s Party) and PSOE (Socialist Party), Esperanza Aguirre and Tomás Gómez, respectively, as examples. We performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of all the messages launched by both facebook and twitter and demonstrating the impact of networks on the election results in Spain has been practically nil. Spanish politicians have understood the importance of being in the nets, but they have not understood its true use. 15-M movement through social networks, monopolized the media information about the campaign, but the networks did not affect voting behavior.