The Party- Influecer: the Constituency Communication of Podemos

This chapter analyses the constituency communication of the elected members of Podemos, a new party that emerged in Spain in 2014. The analysis first illustrates the political context by describing the main electoral and competitive characteristics of Spanish democracy, before focusing on the last general election in November 2019. Specifically, we carry out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of Podemos officials’ communication through two social networks: Facebook and Twitter. We demonstrate that their communication is mainly influenced by two variables: an institutional variable, linked to Podemos’ competitive position, and an organisational variable, linked to the distribution of power resources within the party itself. The communication via social media of Podemos’ parliamentarians and principal institutional representatives is in fact quite uniform in terms of topics and it finds its main exponents in those members occupying high profile positions in the public institutions.