Political-partisan uses on public administrations’ Twitter accounts

Abstract

Introduction: Institutional communication and political communication should have separate vehicles for dissemination. However, by adopting the normalization hypothesis, the tendency to a partisan misuse is also reflected in social networks. Methods: This study analyses the Twitter publications of 40 Spanish institutional accounts equitably distributed between four territorial levels (state, regional, provincial and local). This is a qualitative research, essentially based on a content analysis method. Results and conclusions: The results ratify the hypothesis that these institutional accounts are being used for propaganda and partisan purposes. Ten trends prove there is a great concern for politicians' visibility as party agents. Therefore, in this new channel the confusion between these two areas is reinforced. This has already been detected by previous research that examined communication in an institution's online press rooms (García Orosa & Vázquez Sande, 2012)