The fallacy of interactivity on Twitter: the case of Andalusian political parties in 2020

Abstract

The advent and spread of social networking sites have been the object of study of most of the research performed on political communication over the past 25 years. However, more recent inquiries have indicated that the political establishment still has not fully exploited the interactive potential of these media. Against this backdrop, this paper presents the results of a systematic study of the communication between the main political parties in Andalusia (the most populous region in Spain) and the citizenry on Twitter, with the aim of confirming whether or not it is really interactive and participatory. To this end, the spotlight is placed here on those parties most active online and on the way in which they foster interactivity, the subjects that they broach and the functions of their messages. The data were obtained from a content analysis of the tweets (n = 10,729) posted on the official profiles of the main Andalusian parties in 2020. The results indicate that there was no interactive communication with the citizenry, despite the fact that they were in much need of reassurance owing to the unprecedented situation to which the COVID-19 pandemic had given rise. The Andalusian political parties still use social networking sites for the one-way dissemination of information, which shows that they are not, in practice, horizontal and participatory spaces of communication, as the cyber-optimists, defending the innovation hypothesis, predicted.