Information and Knowledge Society

Are Social Media Challenging Politics? Interaction in Catalan Parties? Facebook Pages and among Catalan MPs? Twitter Accounts

Doctoral Programme on the Information and Knowledge Society
16/07/2015

Author: Marc Esteve del Valle
Programme: Doctoral Programme on the Information and Knowledge Society
Language:  English
Supervisor: Dr Rosa Borge 
Faculty / Institute: Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3)

Key words: Social media, Cataluña, members of parliament, parties 

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Summary

This dissertation focuses on sorting out plausible and refutable explanations of Catalan parties' and their representatives' interaction on Facebook and Twitter. It tries to answer a simple and clear question: Are social media challenging Politics? The dissertation proposes to answer that question by bridging statistical and social network methods. The dissertation shows that parties and their representatives' interactions on social media depend on contextual, organizational, ideological, electoral and network factors. Also, the dissertation's findings points to the fact that social media are opening a new political arena in which new opinion leaders are taking the floor and competing with parties' leaderships. In short, this thesis corroborates that social media are challenging Politics by opening a new online political arena within which parties and their representatives' are maneuvering to guarantee their political survival.