Evolución de las estrategias de los principales candidatos a la presidencia

Electoral campaigns face the common challenge to motivate population, change their minds, beliefs and behavior, in this aspect the social media contribute to advance this objectives due its capacity to take advantage of the great number of formal and informal relationship (Ridout et al., 2010). This research, which forms part of the project “The on-line strategies campaign of the Spanish Political Parties between 2015 and 2016” (Las estrategias de campana online de los partidos politicos espanoles 2015-2016) of the Complutense University of Madrid, lead by journalist expert Jose Luis Dader, has as main object to elaborate the political spectrum, about how the main political parties candidates to run office use Facebook social media during the different electoral processes in Spain between 2015 and 2016, and analyze if they evolved or not, and in which parts they increase strategies. The impossibility of reaching a settlement to govern Spain after the elections of December 20, 2015 and the need to do it again in June 2016, offered an unique evolved framework where it can be analyze the different position of the political leaders in the network. This research has not quantitative purposes. Beyond the analysis about the quantity of messages, its launch or effectiveness, this research is intended to find out how the presidential candidates: Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sanchez, Pablo Iglesias and Albert Rivera, that finally get better results in the elections of December 2015 and June 2016, used Facebook social media, by observing if they coordinate their activities online and offline, if they used it to support and mobilize they voters, if the content of their post work to pull out debates subjects and new contents, if it just create noise (slogans of political parties, quotations of speeches, insults to the rivals or people in particular...) or were just passive activism.