Online network organization of Barcelona en Comú, an emergent movement-party

Abstract

The emerging grassroots party Barcelona en Comú won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. This candidacy was devised by activists involved in the Spanish 15M movement to transform citizen outrage into political change. On the one hand, the 15M movement was based on a decentralized structure. On the other hand, political science literature postulates that parties develop oligarchical leadership structures. This tension motivates to examine whether Barcelona en Comú preserved a decentralized structure or adopted a conventional centralized organization. In this study we develop a computational methodology to characterize the online network organization of every party in the election campaign on Twitter. Results on the network of retweets reveal that, while traditional parties are organized in a single cluster, for Barcelona en Comú two well-defined groups co-exist: a centralized cluster led by the candidate and party accounts, and a decentralized cluster with the movement activists. Furthermore, results on the network of replies also shows a dual structure: a cluster around the candidate receiving the largest attention from other parties, and another with the movement activists exhibiting a higher predisposition to dialogue with other parties.

Detecting Platform Effects in Online Discussions

“…This movement has made a significant impact on Spanish politics. For instance, grassroots parties which emerged from the 15M movement (Aragón, Volkovich, Laniado, & Kaltenbrunner, ), like Barcelona en Comú, Ahora Madrid, and Zaragoza en Común, are currently ruling the city councils of many of these cities. Toret et al () found that the origin of the 15M movement is explained by the emergence of technopolitical practices, many of which occurred in Menéame.…”

From social mobilisation to institutional politics: Reflecting on the impact of municipalism in Madrid and Barcelona

“…Several studies have explored the origins of new political formations in Spain (Lobera 2015;Martin 2015;Calle Collado 2016;Ubasart-González 2018;Portos 2020) and the specific nature of municipalist proposals (Roth, Monterde & Calleja 2019;Font 2017;Mir 2015). Some research explores how technology can instigate alternative ways of doing politics (Hinojona Navarro 2019;Aragón et al 2017;Romanos & Sábada 2016). Other studies analyse the programmes and objectives of municipalist formations in their attempts to promote alternatives to the politics of austerity (Subirats 2018;Aguiló & Sabariego 2019;Blanco Salazar & Bianchi 2019).…”

Going Beyond the Smart City? Implementing Technopolitical Platforms for Urban Democracy in Madrid and Barcelona

“…helped catalyze 15-M, the profile, scale and directions taken were set by citizens themselves. Fed up with endemic corruption, a banking collapse, and austerity, the wider public were sympathetic to many of the aims of those assembled, reflected in opinion surveys at the time, and later through support for new movement-parties like Podemos, Ahora Madrid, and Barcelona en Comú (Eizaguirre et al, 2017;Gonick 2016;Aragón, Gallego et al, 2017).…”