“We Have Taken a Major Step Forward Today”: The Use of Twitter by Spanish Minor Parties

Depósito de investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla https://idus.us.es/ Esta es la versión aceptada del artículo publicado en: This is a accepted manuscript of a paper published in: Southern Communication Journal), (86): 2021 DOI: 10.1080/1041794X.2021.1882545 Copyright: El acceso a la versión publicada del artículo puede requerir la suscripción de la revista. Access to the published version may require subscription. “This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in [Southern Communication Journal] on [2021], available at: https://doi.org/[10.1080/1041794X.2021.1882545].” 1 “We have taken a major step forward today”: the Use of Twitter by Spanish Minor Parties Antonio Pineda ORCID: 0000-0002-0249-1881 Universidad de Sevilla Fernández Gómez, Jorge David ORCID: 0000-0002-0833-6639 Universidad de Sevilla Rebollo-Bueno, Sara ORCID: 0000-0001-8179-6562 Universidad de Sevilla Corresponding author: Antonio Pineda E-mail: [email protected] Minor parties—also known as “third parties” in the US—are integral components of democratic systems. Despite being ignored by the mainstream media, contemporary Spanish politics reveal that minor parties may challenge the hegemony of traditional organizations, and even enter parliamentary politics. This paper analyzes Spanish minor parties’ social media communication in the context of the April 2019 election. A sample of 1,498 tweets was content-analyzed, gathered from the official Twitter profiles of the four main national minor parties: PACMA, the Communist Party of the Spanish Peoples, Zero Cuts, and VOX. Results indicate a lack of party-citizen interaction, as well as a meta-campaigning approach whereby the tweets’ topics and functions are mostly related to the parties themselves and campaign behavior. Keywords: minor party communication; Twitter; social media and politics; Spanish minor parties Introduction 2 In an international context where populist and nationalist political options are on the rise, the erosion of the traditional two-party system in Spain has altered the scope of the role of minor parties. The most evident case is that of VOX, a radical right-wing party founded in 2013 which, when the 2016 general elections were held, did not have a single seat in Parliament; since the November 2019 general elections, however, VOX has become the third most important national party in Spain, increasing its electoral base from 47,000 to 2.6 million voters in just three years. The definition of minor parties—also called “third parties” in the United States (Rosenstone, Behr and Lazarus, 1996; Gillespie, 2013; Neville-Shepard, 2014b)—relies on a classification of political parties by size, which draws a distinction between major, large, medium-sized and small ones, the last being defined as “parties of a small size, usually expressions of significant minorities, whose importance depends on their capacity to form coalitions, and which often play the role of ‘arrowheads’” (Martínez Sospedra, 1996: 35). Moreover, minor parties flourish in multiparty political systems (Sartori, 1987)—indeed, in a strictly two-party system, third parties are those that cannot replace any of the two major parties or transform the two-party system into a multiparty one (Gillespie, 2013). Key’s minor party classification distinguishes between continuing doctrinal and issue parties, on the one hand, and short-lived parties, on the other. To this taxonomy Gillespie (2013) adds a third type: state/local significant parties. Continuing doctrinal and issue parties can last for decades and, although they rarely obtain good election results, their continuity is due to the faith of their supporters when defending their credo or certain issues. Short-lived parties tend to derive from protest movements or splits from major parties, and many of them identify with an influential founder. These parties can obtain notable election results, even determining which major party will govern. As to state/local 3 significant parties, these tend to wield political influence in their community or state— even though they may also have a stake in national politics—with the potential of becoming major parties in both spheres. In the political market, minor parties generally come up against some of the obstacles that “third-party candidates” encounter in the US, such as insufficient campaign funding, deficient media coverage, exclusion from presidential debates and “a belief among voters that support for third parties is a wasted ballot” (Neville-Shepard, 2014a: 132). Notwithstanding these constraints, minor parties find an opportunity in the electorate’s dissatisfaction with major parties, with a more fluctuating vote and a certain degree of misalignment with them, in a context of widespread scepticism (Furlong, 2001). The capacity to leverage this dissatisfaction has to do with the fact that, as noted by Gillespie, “Some of the spirit of insurgency exists in almost all minor parties” (2013: 49). In addition to challenging dominant parties, minor organisations can obtain seats in legislative political bodies and play an important role in them (Furlong, 2001), even constituting a vector of change. This change can derive from their potential to alter or correct the policy positions or ideological line of a major party (Gillespie, 2013). According to Rapoport and Stone, “Third parties instigate change by stimulating a response from major parties. The key to understanding how third parties produce change is another widely observed regularity: successful third parties do not last long” (2019: 5), since their constituents end up being courted and co-opted by their major counterparts (Rapoport and Stone, 2019). Additionally, small parties have been at the forefront of change and progress in freedom long before major parties in countries like the US, from breaking down gender or racial barriers when choosing candidates, to innovating in policy or democratic structural reforms (Rosenstone, Behr and Lazarus, 1996; Gillespie, 2013). 4 In this connection, one of the most important functions of minor parties is their ability to include new issues on the political agenda. The introduction of issues relates to the importance that ideological principles have for minor parties—especially when their campaigns are contrasted with those of major parties, which tend to employ a “catch-all” strategic approach and ideological vagueness. According to Neville-Shepard (2014b: 218), third party campaigns “are almost always steeped in ideology”. In this regard, it is important to note that these groups represent the entire political spectrum: “Third parties, after all, have represented nearly every political point of view, from the Communist Party on the left to the American Independent Party on the right” (Rosenstone, Behr and Lazarus, 1996: 5). In fact, the presence of minor parties can be associated with the ideological diversity of a political system. Thus, for Sartori, a multiparty system reflects a reality of polarization or fragmentation which leads to an ideological gap, namely, “the overall scope of the ideological spectrum of any given political community” (1987: 161; original emphasis), so that the greater the fragmentation of a community is, the greater the polarization will be, thus distancing moderate postures from political reality. In this context, minor parties often embody radical and extremist stances, such as that of the Libertarian Party in the US, or the extreme right-wing Falange Española de las JONS in Spain. In this vein, longitudinal data indicate that niche parties—like the Greens, the Communists, and the extreme Right—are more likely to improve their election results if they toe a clear ideological line (Dumitrescu, 2011). Minor party media coverage and online campaigning Regarding communication, it has become a platitude to claim that there is a huge difference between the news coverage given to major and minor parties, the latter receiving scant attention from the media (Evans et al., 2019). The negligible coverage 5 received by third-party candidates is due to the fact that “broadcasters and publishers do not think they warrant attention” (Rosenstone, Behr and Lanzarus, 1996: 35). Versus the continual attention that the media pay to major parties, small organisations hardly get a look in, insofar as they are considered to be less newsworthy (Ahmed, Cho and Jaidka, 2017). Thus, the possibility of attaining a position of power, or of becoming a relevant political player, is a decisive variable: “It is not the major-minor party status that determines newsworthiness, but the degree of potential influence the party exercises in the political power game” (Rudd and Connew, 2007: 52-53). Owing to this horse-race mentality, “minor parties and the issues they seek to convey remain largely invisible to voters who rely upon television as their source of political news” (Denemark, Ward and Bean, 2007: 95). Additionally, the disregard for minor parties can be boiled down to ideological reasons relating to the fringe position of many of them: “Dissent has rarely a friend in the news media” (Kirch, 2015: 399). It should also be noted, however, that the greater the power of a candidate or party is, the more critical treatment that person or organisation will receive from the media, and vice versa: minor parties receive less media attention, but also less negative appraisals (Gnisci, Galen and Conza, 2014). The lack of media coverage influences the communication and campaigns of minor parties. In the US, for instance, third-party campaigning chiefly serves the “alternative purpose of raising awareness about certain issues”, given that it is improbable that they will win presidential elections. Accordingly, it may be claimed that “third-party candidates are not aiming to win but to agitate” (Neville-Shepard, 2014a: 134). The literature also notes that the rhetorical strategies of American third-party candidates are polarized, non-conventional, and self-destructive, these candidates establishing their own discursive rules, differing in function and form from major-party rhetoric (Neville- Shepard, 2014b, 2014a). From the viewpoint of the media employed, a study by 6 Dumitrescu (2011) on the use of posters in the 2007 election in France and Belgium, indicates that minor parties used them for disseminating information with an eye to expanding their electoral base. Comparing online and traditional campaign posters, Steffan and Venema (2020) point out that German minor parties use textual personalisation to a higher extent, employ fewer ideological symbols, and make more use of visual negative campaigning than major parties. Regarding the Internet, the literature has focused on aspects such as the opportunity that online campaigning offers minor parties for levelling the playing field. The advent of the Internet gave rise to expectations about the advantages that information and communication technologies could offer fringe, minor, and anti-establishment parties (Margolis, Resnick and Levy, 2005). Minor parties themselves have shown their enthusiasm for the Web, appreciating the advantages of web campaigning (Gibson and McAllister, 2015). This relates to the so-called “innovation” or “equalization hypothesis”, which states that those parties and candidates at a disadvantage can gain ground on established parties thanks to online media, which allows smaller parties to overcome the disadvantages that they face in the offline media world, increasing the efficiency of their communication (Schweitzer, 2008; Vergeer, Hermans and Sams, 2011). In contrast, the “normalization” hypothesis asserts that online campaigning only reinforces power relations existing in the offline world, so that, instead of leading to equalization, the Web would merely be replicating the imbalances between major and minor parties (Lilleker et al., 2011; Gibson and McAllister, 2015; Klinger and Svensson, 2015; Ahmed, Cho and Jaidka, 2017). Nevertheless, the concept of normalization goes beyond the notion that moneyed parties perform better online: it also relates to the Web taking on traditional political patterns and behaviour. Not by coincidence, Margolis and Resnick (2000), who formulated the normalization thesis, pointed out the passive nature of the web, and were 7 skeptical towards the celebration of online interactivity. Thus, normalization of offline practices would also imply the migration of features such as one-directional, broadcasting-led, and non-interactive practices to the online world (Parmelee, Roman and Beasley, 2018). In this connection, some studies claim that major parties use the Internet more actively, while others reveal that emerging parties are more active in the use of digital technology (Ahmed, Cho and Jaidka, 2017). In the case of the extreme Right, for example, there are indications that it has exploited it to a great extent, because it has allowed extremists to circumvent traditional media. The literature has also highlighted the case of Green parties, whose websites’ content and interactivity levels match those of major parties in every respect. Other authors point out that an engaging and interactive use of websites may give smaller parties an electoral edge (Koc-Michalska et al., 2016). However, studies of party websites in general elections have revealed the predominance of major parties (Gulati and Williams, 2007), thus reinforcing the normalization hypothesis (Gibson and McAllister, 2015). In view of the fact that the Internet was not benefitting small parties—thus sustaining the normalization thesis—social media and the Web 2.0 breath new life into the equalization thesis, these tools serving to organise supporters, engage a younger audience, and improve election prospects (Gibson and McAllister, 2015). Different authors understand the relevance of social media—or social networking sites (hereinafter SNSs)—for minor parties as a campaign tool, since they are less costly and allow for engaging very specific audience segments, making the most of direct and unmediated contact between voters and candidates, and broadening the audience (Lafuente Pérez and Verón Lassa, 2013; Gibson and McAllister, 2015). In this sense, the principal function of SNSs is to offer those parties that neither attract media coverage, nor can afford to spend 8 much on advertising, “a visibility platform” (Ahmed, Cho and Jaidka, 2017: 1380). As to message content, although the debate on SNSs is more ideologically uniform, it includes a greater level of interaction and the deployment of rational arguments, in contrast to major parties which use SNSs as platforms of self-expression (Valera Ordaz, 2017). The possibilities of SNSs are also evident in the longitudinal study performed by Gibson and McAllister (2015) in Australian elections: although the results go a long way to underpin the normalization thesis—for instance, as to the development of personal websites—it was the minor players that put Web 2.0 tools to a greater use. In the Norwegian context, Larsson and Moe (2014) found that Twitter was an arena for “underdog” parties, with dominant politicians absent from dialogical communication. In another Norway-focused comparative study of interaction strategies in the 2013 election, Kalsnes (2016) found that minor parties received more replies from the public in Facebook. However, other studies have been less optimistic about the opportunities that SNSs offer to minor parties. LaMarre and Suzuki-Lambrecht (2013) found out that US third-party candidates were a lot less inclined to open Twitter accounts than those of the major parties in the 2010 House of Representatives election; findings in keeping with those of Evans, Cordova and Sipole (2014) in the 2012 House of Representatives election. An analysis of SNSs in the 2012 South Korean elections, revealed that major parties and leaders had a greater degree centrality than their minor counterparts—this being understood as the co-occurrence frequencies of a party/leader and the parties/leaders (Nam, Lee and Park, 2015). In a study on the Israeli 2015 election, Lev-On and Haleva- Amir (2018) found that dominant parties and candidates are taking over Facebook, thus supporting the normalization hypothesis. As to the use of Twitter in particular, research has also brought to light certain patterns. In the 2012 US House of Representatives election, Evans, Cordova and Sipole 15 fact, the fiercest opposition to the current left-leaning government in the context of the COVID-19 crisis. Originally an amalgam of different like-minded communist parties, the PCPE was founded by Ignacio Gallego, a historical member of the Communist Party of Spain (hereinafter PCE) in Madrid in January 1984. With a radical left-wing bent, the PCPE is “inspired by the principles of the Third International, Unified Marxist-Leninist and Proletarian Internationalists, whose immediate aim is to overcome the political, organic and ideological deterioration caused by Eurocommunism’s renouncement of Leninism and Internationalism, and to override the historical PCE as a useful tool for confronting capitalism in its advanced stage, namely, imperialism” (Partido Comunista de los Pueblos de España, n.d.). A staunch advocate of workers’ movement, its main adversary is imperialism, which it combats through its opposition to NATO and the foreign military bases in Spain. Pertaining to the media employed by these parties, SNSs were chosen because they are a very relevant tool when shaping public opinion in Spain: according to official sociological data, they are the second most preferred channel for keeping abreast of political affairs and election news (CIS, 2019). Additionally, SNSs do not impose on small parties the barriers that they tend to encounter in media such as television. More specifically, Twitter was chosen for several reasons. Firstly, it is a highly used site for election campaigning by parties and candidates (Jungherr, 2016), as well as the SNS that has aroused the greatest scholarly interest regarding politics (Filimonov et al., 2016; Ramos-Serrano, Fernández Gómez and Pineda, 2018; Evans et al., 2019). Secondly, Twitter use is fairly widespread in Spain (García Ortega and Zugasti Azagra, 2014), thus making it an enticing SNS for the political class. Thirdly, the literature has highlighted 16 the importance of Twitter for parties like VOX, which uses this SNS carefully because it is frequently employed by the media as a source (García Herrero, 2019). The Twitter sample comprises all the tweets posted by each party on their official profiles between 12 and 28 April 2019, a period running from the start of the campaign to election day. VOX’s tweets were retrieved using the OPILEAK tool developed by the company Dinamic Área, which has registered apps for the retrieval of tweets using this SNS’s application program interfaces. The tweets of the other three parties—the PCPE, RC-GV and the PACMA—much less numerous than those of VOX, were retrieved manually. The sample of tweets totalled 1,498, the majority of which had been posted by VOX (847 tweets), followed by RC-GV (261), the PACMA (220) and the PCPE (170). Content analysis (Krippendorff, 2004) was the data-gathering and analytical technique applied to the sample. To answer the research questions, we used the operationalization proposed by Graham et al. (2013), who developed a coding scheme for analysing British campaigning on Twitter in 2010, which was adapted to the Spanish context. To analyze interactivity, three types were distinguished: normal posts, @-replies and retweets—a typology similar to the one used by Larsson and Moe (2011)—although, unlike Graham et al. (2013), retweets with comments were not taken into account, on the understanding that they have a function similar to that of normal retweets. On the basis of this typology, @-reply was operationalized as the basic indicator of interaction—one that has already been used widely for studying interactivity (Evans, Cordova and Sipole, 2014; Zugasti Azagra and Pérez González, 2015). The analysis of interactivity was reinforced by including variables relating to the number of multimedia elements (links, images and videos) and hashtags that each post contained—understanding the average number of hashtags used in each post as a secondary indicator of interactivity (Verón Lassa and Pallarés Navarro, 2017), for the literature has noted that, when used correctly, 17 hashtags aim to increase interactions (Cartes Barroso, 2018). In any case, the fact that hashtags are just sociotechnical affordances (Rathnayake and Ntalla, 2020) whose use depends on factors beyond the parties’ capacities, makes them subordinate to @-replies as far as interactivity is concerned. Secondly, operationalization takes into account the proposal of Graham et al. (2013) for the topics addressed in the tweets, to which we added specific topics in order to adapt it to the Spanish context (see Table 4 for the complete list of topics). As to tweet functions, we employed the following categories established by Evans, Cordova and Sipole (2014) and Evans et al. (2019): - Campaign. Messages in which candidates talk about what they have done during the campaign, as well as tweets containing links to campaign materials or to websites with information on their candidacies. - Media. Tweets notifying followers about the appearances of candidates in the media, or about publications focusing on them in the media. - Issues (position taking/policy statement). Messages aimed at raising awareness about a public policy area or a campaign topic (the economy, abortion, etc.), whether taking a stance (position taking) or not (policy statement) when reporting on an issue. - Attack. A direct attack against, or criticism of electoral rivals. - Attack other. Attacks against other groups (the Government, the media, institutions, etc.). - Personal. Messages that do not fall into any of the previous categories, and which either tend to revolve around family/private aspects, or have nothing to do with the campaign. 18 Regarding inter-coder reliability, an initial informal test was run on some random tweets, which served to introduce a variable relating to hashtags and to clarify the meaning of some categories. Following this, a first two-coder test was run, which resulted in the inclusion of a new category in the tweet topic variable. The coders—four undergraduate students—received training both before and after the first test, which resulted in a second reliability test that yielded indicators of agreement higher than 0.95 for all variables, using Krippendorff’s alpha. Results Table 1 shows the types of tweets posted, providing a contrast between the general tone and that of the specific case of VOX. The PACMA, RC-GV and the PCPE generally posted normal tweets, with percentages close or equal to 100 per cent in the cases of the PACMA and the PCPE. On the contrary, VOX resorted more often to retweets—in fact, over 60 per cent of its messages were retweets. For example, on 28 April 2019 the party retweeted a message posted by Rocío Monasterio, one of its main leaders, claiming that thenceforth it was going to fight for Spain in the Congress (Monasterio, 2019). At any rate, the ‘total’ column in Table 1 evinces the predominance of normal tweets, exemplified by a message posted by the PACMA on 25 April, in which the party declared that it was going to do its utmost ‘to make sure that violence against animals becomes a thing of the past in our country’ (PACMA, 2019). On the other hand, interactivity and dialogue with users were irrelevant factors for all parties, except for RC-GV, which devoted 22 per cent of its messages to @replies. TABLE 1 HERE The three parties with a left-wing ideology also coincided in the use of multimedia features in their tweets (see Table 2): the PACMA, RC-GV and the PCPE included images 19 in their posts as a primary resource, while also giving relative importance to links and videos—barring the PCPE, which only included videos on one occasion. TABLE 2 HERE The importance of images is exemplified by a tweet against privatizations posted by RCGV on 18 April (see Image 1), as well as by a tweet posted by the PCPE featuring its visual ideological symbols (see Image 2). IMAGE 1 HERE IMAGE 2 HERE In contrast, VOX used videos as its main multimedia tool in nearly 37 per cent of its tweets, thus being the party that put multimedia resources to a most balanced use, in addition to giving less importance to images than the rest of the parties. Be that as it may, all the parties included a large variety of multimedia resources in their tweets. Table 3 shows the frequency with which hashtags were used per tweet, highlighting yet again the gap between the left-wing parties and the radical right-wing VOX. The PACMA, RC-GV and the PCPE predominantly used between two and five hashtags, followed by one hashtag per tweet—a category in which PACMA animalists stood out, with 31.8 per cent of its messages containing one hashtag. On the other hand, more than 20 RC-GV tweets fell into the ‘more than five’ hashtag category, which points to an intensive use of this interactive resource. TABLE 3 HERE VOX was diametrically opposed to the other in that it did not use any hashtags in more than half of its tweets. Notwithstanding this underuse, it employed a hashtag in 27 per cent of its messages. Considering the totals, the ‘between two and five’ hashtags-per- tweet category was in any event the most frequently employed, an aspect exemplified by 20 a post by the Marxist PCPE on 12 April, which contained four hashtags evincing its ideological slant: #PCPE, #RepúblicaSocialista (#SocialistRepublic), #14Abril—14 April being the day when the Spanish Second Republic was proclaimed in 1931—and #Autodeterminación (#Self-determination) (PCPE, 2019a). Irrespective of ideological slants, minor-party communication did indeed coincide in the topics addressed. As Table 4 shows, the topic that was by far the most frequently addressed was “campaign and political parties”, accounting for nearly or more than 50 per cent of the messages—in descending order, VOX (68.83 per cent), the PCPE (60 per cent), the PACMA (55 per cent), and RC-GV (49.04 per cent). This implies that more than 60 per cent of the total number of minor-party posts were devoted to the campaign, or to themselves. Such a self-referentiality can be clearly seen in the following VOX tweet (Image 3), with information on the closing rally of the campaign and a photo of party leader Abascal: IMAGE 3 HERE In comparison with “campaign and political parties” all the other topics were secondary, if not marginal, and whether or not they were addressed depended to a great extent on the ideology of each party. The PACMA talked about “animal rights” and “environment”, while pro-public sector RC-GV focused on issues such as “economy and business”, “culture”, and “war and conflicts”. Only VOX differed in this respect, addressing a lot of topics, besides issues associated with its hard-right principles, including “Spain”, “non- Spanish nationalism”, “economy and business”, and “immigration”. It is worth noting that VOX was the only party to broach the subject of religion, in addition to the considerable number of tweets (39) that it devoted to criticising the media, in keeping with the attitude of other right-wing populist politicians like Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. 21 TABLE 4 HERE There were also certain similarities in the functions performed by the tweets (Table 5). In coherence with the topics variable, “campaign” was the most repeated function, accounting for over 50 per cent of the total number of posts by the PCPE, VOX and the PACMA, and to a lesser extent RC-GV (33.33 per cent). The “campaign” function was exemplified by a tweet posted by the PCPE on 13 April which, as well as appealing to “the strength of workers”, included a link to the party’s electoral programme (PCPE, 2019b). The tendency towards referring to the campaign was accompanied by other functions that, albeit to a lesser extent, had overlaps in the different parties. This was the case with “position taking” on issues, an aspect present in the tweets of all parties— especially in the 80 posts devoted to this function by RC-GV—and the “attack other” function, as regards which VOX stood out with 68 tweets. Similarly, the “media” function was also prevalent—with tweets where followers were informed about the appearances of candidates in the media—in the campaigns of VOX and the PACMA—not for nothing the two parties with the best electoral prospects. The quantitative irrelevance of personal issues and, by extension, the personalization of politics, is also remarkable. TABLE 5 HERE Discussion and Conclusions The Internet and SNSs provide minor parties with communication channels that act as a counterbalance to media coverage focusing on major leaders involved in the “horse race” and the struggle for office. Owing to the difficulties faced by minor parties when attempting to carve out a niche for themselves on the political agenda (Zunino and Ortiz Marín, 2017), they tend to resort to SNSs like Twitter. In this regard, we proceed to discuss the implications of our findings on Spanish minor parties’ Twitter behaviour, and 22 relating them to existing knowledge on minor-party communication and the normalization hypothesis. Our study supports the idea that SNSs have been adopted “by smaller parties with budgets to match, which have seen in the Web a way of staying in contact with their followers, while attempting to engage new segments of society” (Lafuente Pérez and Verón Lassa, 2013: 541-542). In this respect, the case of RC-GV is fairly evident, since it was the minor party that posted the largest number of tweets, after VOX, and, at the same time, the kind of small party that is ignored by the mainstream media—as indicated by Sanjuán Santonja’s study (2015), in which RC-GV was the only party, among those analyzed, that did not appear in traditional media. On the other hand, ideology seems to be a discriminating factor regarding SNS activity, inasmuch as ultra-rightist VOX posted many more tweets than the rest of minor parties, which can be defined as being to the left or radical left of the political spectrum. VOX’s abundant activity on Twitter is in consonance with Gibson and McAllister’s thesis (2015) that the extreme right puts the Internet to a considerable use. At the same time, this implies a disconcerting conclusion pertaining to the Spanish context, where Twitter users tend to be young and ideologically left wing (Congosto, 2015). This may indicate that Spanish progressive minor parties are not making sufficient efforts on the Web in comparison with their right-wing rivals. Furthermore, the overwhelming superiority of VOX pertaining to posting frequency in relation to the other minor parties in 2019, sheds light on the fact that the communication of this radical party, is characterized by the repudiation of traditional media, with the argument that they do not report on its proposals and ideas with reliability, but in a partial or adulterated manner (García Herrero, 2019). Thus, VOX’s systematic use of SNSs does not only have to do with the lack of coverage given by traditional media to minor parties, but rather with a direct confrontation with 23 them (Abuín-Vences and García-Rosales, 2020)—a strategy clearly inspired by Trump’s. In this regard, it is interesting to relate VOX and Trump’s communication similarities to the links existing beetween former Trump strategist Steve Bannon and VOX’s National Executive Committee member Rafael Barjadí (Ferreira, 2019; Aladro Vico and Requeijo Rey, 2020; García-Sanjuan, 2020), who share the aim of an European populist right-wing movement—according to Woertz and Soler I Lecha (2020: 13), “The mastermind of VOX’s international outreach programme, Bardají, is the director of the Friends of Israel Initiative and has aligned his party with former Trump advisor Bannon’s efforts to create a pan-European right-wing populist platform”. Hence similarities regarding communication strategies have been highlighted, from VOX’s use of a Trump-inspired political incorrectness (Álvarez-Benavides and Jiménez Aguilar, 2020) to the propagandistic use of the nationalist-medieval past (García-Sanjuan, 2020) to different SNS strategies pertaining to both form and message content (Aladro Vico and Requeijo Rey, 2020). Our second research question related to the communication functions of minor parties. The “campaign” function was the most relevant, which is in line with research conducted by Abuín-Vences and García Rosales, highlighting that VOX’s tweets tend to extol “its convening power in campaign rallies and seek to show how close its leaders are to the electorate” (2020: 9). Also in keeping with previous studies of Spanish parties, minor organizations resort to Twitter to enhance their campaigns, as if it were a traditional media outlet (Ramos-Serrano, Fernández Gómez and Pineda, 2018). So, it could be claimed that the 2019 campaigns of Spanish minor parties were a case of “metacampaigning, that is, communications about the state of the campaign” (Jensen and Anstead, 2014: 61), which can be related to a vertical and monological communication approach. Thus, minor parties not only hardly interacted with users—as evidenced by the 24 irrelevance of the @replies, or VOX’s scant use of hashtags—but they also dedicated most of their tweets to themselves and their own activities. This coincides with the scepticism shown in previous studies of Spanish SNS political communication (Abejón, Sastre and Linares, 2012; Ramos-Serrano, Fernández Gómez and Pineda, 2018), which suggest that social sites are underused tools that repeat a one-way broadcasting model, instead of exploiting the possibilities for interactivity (Jungherr, 2016). Typologically speaking, the intensive use of retweets by VOX is also coherent with previous research claiming that this party implements a SNS strategy aimed at the dissemination and resending of messages (García Herrero, 2019). At any rate, and beyond metacampaigning and one-way communication, it is important to note other results relating to communication functions, such as the importance of the “attack other” category, as well as the irrelevance of the personalization of politics. This last aspect contradicts Sanjuán Santonja’s study (2015), which points out that traditional media information on minor parties tends to revolve around front-runners, which may indicate that the media strategy of these parties differs in the digital environment in certain aspects. In any case, the fact of having analyzed the Twitter profiles of the parties rather than those of the presidential candidates, might have something to do with the lack of focus on personal factors. It is the campaign topics variable that most clearly evinces the tendency of minor parties to put SNSs to a continuist use―an issue relating to our third research question. Part of the literature considers that third parties discuss issues differing from those of major parties (Evans et al., 2019), which often violate the rules of political discourse (Neville-Shepard, 2014b), and which place the accent on ideological principles (Neville- Shepard, 2014b). Our findings are a long way from corroborating these assumptions. In fact, the topic most frequently raised by all parties was “campaign and political parties”, which suggests a deep-seated and self-referential use of Twitter. In view of the fact that 31 García Herrero, F. J. (2019). “La nueva política como anunciantes en la Derecha Española: VOX y las elecciones de 2018 y 2019”. Redmarka, 23(3), 65-82. García Ortega, C., and Zugasti Azagra, R. 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Revista Internacional de Sociología, 75(1), e052, 1-15. Vergeer, M., Hermans, L., and Sams, S. (2011). “Online social networks and microblogging in political campaigning: The exploration of a new campaign tool and a new campaign style”. Party Politics, 19(3), 477-501. Verón Lassa, J. J., and Pallarés Navarro, S. (2017). “La imagen del político como estrategia electoral: el caso de Albert Rivera en Instagram”. Mediatika, 16, 195- 217. VOX. (n.d.). Qué es VOX. https://www.voxespana.es/espana/que-es-vox vox_es. [@vox_es]. (2019, April 28). ¡Gracias! ¡Gracias! ¡Gracias! La #EspañaViva tendrá voz en el Congreso. Hoy hemos dado un gran paso. 37 #EleccionesGenerales28A [Video attached] [Tweet]. Twitter. https://twitter.com/vox_es/status/1122594018502828033 Woertz, E., and Soler i Lecha, E. (2020). Populism and Euro-Mediterranean cooperation: The Barcelona process 25 years after. Mediterranean Politics, 1-24. Zugasti Azagra, R., and Pérez González, J. (2015). “La interacción política en Twitter: el caso de @ppopular y @ahorapodemos durante la campaña para las Elecciones Europeas de 2014”. Ámbitos, 28. Zunino, E., and Ortiz Marín, M. (2017). “Los medios y las elecciones: La agenda informativa de la campaña presidencial de 2015 en la Argentina”. Más poder local, 30, 56-66. i Although VOX is widely regarded by the Spanish media and left-wing politicians as an “extreme right” party, it should be labeled as a “radical right” party. As pointed out by different authors, there are differences within the far right political family, between the extreme right, which rejects the whole democratic system and aims to impose dictatorships or other types of authoritarian regimes; and the radical right, which rejects some aspects of liberal-democratic systems, but accepts democratic rules and free elections. Radical right parties oppose some key features of liberal democracies, like the constitutional protection of minorities, but they are nominally democratic, whereas the extreme right is essentially antidemocratic. Additionally, extreme right groups and movements are willing to use violent direct action, whereas the radical right compete through conventional electoral channels, and disown the adoption of violent tactics (Norris, 2005; Mudde, 2007; Ferreira, 2019). In these terms, VOX should be classified as a radical right party, instead of an extreme right party.