Analysis of political ideology on social media and official platforms: Spain and the United Kingdom

Abstract

During electoral campaigns, political parties use different communication channels for their messages to reach the voters. Traditionally, the parties’ platforms have been the main tool for this. On the other hand, social media is becoming an increasingly important channel in recent times. The aim of this project is to analyse and compare the political ideology of the messages published by the political parties depending on the media they use and for different topics, among which I will show the results for equality. To accomplish this, a selection of tweets and parties’ platforms are used. The chosen parties are the five national parties with most representation in the last elections in Spain and four national parties in the UK. The project is expected to examine whether there are ideological differences between the messages depending on the media being used for each party and if the ideology gets radicalised. Moreover, analysing similar aspects from Spanish and UK political parties may reflect a broader idea of similarities or differences at a European level.