The communicative behavior of spanish politicians on Twitter. Comparative analysis according to the different levels of government

Abstract

Social networks have become a substantive element of political communication today because they are one of the central spaces for access to political information and because they enable debate on everything considered of public interest. In addition to be a privileged field for politicians to make their opinions known and engage in direct dialogue with citizens. From this point of view, we wonder if Spanish politicians are taking advantage of the potential offered by social networks. The main objective of this work is to analyze from a comparative perspective the use that the political class makes of the social network Twitter, and if there is a true communicative intention adapted to the new media among Spanish politicians. Some of our hypotheses being: —among politicians who use the microblogging platform Twitter—: 1) that there are notable differences both in the intensity and in the form of use, 2) that interaction with citizens is not common and, furthermore, 3) it is observed that the level of political responsibility becomes the independent variable that determines the different communicative attitudes in this social network. To develop this comparative analysis, we have drawn up a representative sample of Spanish politicians at different levels of government, forming and comparing the communicative attitudes of four different blocks of representation. Finally, we conclude that the use made by the political class of this channel is not homogeneous, since, although little use of the potential of this political communication tool is common, different uses and communicative attitudes are observed depending on the level of political responsibility.