Battle of frames during the electoral campaign of April 2019: engagement and promotion of political parties' messages on Facebook

Framing processes are one of the preferred objects of study in the area of Communication, despite the frequent criticism regarding their theoretical and methodological strength. This study follows the proposal of Matthes and Kohring (2008) of the detection of frames through statistical analysis of clusters that operationalize the components as defined by Entman (2003) using framing elements. This is applied to the study of the electoral campaign on Facebook of the main Spanish political parties in the election of 28 April 2019. All messages published on this social network during the 15 days of the electoral campaign were captured automatically. The use of four large frames by the parties was detected, corresponding to events and political questions, request for vote, the rival party, and media treatment. The parties used these frames to different degrees: from the institutional and positive campaign of the PSOE, to the campaign aimed at criticizing the ruling party of the main opposition party, the PP, through the inclination towards media treatment of Unidas Podemos, or a focus on their own events and proposals by Ciudadanos and Vox. A negative correlation was detected between the frames most used by the political formations as a whole and the level of user engagement on Facebook, although the use of frames by PSOE and Unidas Podemos showed a greater parallelism with the levels of interaction in this social network.