Keywords: New sources of information on public opinion and the use of social media to voice public opinion

Electoral pledges are an integral part of a political party’s program (Klingemann, 1994) and constitute the mandate from which a political party will enact the policies they have proposed during the electoral campaign (McDonald & Budge 2005). Media reports of these party pledges are the first step in a democracy’s mandate theory model (McDonald & Budge, 2005). This information allows voters to distinguish among political contenders, select the party closest to their own preferences, and shape public opinion. Yet how media perform this democratic function remains relatively understudied, especially for new forms of media such as social networking sites, and for countries outside of the United States or two-party systems. Spain offers the possibility to study both these voids in the literature.

Research from Bulgaria (another country with a multi-party system) has shown that newspapers tend to publish pledges by main political parties and pledges that relate to economic policy, but without necessarily reflecting the salient ideological priorities of political parties (Kostadinova, 2015). But political parties now can directly connect with their voters via Twitter. During electoral campaigns, this offers a unique channel to potentially circumvent legacy media and focus on aspects of their campaign that are less treated in the newspapers, television, or that parties wish to emphasize (Theocharis, Barberá, Fazekas, Popa, & Parnet, 2016). Spain is a top country in Twitter usage (Barberá & Zeitzoff, 2014; Feenstra, Tormey, Casero-Ripollés, & Keane, 2017) and tweets are regularly referred to in the news media, so Twitter constitutes a critical factor to consider.

This study seeks to compare which pledges registered in the four main political parties’ manifestos were then reported in the media and on the parties’ Twitter accounts during the 2016 Spanish Presidential Election campaign, which spanned two weeks (June 11-24). The four main political parties reaped 89,95% of all the votes cast in that election. Data consists of content analysis of the parties’ manifestos to identify pledges (n1 = 1,228 pledges), the population of news (n2 = 966 news articles), and the population of tweets tweeted by the four main political parties’ official Twitter accounts published during the campaign (n3 = 8,201 tweets). Newspaper articles were obtained from searching on LexisNexis using the search word “elections” in Spanish during the campaign period. All Spanish newspapers represented in the database were considered. To obtain the tweets, the web tool Twitonomy was used, which allows extracting tweets, retweets, and replies from Twitter accounts. Since none of the accounts had more messages than allowed by the tool quota during that period, we were able to use population data.

Consistent with studies in other democracies, we expect that relatively fewer number of pledges will be reflected in the media (Costello & Thomson, 2008; Kostadinova, 2015), and that those would feature the major contenders (Hopmann et al., 2011; Walgrave & De Swert, 2007; Semetko & Canel, 1997; Hakansson & Naurin, 2011), as well as the key divisive issues in the campaign (Brandenburg, 2005; Walgrave & de Swert, 2007; Eilders et al., 2004).