Partisan Political Influencers: Identifying Social Media Influencers and Their Linkage Functions in the TikTok Spheres of Political Parties

The literature has highlighted the role of political influencers on the formation of public opinion, and the creation of alternative communication networks with regard to traditional media (Finlayson, 2020; Lewis, 2018). Their influence is based on their horizontal communication styles and perceived independence, prompting their publics to identify with them (Cheng et al., 2024; Klüver, 2024). This contrasts with parties’ top-down and scarcely interactive approach when using social media, frequently unable to surpass echo-chambers and establish a real dialogue with voters (Beriain-Bañares et al., 2022). The growing centrality of influencers is connected to the importance of digital communication in electoral campaigning, which opens the range of actors involved, erases the protagonism of political parties, and favours networked and decentralised canvassing strategies (Römmele and Gibson, 2020). In parallel, the rise of time-consuming and skill-demanding social media, particularly video-based apps such as Tik Tok, entails a relatively professional and personality-oriented communication, outdating the kind of amateur canvassing and corporate propaganda of the early digital activism (Illia, 2003). Accordingly, parties may be increasingly turning their communication strategies to influencers sympathetic to their cause, engaging in their social media activity and permeating their networks with partisan followers. Rather than cooptation, we understand this relationship as a cooperation: although political influencers are unlikely to fall within the obedience of party organisation, their independence should not be mistaken by a lack of political commitment (Riedl et al., 2023). Our aim is to identify those political influencers who adopt partisan stands on TikTok, map their interactions with party-linked accounts and analyse their contribution to the communication and linkage functions of political parties. We hypothesise that parties and party elites have integrated some of these influencers into their social media clusters, following them and reacting to their content in terms of shares and reactions. In exchange, we expect influencers to promote the party’s message while shaping it, and contribute to the campaign effort through their own popularity. We conduct this research by first collecting the TikTok followings of the main Spanish political parties and their MPs in the national parliament (starting with up to 130 accounts). Next, we identify those personal accounts (not linked to the party) most followed among the MPs and official profiles, determining which of these accounts qualify as “influencers” based on their network centrality and their average engagement. Finally, we examine the influencers’ interaction with parties, what their characteristics are, and to what extent they promote the party’s message through the diffusion of partisan contents.