1.1. Background

In the last five years, Spaniards have witnessed the fracturing of the historical political dominance of the PSOE and the PP, the two parties that held mostly uncontested control over the country since the 1977 elections that followed the end of the Franco regime. The ousting of the PP’s Mariano Rajoy and the brief administration of the PSOE’s Pedro Sánchez occurred in parallel with the rise of new political parties—namely the centre-right neoliberal Ciudadanos (founded in 2006), the far-right nationalist Vox (founded in 2013), and the left-wing populist Podemos (founded 2014). Between December 20, 2015, and November 10, 2019, Spaniards took to the polls to vote in General Elections no less than four times—a staggering number given the maximum four-year term permitted for Spanish Congress and Senate. The period between 2015 and 2019 was marked by political instability due to a series of failed attempts at coalition governments, allegations of corruption, and a no-confidence vote that culminated in the resignation of Prime Minister Rajoy in June 2018 and his succession by Sánchez. After merely eight months in office, Sánchez called a snap general election for April 2019, which resulted in his party losing the majority and creating a political deadlock with the left that sent Spain back to the polls on November 10, 2019, mere days before the completion of this study. The November 2019 elections are not discussed in this article, but the methods put forth herein could be easily applied to Twitter data from this period.

In Spain, the rise of social networks as a major platform for political mobilization coincided with the anti-austerity movements of 2011, a precedent to Occupy Wall Street (Castañeda 2012), following the global financial recession of 2008. During the General Elections of 2011, political leaders including Rajoy began using Twitter as a campaign tool for the first time in Spanish political history (Jivkova-Semova, Requeijo-Rey, and Padilla-Castillo 2017). Since then, the online presence of Spanish politicians, political parties, and political mobilizers has increased exponentially, as have digital readership and engagement by Spanish citizens. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate, respectively, each party’s increasing number of followers by year and the accumulated number of tweets, including retweets, posted each year by each party. Notably, the two most active party accounts on Twitter (in terms of published tweets) belong to two of the most recently formed parties, Podemos and Ciudadanos.

Figure 1

Number of Followers per Account by Year, 2009–2019.

Figure 2

Number of Tweets per Account by Year, 2009–2019.

3.1. Overall word use

We structured our data to determine which terms appeared most frequently in party tweets and selected the top twenty nouns used by each party based on the assumption that nouns are better indicators of party issues and concerns than verbs and adjectives. We excluded proper nouns with the exception of España (Spain), the names of the five party leaders (Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Casado, Pablo Iglesias, Santiago Abascal, Albert Rivera), and the names of Spain’s autonomous regions and cities, and provincial capitals. Table 2 summarizes the top twenty most frequently used nouns by each party in absolute values, expressed in raw numerical count. The table also displays the relative frequency of each word in relation to the total number of words posted by each party, expressed as a percentage of total words. Examining the top words used by each party not only reveals their recurring concerns, giving us insight into each party’s electoral priorities, but even when party concerns demonstrate some overlap, a party’s word often reveals an implicit ideological stance on an issue. This demonstrates how parsing the language of tweets provides readers with insight into the relationship between a party’s ideology and word choice in Twitter campaign discourse.

Repeat occurrences of nouns across party accounts paint a picture of general electoral concerns, highlighting matters that all parties address in their tweets. For instance, España (Spain) appears within the top noun count for all five parties (see Table 2). This is to be expected given that these are national elections. Other topics (nouns) discussed by all parties include mujer (woman)—also unsurprising given that these elections take place shortly after the Women’s Strike on March 8—and voto (vote), although how each party engages with these matters varies. However, beyond identifying common electoral concerns, this study finds that a comparison of noun recurrence between parties also reveals differences in each party’s electoral priorities and, at times, suggests their stance on an issue.

In the case of Catalan neo-liberal party Ciudadanos, there is a high occurrence of terms associated with Catalonia (Cataluña, n = 88, 1.0%) and freedom (libertad, n = 188, 2.2%), reflecting the party’s neoliberal stance and opposition to Catalan separatism, in favour of a pro-Spanish, pro-European, and post-nationalist stance. In that of populist and self-proclaimed feminist party Podemos, the terms people (gente, n = 271, 3.7%), woman (mujer, n = 75, 1.0%), and feminism (feminismo, n = 47, 0.7%) recur often, highlighting its interest in discussing and appealing to “the people,” women, and feminists. As a point of contrast, the fiscally conservative right-of-centre Partido Popular discusses taxes (impuestos, n = 160, 1.3%) more often than any other party, as well as government (gobierno, n = 361, 3%) and the presidency (presidente, n = 202, 1.7%) more than any other topic besides Spain (España, n = 529, 4.4%). PSOE’s second-most-tweeted term after Spain (España, n = 463, 5.5%) is right (derecha, n = 313, 3.7%), followed by government (gobierno, n = 237, 2.8%) and woman (mujer, n = 202, 2.4%). This suggests that the party’s main electoral priorities include opposing the rise of arguably the biggest threat to its power, what it refers to as the right-wing trio (trío de derechas)—comprised of PP, Ciudadanos, and Vox—and women’s empowerment, rights, and freedoms. Finally, Vox extensively tweets the terms rally (acto, n = 176, 3%), a reference to its many campaign rallies, and list (lista, n = 101, 1.7%), a reference to the electoral lists of provincial congressional candidates. A relative newcomer to the political scene in Spain, Vox frequently uses nouns that demonstrate the party’s interest in self-promotion, generating a sense of community through numerous rallies, and introducing its provincial candidates to its voter base online. This contrasts with the incumbent leftist PSOE’s more defensive and oppositional stance towards the right, as it focuses on maintaining and defending its power and popularity, rather than trying to obtain them like Vox.

3.2. Word use and gender

While the recurrence of a noun—or electoral issue—suggests the degree to which a party is preoccupied with that topic, frequency of word use is not necessarily indicative of a party’s support for that issue. Our gender case study illustrates this point. For instance, neoliberal party Ciudadanos tweeted the term feminismo (feminism, n = 52, 0.6%) approximately as often as feminist parties Podemos (n = 47, 0.65%) and PSOE (n = 44, 0.52%). However, few are likely to argue that Ciudadanos is equally or more feminist than Podemos. If anything, Ciudadanos is criticized by feminists, journalists, and left-leaning political pundits for its neoliberal pseudofeminist discourse that envisions a feminismo liberal (liberal feminism), which advocates for women having the freedom and right to make decisions over their own bodies without proposing policy changes that will actually empower women, in the same vein that it argues for neoliberal, free-market, and capitalist economic policies. In the words of feminist activist, journalist, and author Cristina Fallarás, “El feminismo tiene que ser anticapitalista por definición porque el capitalismo es patriarchal” (“feminism must be anti-capitalist by definition because capitalism is patriarchal,” translation mine, quoted in Trobat 2019). So, although feminism is a recurrent theme in Ciudadanos’s tweets—highlighting their consistent concern and engagement with the issue—their position on feminism is not captured in a basic word noun count or word frequency analysis.

Given the above, party word choice when addressing gender bears ideological weight. For example, one of the most frequently tweeted nouns by PP is women (mujeres, n = 112, 1.5%) despite them not once mentioning feministas as either a noun or an adjective. This raises questions about the types of gender politics reflected in the PP’s stance and rhetoric. Given the feminist march on March 8, 2019, and general feminist movements getting extensive exposure during this election, it seems that the PP wants to appeal to voters interested in some aspects of gender equality platforms but is reluctant to identify with feminism as a movement. Similarly, while it is no surprise that Vox (n = 31, 0.5%) and PP (n = 12, 0.1%) tweeted the term feminista the least of all parties, the fact that the anti-feminist Vox tweets about feminism much more frequently than PP does not indicate Vox’s position on the issue. It is only upon taking a closer look at Vox’s individual tweets containing feminismo that one can deem the party anti-feminist. The tweet below demonstrates how Vox villainizes feminism and depicts it as a social and political problem with which Vox intends to do away:

En VOX no vamos a participar en la #HuelgaFeminista8M. No creemos en las leyes de género, ni en las cuotas, ni en el feminismo supremacista que lo único que busca son privilegios, no para las mujeres, sino para una minoría de aprovechados y lobbies.

(VOX will not participate in the #FeministStrike8M. We do not believe in gender laws, nor in quotas, nor in the supremacist feminism that only seeks privileges, not even for women, but for a minority of opportunists and lobbies.) (VOX [@vox_es] 2019a)

To see if these discursive differences in the contextual use of gender-related words can be made on the macro level through quantitative analysis, we conducted a co-occurrence analysis to identify the qualifiers surrounding mujer/es (women) and feminismo (feminism).

3.3. Qualified nouns

To develop broad-level assessments of parties’ positions on the recurring issues identified in the word-frequency analysis, this study delves further into the gender case study by using co-occurrence networks to compare parties’ use of qualified nouns. While the word frequency analysis quantifies the extent to which a particular noun/issue/topic is discussed by a party, the study of qualified nouns provides an indication of how and in relation to what those issues are discussed. From the results of the word frequency analysis, we selected the terms mujer/mujeres and feminismo to further nuance our gender case study. The node graphs in this section (Figures 3, 4) represent the results of this analysis: first, the qualifiers that each party associates with the term in question and, second, the relative usage or recurrence of each qualifier in tweets. The latter is represented by the relative width of the lines, or edges, connecting the central term to its qualifiers, with thicker and thinner edges representing higher and lower frequencies of use, respectively. Qualifiers need to have occurred a minimum of ten times to be selected to the graph.

Figure 3

Qualified nouns containing mujer and mujeres.

Figure 4

Qualified nouns containing feminismo.

As Figure 3 reveals, the PSOE most often qualifies mujer and mujeres (woman and women) as joven (young), española (Spanish), and asesinada (murdered). Podemos, meanwhile, qualifies mujer/es in terms of a group or gathering (concentración de), a discursive tendency in line with the party’s focus on strike- and demonstration-related frames for discussing gender-related issues (see further discussion of this tendency in Hashtags section). In contrast, the PP qualifies mujer/es as trabajadora (working) and embarazada (pregnant), reflecting the party’s focus on workplace and family policies when addressing gender. Echoing the party’s focus on liberalism, our analysis of Ciudadanos’s tweets containing mujer/es yields the qualifiers valiente (brave) and autónoma (autonomous/independent). In contrast, Vox qualifies mujer/es as española (Spanish) and maltratada (abused or mistreated). While these qualifications shed some light on how each party views and represents women and their issues and engages with issues such as gender violence, perhaps most telling is that all five write about women in relation to men, hence the prominence of hombre y (man and) as a prominent qualifier for mujer/es. In fact, except for Podemos, all parties qualify women in relation to men more so than anything else, indicating that they consistently imagine women within a male-female binary—rather than as independent from men—and, perhaps, that they wish to assure voters that the party sees a place for men within their discussions of women’s rights and feminism.

Moving from mujer/es to feminismo—a term that sparked substantial debate among parties—again reveals differences across parties, shown in Figure 4. To begin, the avowed anti-feminist far-right Vox engages in fear tactics through the construction of a feminismo supremacista (supremacist feminism), radical (radical), and imperante (dominant). Vox’s use of cursos de (courses/classes in) might indicate a perceived threat of mandatory feminist education in schools. Compared to the incensed qualifications of feminismo in Vox’s speech, more muted qualifiers appear in the PP’s section of the graph, all with relatively sparse use frequency. The PP has few tweets that contain feminismo, but those that do tend to deflect critique of the party’s policies in favour of levelling criticism at their left-leaning detractors on the grounds that these entities promote an exclusive and/or negative form of feminism. Tweets containing these qualifiers yield messages in which the PP’s politicians protest the perceived negativity of the party’s critics, rebuffing the lección sobre (lesson on/lecture about) feminism offered by those who criticized the PP’s stance, on the grounds that the PP already espouses a feminismo positivo (positive feminism) that positions women as equal to, rather than against, men.

No hay que confundir la reivindicación del #8M y aquello que quiere utilizar la izquierda en la manifestación, que es la idea de que el feminismo solo puede ser de izquierdas. A la mujer no hay que imponerle un dogma para ser feminista.

(We shouldn’t confuse the revival of 8M with the vision that the left wants to bring to the march, which is the idea that feminism is the sole property of leftists. A woman doesn’t have to submit to a dogma to be a feminist.) (Partido Popular [@Populares] 2019a)

In Cs’s case, the recurrence of liberal as a qualifier for feminismo reflects their ideology. The notion of a feminismo liberal is central to Ciudadanos’s platform. After using the expression feminismo liberal sporadically in 2018, Ciudadanos published their Manifiesto Feminismo Liberal (Liberal Feminism Manifesto)—an outline of the party’s policy priorities—on March 3, 2019, days before the 8M demonstrations (Ciudadanos 2019). The use of liberal as modifier serves to distinguish this platform from a more radical feminism like that of Podemos, while also differentiating Ciudadanos from the non-engagement of the PP and the vitriolic anti-feminism of Vox. Beyond the qualifiers closely associated with their feminismo liberal platform, Ciudadanos qualifies feminismo with the terms inclusivo (inclusive) and moderno (modern), engaging an implicit critique of previous movements as overly radical and exclusive of those with more subdued objectives within the area of gender equality.

However, feminismo liberal is also the most frequently tweeted qualifier-noun pairing of the PSOE. According to this node chart, then, the PSOE and Ciudadanos most often qualify feminism in the same way, as liberal. This similarity, however, is not a good indicator of each party’s stance on feminism, given that, while Cs promotes a liberal feminism, PSOE does not. Determining the context in which a qualified noun is tweeted demands a close reading of tweets containing the term feminismo liberal. In fact, PSOE’s tweets containing feminismo liberal reveal that the qualified noun is only mentioned in tweets questioning the notion of liberal feminism:

Queremos un país con mujeres libres, seguras y vivas. La derecha habla de feminismo liberal y violencia intrafamiliar. Las palabras en democracia representan compromisos y el PSOE será el valladar de los derechos y libertades de las mujeres.

(We want a country whose women are free, safe, and alive. The right talks about liberal feminism and inter-family violence. Words, in a democracy, represent commitments, and the PSOE will be the defender of the rights and liberties of women.) (PSOE [@PSOE] 2019b)

In this light, the PSOE’s other frequently used qualifiers—nuevo modelo de feminismo (new model of feminism), and feminismo en estado puro (feminismo in its pure state)—seem to be a defense of endorsing feminism unconditionally. While Podemos also engages with Ciudadanos’s platform via the use of liberal as a qualifier, their qualifiers illustrate the party’s call for a “plural” feminism that is intersectional and diverse, one that fills the streets (calles), echoing their use of concentración de to qualify mujeres. Notably, Podemos’s call for policy changes that would include a mandatory asignatura de feminismo (course on feminism) being taught in Spanish public schools drew the ire of Vox (see the above discussion of Vox’s use of cursos de). Podemos calls for a feminist revolution, the creation of feminist policies and a strongly worded platform that advocates systemic overhaul, mobilization, and change, whereas Vox attempts to discredit feminist movements, parties, and organizations by referring to them as supremacista (supremacist) and imperante (dominant).

The quantitative analysis and visualization of qualified nouns alone, whilst signalling how key terms like feminism are most often qualified in party tweets, fall short—like the noun frequency analysis (Table 2)—of consistently indicating a party’s stance on a given issue. Nevertheless, while a standalone analysis of qualified nouns by party may not provide an accurate depiction of a party’s position on a topic, in conjunction with a close reading of relevant tweets, it provides insight into the principal ways that each party describes and imagines key electoral issues and the rhetorical style of a party’s engagement with these. By comparing how key terms are qualified, one can identify differences between how parties tweet about gender, particularly between progressive and conservative parties.

Comparing how parties qualify gender-related nouns provides a valuable basis for examining stylistic and ideological treatment of gender. Furthermore, the overlaps and conflicts in the qualified nouns analysis point to areas of potential examination through selected close readings, such as the conflict over feminismo liberal between PSOE and Ciudadanos. To develop another lens, we conducted sentiment analysis to gain a deeper and more accurate quantitative reading of how parties discuss gender on Twitter by determining if there is a quantifiable relationship between the sentiment of tweets and gender-related discussions generated by party.

4.1. Comparing overall sentiment

By analyzing the sentiment of all tweets posted by each party, this section illustrates how sentiment analysis can reveal relationships between the sentiment of party tweets and how much power a political party holds—be that in number of votes and parliamentary seats or in years of party power and activity. In their 2018 study of the strategic use of emotive language in European campaign manifestos, Crabtree et al. found strong support for the hypotheses that 1) incumbent parties use more positive sentiment in their manifestos and 2) ideologically moderate parties use more positive sentiment than radical or ideologically extreme parties (Crabtree et al. 2018). The first hypothesis is supported by this study, where both incumbent parties and parties with the highest level of public support (measured here in their percentage of the popular vote) during the April 2019 elections are the same parties that generated most positivity—or least negativity—in their tweets: PSOE (incumbent and leading party with 28.7% of votes) and PP (second to PSOE with 16.7% of votes). Conversely, parties with the lowest percentage of votes displayed the most negativity in their tweets overall: Cs (15.9%), Podemos/Unidas Podemos (14.3%), and Vox (10.3%). Figure 5 shows overall sentiment scores by party.

Figure 5

Overall Sentiment by Party (all tweets).

A second reading of the data is grounded in terms of the left-right political spectrum, whereby the parties that are, despite their fundamental differences, closer to the centre of the ideological spectrum—PSOE (left/left of centre), PP (right/right of centre), Ciudadanos (right/right of centre)—generate more positive tweets, whereas parties at more extreme ends of the spectrum—Podemos (far left) and Vox (far right)—generate more negative tweets. A third reading is based on the longevity of each party, whereby the longest standing parties in Spain—in this case, PSOE (founded in 1879), PP (founded in 1989), and Ciudadanos (founded in 2006)—display more positive tweets than those published by Podemos (founded in 2014) and Vox (founded in 2013). In any event, the two parties that have exclusively governed Spain at the national level in the post-Franco era are the same parties that express more positive sentiment in their tweets, suggesting they have a higher degree of satisfaction with Spain’s current political system, whereas less mature parties display more negative sentiment in tweets, suggesting their lower degree of overall satisfaction with the system. A close reading of the following tweet from the PP offers a more qualitative illustration of these rhetorical tendencies.

Tras el #28A vamos a volver a gobernar para todos. Somos un Partido Popular renovado, orgulloso de lo mucho que hemos hecho por España y ambicioso con el futuro que tenemos que conquistar. Somos el #ValorSeguro y no os vamos a defraudar

(After #28A we will again govern for all. We are a renewed Partido Popular, proud of all we have done for Spain and ambitious about the future we have to conquer. We are the #SureBet and won’t let you down.) (Partido Popular [@Populares] 2019b)

In making their promises to the electorate, the incumbent parties PP and PSOE strive to portray their political records as works-in-progress that should be interpreted in a generally favourable light. However, these differences in positioning do not translate to stark differences in sentiment analysis scores between the parties: opposition parties Podemos and Vox have only slightly lower median sentiment scores (0, indicating overall neutral sentiment) compared to the incumbent parties and Ciudadanos (0.1). To better leverage the capacity of sentiment analysis to draw broad-scale conclusions about party rhetoric, it is helpful to compare how party sentiment in discussions of a particular topic—gender—compares with the sentiment scores of their tweets overall. This comparative approach offers a more nuanced reading of party differences and allows us to identify areas for further selected close readings.

4.2. Sentiment analysis using gender-related terms

For a more nuanced understanding of each party’s stance regarding topics related to gender, we performed a sentiment analysis of tweets containing the frequently occurring nouns mujeres, feminismo, and feminista identified in the word frequency analysis. This analysis was done by looking at each party’s tweets that included the gender-related target terms feminism and feminist. We created a corpus of tweets containing the terms in question, and then used Google’s Natural Language API to compute the individual score of each sentence from the filtered tweets. This analysis enables us to form conclusions about the differences in parties’ use of relatively neutral gender-related terms, like mujeres, versus contentious terms that attracted political controversy during the leadup to the elections, like feminismo (see Figure 6).

Figure 6

A comparison of party sentiment based on three analyzed corpuses: all tweets, tweets that include mujer and mujeres (woman/women), and tweets that include feminista/feminismo. Note that the dots represent outliers.

Our comparative study of mujer/es and feminismo/feminista indicates that the five parties tended to treat these terms distinctly. Notably, with the exception of the PSOE, the parties’ gender-related tweets tended to display more variable sentiment (as measured by the Interquartile Range, or IQR), indicating less consistency in their treatment of gender. Among more conservative parties (PP, Ciudadanos, Vox) tweets containing feminismo/feminista displayed more negative sentiment than both the parties’ tweets overall and those containing mujer/es. This is especially interesting in the case of Ciudadanos, whose feminismo liberal platform drew substantial criticism from more progressive parties. In fact, the median sentiment score for tweets that included the terms mujer and mujeres was lower than the overall median sentiment score for all parties except Ciudadanos (whose median scores were the same across all three sentiment analyses). Figure 6 visualizes the sentiment of tweets that include feminismo and feministas from all five parties using box plots.

Although the PSOE, Podemos, and Ciudadanos share a median positive sentiment score of 0.1 in the feminismo/feminista sentiment analysis, there are pronounced differences in the sentiment patterns of these parties. The generally positive sentiment of Podemos’ tweets containing feminist terms is unsurprising in that Podemos positions itself as a feminist party. Although Podemos is the only party whose sentiment surrounding the terms feminismo/feminista is more positive than that of tweets containing mujer/es and the party’s overall sentiment, Podemos also displays a fair amount of negativity in these tweets. Upon closer examination, it becomes clear that Podemos adopts a strongly negative tone when criticizing the policies of other parties:

¿Cómo un partido que critica las subvenciones para la lucha contra la violencia machista puede llamarse feminista? Este es el #FeminismoLiberal de Cs : a favor de los vientres de alquiler y en contra del lenguaje inclusivo. Mucho tienen que aprender del movimiento feminista.

(How can a party call itself feminist and criticize policy changes to combat gender-based violence? This is the #LiberalFeminism of Cs: in favour of wombs for rent [referring to surrogate gestation] and against inclusive language. They have a lot to learn from the feminist movement.) (Podemos [@ahorapodemos] 2019a)

Similarly, tweets classified as negative for the PSOE often outlined the PSOE’s critique of other parties’ stances on gender issues. For example, as noted in the qualified nouns discussion, the PSOE repeatedly criticized Ciudadanos for adding modifiers (apellidos) to feminism, which specifically targets the feminismo liberal platform that Ciudadanos sought to advance.

Feminismo es #igualdad, no tiene apellidos: o se es feminista, o cómplice del machismo.

(Feminism is #equality, it doesn’t have modifiers: in other words, it’s feminism, or it’s complicit in chauvinism.) (PSOE [@PSOE] 2019a)

Vox’s sentiment around feminism and feminists is by far the most negative of the five parties, with the Partido Popular a near second. Upon closer inspection, however, the target of this negative sentiment was revealed to be substantially different between the parties. Although the overall sentiment of Vox’s tweets leaned negative, their tweets containing the terms feminismo/feminista were especially so, with a median sentiment score of -0.2. This is especially significant given that Vox’s sentiment in tweets containing the terms mujer/mujeres and feminista/feminismo is markedly more negative than the party’s overall sentiment (for all tweets). A close reading of Vox’s tweets that address the 8M feminist demonstrations and the notion of a feminismo supremacista further illustrates how this negative sentiment plays into an underlying assertion of Vox’s platform.

Las mujeres de la España real no necesitan un colectivo que les diga lo que son, mujeres fuertes, trabajadoras e independientes. Ni un euro público más para los lobbies del feminismo supremacista que propagan odio y división.

(The women of the true Spain do not need a collective to tell them who they are, strong, hardworking, independent women. Not one euro more for the supremacist feminist lobbies that promote hate and divisiveness.) (VOX [@vox_es] 2019b)

Here, by using sentiment analysis to guide close readings of the tweets, we identify points of discursive and ideological conflict between parties, particularly over the meaning of feminism and the role of the political party in advancing a specific interpretation of gender equality.

5.1. Feminist and activist hashtag politics

Significant scholarship has been produced on feminist and activist hashtag use. For example, work exists on how the use of hashtags by feminist movements fosters online conversations on specific issues, such as misogyny in Korea (Kim 2017), or on hashtags as a form of feminist “shouting back” (Turley and Fisher 2018). Scholars have also cited media hashtagging as a response to rape culture, and as a method to “call out” and demand accountability from perpetrators “when mainstream news media, police, and school authorities do not” (Rentschler 2014, 67).

It has also been argued that hashtagging has brought ordinary people into the political arena and aided in feminist consciousness-raising on a large scale. Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller study how the hashtags #BeenRapedNeverReported and #MeToo do the work of creating feminist solidarity by exposing the structural nature of oppressive experiences, and concurrently make survivors feel heard (Mendes, Ringrose, and Keller 2019). This is also due to the conversational nature of the platform, which enables a larger “collective storytelling” (Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles 2020). Larrondo (Larrondo, Morales-i-Gras, and Orbegozo-Terradillos 2019) similarly writes about this phenomenon in Spain, contending that hashtag activism “would appear to be an intermediate step in a longer process of creating a higher consciousness regarding gender equality issues in Spain” (207).

However, online feminist networks that utilize hashtagging are not without critique. They have been largely problematized for replicating pre-existing racial hierarchies (Feldman and De Kosnik 2019). This results in a dominant digital politic that ignores the contributions of women of colour in activist movements and centres the experiences of white women (Mueller et al. 2021).

The feminist Twitter protest tactic of self-disclosure to gain visibility has also been discussed in terms of its potential harms. While it has certainly had deep social impacts, this visibility can simultaneously put survivors at risk. As Clark-Parsons writes, “publicly performing the identity of a survivor in a cultural context where sexual violence victims are shamed and doubted” (Clark-Parsons 2019, 10) can make participants more vulnerable to online harassment, doxxing, and personal attacks. Parties’ framing of political discourse is in conversation, reaction, and response to activist and feminist hashtagging practices, particularly in terms of gender issues.

5.2. Overall hashtag use

The results of our preliminary hashtag analysis are summarized in Tables 3 and 4. A superficial reading of these hashtags supports the broad policy leanings associated with each party. However, a look at the context in which each party’s most frequently tweeted hashtags were produced reveals more complex entanglements of party self-representation and use of hashtags to carefully frame political discourse.

The left-of-centre incumbent PSOE’s use of #LaEspañaQueQuieres (#TheSpainYouWant) reinforces the generally positive sentiment that the party displayed in this study’s Sentiment Analysis. By linking this slogan with a demand for gender equality in #LaEspañaQueQuieresEsFeminista, the party pitches itself as not only a party with a proposed platform on gender equality, but a party that advocates for a feminist Spain and expects its voters to want the same. Notably, #LaEspañaQueQuieres and other PSOE tags like #HazQuePase (#MakeItHappen) and #VotaPSOE (#VotePSOE) directly address the audience with action- and future-oriented frames that invite the reader to be part of the PSOE’s political project.

The conservative incumbent PP focuses on frames that assure voters of the party’s competence and commitment to achieving its aims, with hashtags like #ValorSeguro (#SureBet), #NoHablamosHacemos (#WeDon’tTalkWeGetThingsDone), and #GarantíaDeFuturoPP (#FutureProofedPP). Compared with more progressive parties, few of the PP’s hashtags relate to specific topical concerns that are linked to specific policy areas, with one notable exception: #PrisiónPermanenteRevisable (#RevisablePermanentImprisonment), a reference to the PP’s contentious call to modify Spain’s penal code and expand the list of crimes that can carry a sentence of life imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, tweets by the conservative Partido Popular also regularly reference Spain (as is the case with #ProgramaParaEspaña—#ProgramForSpain). In other words, the PP’s use of hashtags reveals a platform that is nationalist and tough on crime.

Ciudadanos’s hashtag use reminds readers that the party wishes to present itself as a refreshing, ideologically moderate alternative to the two incumbent parties. The hashtag #PPSOE, a portmanteau of the acronyms for the two incumbent parties, offers an implicit critique of the two-party system and the corruption and political gridlock that have been central problems of Spanish politics in recent years. Podemos, on the other hand, seeks to distinguish itself from the dominant parties through its positions on social and environmental issues and a strong encouragement of voter participation. Examining the table, we see that Podemos’s tweets are often climate- and gender-focused with hashtags such as #FridaysForFuture, #8M, #HorizonteVerde (#GreenHorizon), #15MClimático (#15MForClimate), #HuelgaFeminista (#FeministStrike), #UnidasPodemos, and #UnPaísAnimalista (#AnimalFriendlyCountry) among its twenty most frequently tweeted hashtags. These ecologically minded and gender-inclusive hashtags, coupled with those with a focus on democracy and popular participation in history and politics, such as #LaHistoriaLaEscribesTú (#YouWriteThisHistory), paint Podemos as environmentally friendly, committed to gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as democratic. As a point of comparison to this approach to staking a claim as an opposition party, Vox’s hashtag use is heavily inflected with nationalism. Six of Vox’s top twenty hashtags include the term España, consistent with the party’s nationalist platform. Vox displays a strong focus on nationalism through tags such as #EspañaViva (#LiveSpain) and #PorEspaña (#ForSpain), but also draws on anti-feminist rhetoric with #NoHablesEnMiNombre, which is discussed further in the next section.

5.3. Gender-related hashtags

In the leadup to the 2019 election, parties engaged in a public series of debates about what feminism is and is not, what it means to be a feminist party, and what the role of the party is in outlining modes of participation in feminist activism. Interpreted in this context, hashtags operate as discursive frames that offer insight into each party’s rhetorical treatment of gender. To examine variations in hashtag use, we manually identified gender-related hashtags and then interpreted those hashtags based on their function in positioning the party’s stance on gender. It was necessary to do this manually because parties often used hashtags related to gender that were neither existing refrains of online discussion about gender nor contained gender-related keywords. To identify these hashtags, we reviewed the tweets that contained them and determined if they operated as discursive frames in gender-related conversations.

Although left-leaning parties Podemos and PSOE both tended to identify with feminist labels more frequently than the conservative parties, they adopted different hashtagging tactics. The PSOE took a rigorous and consistent approach to branding their feminist platform using a set of party-specific hashtags. To continue their #LaEspañaQueQuieres slogan, the PSOE made frequent use of #LaEspañaQueQuieresEsFeminista (#TheSpainYouWantIsFeminist). The heavy use (n = 80) of the hashtag #8M speaks to how the PSOE sought to immerse itself in the demonstrations on March 8. They also drew on concept-focused tags such as #Igualdad (#Equality), #ViolenciaDeGénero (#GenderViolence), and #ViolenciaMachista (#ChauvinistViolence) to articulate specific concerns within their advocacy for gender equality. On occasion, the PSOE drew on existing feminist Twitter discussions through the use of hashtags, such as #NiUnPasoAtrás (#NotOneStepBackwards), used by activists during protests on January 15, 2019, against the Andalusian government’s alliance with the anti-feminist Vox. The threat of regression implied within #NiUnPasoAtras is a resonant form of thematic unity for the PSOE’s broader rhetorical strategy of future-oriented promises that portray the party’s accomplishments as a favourable work in progress and warn against the regressive policies of more conservative parties.

Like the PSOE, Podemos included a handful of hashtags belonging to existing feminist Twitter dialogues, such as #Cuéntalo (#TellIt/#TellYourStory), first tweeted in April 2018 by journalist Cristina Fallarás who called on women in the Twittersphere to tell the story of their first memory of sexual harassment and abuse. It is also notable that the PSOE and Podemos were the only parties to draw on existing feminist hashtag dialogues, indicating their interest in affiliating themselves with larger movements for gender equality as part of their feminist self-presentation. However, in comparison to the PSOE, Podemos used relatively few gender-related hashtags overall, and left many of their gender-focused tweets untagged. Beyond the frequent use of the tags #8M and #HuelgaFeminista (#FeministStrike) to draw attention to the feminist demonstrations on March 8, 2019, Podemos used a variety of event-linked hashtags to express their party’s support for the marches: #YoVoy8M (#I’mGoing8M) and #NadaNosPara8M (#NothingCanStopUs8M) reinforce the assessment of Podemos’s approach to feminism that emerged from the co-occurrence analysis—one that is based on a vision of feminism as an unstoppable wave that fills the streets.

While the more progressive parties tended to describe the 8M protests as a #HuelgaFeminista (#FeministStrike), conservative parties stuck to a muted playbook of celebrating women in family- and workforce-oriented frames. The conservative PP—who declined to participate in the 8M demonstrations on the grounds that the left-leaning parties had “politicized” the event— opted for variations of the tag #DíaDeLaMujer (#WomensDay) rather than invoke frames associated with feminist demonstrations. The centre-right and conservative parties—PP and Ciudadanos—tended towards hashtags that focused more heavily on loosely defined equality frames in the context of workplace and family policy, as the PP’s #MásPPMásFamilia (#MorePPMoreFamily) and #LeyDeMaternidad (#MaternityLaw) indicate. The PP’s use of #NoHablamosHacemos (#WeDon’tTalkWeGetThingsDone) is especially compelling, as it attempts to deflect the critique from left-leaning parties of the right’s language surrounding gender by pointing to the PP’s historical encouragement of women’s labour force participation. Similarly, Ciudadanos focuses their hashtag use on advancing a neoliberal platform for gender equality—#FeminismoLiberal. Vox’s hashtags lend more vivid context to the negativity observed in our earlier analysis of the party’s gender-related tweets. The use of the tag #NoHablesEnMiNombre (#Don’tSpeakInMyName), is a particularly telling tactic wherein Vox attempts to shift critique towards progressive parties and politicians and feminist activists for “speaking in the name of” (hablar en nombre de) all women. Notably, this hashtag borrows some of the features of popular feminist twitter campaigns through a testimonial-style format in which Vox supporters share their experiences and state their opposition to feminism. The notion of a feminismo supremacista that crowds out the real voices of Spanish women and asserts itself within politics and public life against the will of the people is consistent with Vox’s perception of an ideología de género that is corrupting Spanish institutions.

By parsing and visualizing the most frequently used hashtags by party, this study finds that Spanish parties use hashtags to frame their policies and critiques of other parties. By understanding these discursive frames, one can understand how parties align themselves with existing feminist dialogues on Twitter like #NiUnPasoAtrás, create contextual frames for their campaign promises as with #LaEspañaQueQuieresEsFeminista, and deflect criticism by attempting to change or destabilize the terms of feminist discourse through speech frames like #NoHablamosHacemos and #NoHablesEnMiNombre.

Authorial

Authorship is alphabetical after the drafting author and principal technical lead. Author contributions, described using the CASRAI CredIT typology, are as follows:

Vanessa Ceia: vc

Thyago Mota: tm

Rhian Lewis: rl

Authors are listed in descending order by significance of contribution. The corresponding author is Vanessa Ceia.

Conceptualization vc

Methodology vc, tm

Software tm

Project Administration vc

Formal Analysis vc, tm, rl

Investigation vc, tm, rl

Visualization tm

Data curation vc, rl

Writing – Original Draft Preparation vc, rl

Writing – Review and Editing vc

Editorial contributions

Section and Copy Editor

Shahina Parvin, Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada

Layout Editor

Christa Avram, Journal Incubator, University of Lethbridge, Canada