Shifting Patterns of Polarisation in Spain and Catalunya as New Parties Enter Politics

The final IAMCR 2023 session for today is one that also contains a couple of presentation from my current Laureate Fellowship project, but we start with Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on political polarisation on Twitter in Catalunya and Spain. It’s important to study cases like this because polarisation research remains so dominated by studies of the bipolar US system, which simply don’t translate well to anywhere else. Spain has seen the emergence of several new parties, and this shifts the structure of the overall party system considerably.

New parties include centrist parties, extreme left parties, and far right parties in both Catalunya and Spain, and it is now important to determine how these are polarised against each other; here, polarisation is operationalised as the distance between specific groups in a given society, and this may also be translated to a longitudinal analysis of communicative distance on platforms like Twitter over time. Specifically, how does the emergence of parties like Vox affect the community structure of retweet overlap networks amongst partisans?

Frederic examined this for discourse around TV debate hashtags in national elections since 2012, and produced a series of network graphs to examine these retweet overlap network structures. Vox emerged as the central node of the right-wing cluster during the Spanish debates, but in an isolated position far from the right in Catalan debates. Overall, the positioning of the various clusters in the network shows a multipolar structure rather than a simple left/right distribution.

In subsequent elections the structure evolved further; following the failure of a bid to form a left/centrist government, the socialist party was positioned in a more isolated part of the network. These observations show that the shifting of party structures in a multi-party system like Spain’s has an effect on the entire party (and media) ecology – polarisation is a dynamic variable that depends on the emergence of new parties in political scenarios.