Framing parties on Twitter

Political life these days appears to be characterized by an individualization and a personalization of political capital, at the expense of parties. The emergence of digital platforms seems to be accelerating this phenomenon, as they allow for more personalized public expression. This paper explores the empirical aspect of this proposition, through an analysis of the Twitter communication of French deputies of the Fifteenth Legislature. We apply network statistical tools to more than a million tweets scraped between 2017 and 2019, and study the parties’ role in structuring the interactions between deputies on the Web, as well as the induced rearrangement between party and individual capital. Parties still largely supervise the deputies’ communication, which does not contradict the individualization of their figureheads; the collective communication of the parliamentary fractions is enrolled to their benefit, albeit unevenly among parties.