Imperfect Bipartisanship and Spanish Pluralism: The Keys to Success of Podemos on Twitter

Abstract

The objective of this research is to find if the success of Podemos in the 2014 European Parliament Elections and its activity on Twitter agrees with the theoretical perspectives that Dahlgren (2011) and De Ugarte (2007) developed or if there is a new civic participation paradigm that determinates the successful of the current political communication strategies. In order to verify this purpose, this study not only has applied Dahlgren (2011) and De Ugarte (2007) proposals, but also it has developed a sampling tweets methodology that permits to collect and analyze information from Podemos’ tweets from the 25th, March 2015 to the 24th, May 2014. The main conclusion of this research is that there is not a real ‘new civic participation model’, but there are emerging some social and collective trends that De Ugarte and Dahlgren did not consider in their approaches, but that offer a new context for the development of a new concept of “politics”.