Candidates, parties, media and citizens have the same ability to post tweets. For this reason, mapping the dynamics of interaction among users is essential to evaluate the processes of influence in an electoral campaign. However, characterising these aspects requires methodologies that consider the interconnections generated by users globally. The discipline of social network analysis provides the concepts of centrality and modularity, both very suitable for the context of network communication. This paper analyses the political conversation on Twitter during the 2015 and 2016 General Elections in Spain, in which four candidates with significant popularity in the electorate participated. Two corpora of 8.9M and 9.7M tweets were collected from each campaign, respectively, in order to analyse the networks of mentions and retweets. The network of mentions appears more blurred than that of retweets, allowing us to better estimate users' partisan preference. The graphs of the network of retweets show a strong internal activity within clusters, and the proximity between them reflects the ideological axis of each party.

ABSTRACT:Giving without the expectation of reward is difficult to understand in organizational contexts. In opposition to a logic based on self-interest or a sense of duty, a “logic of gift” has been proposed as a way to understand the phenomenon of free, unconditional giving. However, the rationale behind, and effects of, this logic have been under-explored. This paper responds by first clarifying the three logics of action—the logic of exchange, the logic of duty, and the logic of gift—and then explains how their balanced integration promises to enhance organizational life and outcomes. Having explicated the unique character and contributions of the logic of gift, the paper further suggests practical implications for management. Encouraging the logic of gift fosters more humane relationships within organizations and to enable individuals to be generous in ways that inspire trust and promote creativity.

During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of 'party evangelists', and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish General Election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations were uncertain for the two major parties (PP and PSOE) because of the rise of two emerging parties that were disrupting the political status quo (Podemos and Ciudadanos). This was an ideal situation to assess the differences between the evangelists of established and emerging parties. The paper evaluates two aspects of the political conversation based on a corpus of 8.9 million tweets: the retweeting effectiveness, and the sentiment analysis of the overall conversation.We found that one of the emerging party's evangelists dominated message dissemination to a much greater extent.

As fake news elicits an emotional response from users, whose attention is then monetised, political advertising has a significant influence on its production and dissemination. Facebook ads, therefore, have an essential role in contemporary political communication, not only because of their extensive use in international political campaigns, but also because they address intriguing questions about the regulation of disinformation on social networking sites. This research employs a corpus of 14,684 Facebook ads published by the major national political parties during their campaigns leading up to the two Spanish general elections held in 2019. A manual content analysis was performed on all the visually identical ads so as to identify those containing disinformation and those denouncing it. The topics addressed in these ads were then examined. The results show that the political parties’ Facebook ad strategies were akin to those of conventional advertising. Disinformation messages were infrequent and mainly posted by Ciudadanos and VOX. Nonetheless, it is striking that the main topic addressed in the ads was the unity of Spain—precisely the issue of Catalonia’s independence. In light of this, it can be deduced that ‘traditional’ parties are taking longer to renounce classical forms of campaigning than their ‘new’ counterparts, thus demonstrating that the actors implementing disinformation strategies are not only restricted to the extreme right of the ideological spectrum.

Tomás Baviera (1974) is professor of marketing at the Polytechnic University of Valencia. He holds a BA in Telecommunications Engineering from the same university, as well as a PhD in Communication from the University of Valencia. He is part of the University of Valencia's research group Mediaflows, which focuses on political communication. He is visiting professor in the Master's in Social Communication of Scientific Research at the Valencian International University. He has held various positions overseeing two Colegios Mayores (residential colleges) affiliated with the University of Valencia, through which he has promoted education in the liberal arts.