Government formation and political discussions in Twitter: an extended model for quantifying political distances in multiparty democracies

Abstract

The retweet overlap network (RON) method has proved to be successful in quantifying the distances between political parties in multiparty democracies. These distances are frequently used in political science to explain the formation of coalitions and governments. This article explores how data collected from Twitter can be related to ideological similarities between political parties, drawing on an extended development of the RON method that calculates the overlaps between the communities of retweeters of the most influential users in a political discussion. The method is applied to two conversations in Twitter during the last two General Elections in Spain in 2015 and 2016. Our results are consistent with the dynamics and the outcomes of the bargaining processes after both elections and support the Spanish President's statement on the reasonableness of a government of the Popular Party, the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, and the Citizens–Party of the Citizenry after the Spanish General Elections in 2016. This work links quantitative analysis of the overlaps of the parties' communities of retweeters with the theories of coalition and government formation. It contributes to the exploration of Twitter metrics that can be used as new indicators of the support for coalitions in multiparty democracies.