Who do we follow? Analyzing the Behavioral Variance of Twitter Users in Spain

Citizens make an increasing use of social media with a political intention in mind and, as it has been recently recognized, this provides us with an unstructured and unfiltered survey of their political behavior (Nagler and Tucker 2015). In this paper we aim to connect the online political activity of a random group of Twitter users with their political opinions as revealed in the voting advice application (Brújula Electoral) that we launched in the occasion of the 2015 Spanish general elections. Given the relevance of social media as direct sources of political information, our goal is to understand existing patterns of political profiles of users of Twitter, and their implications. More specifically, we set forth two alternative hypotheses. On the one hand, following Butler and Stokes (1974 [1969]) and Converse (1969 and 1976) we argue that young voters are not anchored to a particular voting pattern yet. For this reason, they are more likely to follow more than one party and/or politicians from different parties at the same time. On the other, the likelihood of being equidistant from two political parties is higher for ideologically moderate citizens and, hence, they are more likely to simultaneously follow more than one party and/or politicians from different parties. Preliminary evidence seems to suggest that non-established users present more politically heterogeneous Twitter profiles. In contrast, ideological moderation does not have any significant effect on the probability of becoming a follower of different parties and/or politicians of more than one party at the same time on Twitter.