Connective parties during the pandemic. The communication strategy of Podemos in Twitter

Connective parties were originated as the response to the citizens inclinations towards the shared decision making and horizontality. To accomplish that, they delegate part of their organization to online tools on the net. In this research we study if those connective parties actually represent an innovation in terms of political representation. Thus, we observe - on an external level - the communicative manners of the connective party Podemos in comparison with four parties which hold the higher representation in the Spanish congress during the state of alarm in Spain due to the COVID-19 pandemic. To this end, we measure the interactions and responses rate of the deputies in Twitter to the interpellations of the users and we determine if these are higher according to the message impact on the net or when it comes to users with greater influence and communicative power. Our results show that the external communication patterns of Podemos correspond to a vertical criterion in terms of communication which is typical of traditional parties.