Political deliberation in the Spanish political parties’ Twitter-sphere.

This paper aims at analysing the role of political parties within the digital deliberative ecosystem. Focusing on the Spanish Twitter-sphere, we study the contribution of political parties to the democratic deliberative system, taking into account the political debates and conversations on Twitter. The contribution of political parties to the public sphere , and especially to political deliberation, has not been extensively studied. Our research tries to fill that gap by analysing the deliberative potential of the five main Spanish political parties’ Twitter accounts (PSOE, PP, Ciudadanos, Podemos and Vox) and the Twitter-sphere around them. We rely on quantitative research tools, including computational techniques like machine learning and network analysis to analyze conversations (particularly, replies) on Twitter. Our attention is put on three features related to the deliberative behaviour of political parties on Twitter: a) the degree of ‘homophily’ in the reply network; b) the degree of issue variety or concentration; c) and the deliberative quality of conversations according to deliberative criteria developed by the literature. The first two tackle the internal party fragmentation and conflict which will set the ground for the latter analysis on the deliberative traits of conversations. Our general hypothesis is that the deliberative behaviour of political parties will vary depending on the political party’s characteristics and position in terms of ideology, resources for electoral competition and organization structure. The paper aims at contributing to the debate on the quality of deliberation through a proposal of indicators for the empirical measurement of deliberation in digital environments. At a more general level, it contributes to the controversial debate surrounding the negative effects of Twitter on the public sphere, particularly in highly partisan political contexts.