The ecological dynamics of political polarization in Catalonia. Analysis of the structuring in communities of the Twitter debate network during the 14 February (14-F) election campaign

Abstract

The Catalan elections of 14 February, 2021 were marked, as had previously happened with the Spanish elections of 2019, by the irruption of the far-right party Vox into the Parliament. In addition, these elections involved the reconstitution of the proindependence parties after the events of 1 October, 2017 and the application of Article 155 by the Spanish government (Guerrero-Solé, 2022). Again, Twitter was one of the platforms on which the political debate took place during the election campaign. Both the reorganization of the so-called pro-independence sector and the impact of Vox’s irruption on the political scene were reflected in the structuring of the user communities on the microblogging network. Taking advantage of a well-established line of social network research in Catalonia, this article analyzes the evolution of the political parties’ structuring in communities in the debates on Twitter as a result of the incorporation of a new actor, Vox, into this structure. The research concludes that, as in the case of the media (Scolari, 2012), the networks of interaction between ideological groups must be studied from an ecological perspective, considering the impact of a new actor’s emergence in the party system. This perspective contrasts with the widespread tendency to analyze polarization in terms of US bipolarity, as in the case of selective exposure dynamics (Trilling, Van Klingeren and Tsfati, 2017), for example, and it sketches out a new framework for understanding the polarization and ideological distances between political parties and groups.