The dialogic potential of Twitter in electoral campaign. The case of PSOE and Podemos in Spain

The use of Twitter in the political communication field has increased considerably in the last years. Its potential as a communicative tool, specifically in electoral campaigns, and its capacity to improve the relation with the citizenry are some of the reasons to explain their rise. Specifically, the last aspect constitutes one of the major benefits of this platform: the possibility of establishing a dialogue with citizens, which encourages conversation from direct contact technologically mediated. The goal of this paper is to analyze the official Twitter profile of Partido Socialista (PSOE) and Podemos during the campaign of the 2015 Spanish elections to examine the degree of compliance with the principles dialogic attributed to social media. For this purpose, the proposed Kent and Taylor (1998) for digital media and subsequent adaptation of Ribalko and Seltzer (2010) for Twitter is taken as a starting point. The methodology is based on a quantitative approach from the application of the technique of content analysis in order to observe the use that each of the political parties analyzed made of Twitter, particularly its potential for generating dialogue with citizens. The sample focuses on the electoral campaign of the general elections celebrated in Spain on December, 20th 2015. Specifically, we analyze the 15 day campaign, the reflection day, the election day and the day after these. During this period, it will be studied the message shared by two political parties (PSOE and Podemos) in their Twitter official profiles. In this way, a traditional political party and a new one can be compared. The obtained results shows that both PSOE and Podemos produce a big amount of tweets that accomplish with some of the dialogic principles that reflect the existence of interaction between the profiles of the party and their principle leaders. Nevertheless, data shows that conversation of both political parties with their followers is limited. This finding question the use of the interactivity and dialogic capacity that are attributed to social media in the digital political communication during the electoral campaigns.