This research presents an analysis of the processes that were involved in the building and development of the citizen-led coalition, Barcelona en Comù, in the May 2015 elections.

Key findings

• The political campaign that made Barcelona en Comù successful in the 2015 Council elections took inspiration and practice from the 15M movement. Barcelona en Comù aimed to build an inclusive, transversal, popular and participatory process for constructing a strong candidacy.
• The D-CENT tools helped support the BeC construction efforts and helped various techno political participation processes, including the drafting and validation of an ethical code, the validation of the electoral candidacy, and the elaboration of the electoral program.
• The report investigates the role of two technical platforms which played key roles in the online-offline building of BeC: Democracy OS and Participa. These platforms were oriented to open-up and increase participation, and to generate new proposals from interested and engaged citizens. By analysing the different Twitter networks of the parties that ran in the May 2015 elections, we can see that the original decentralised, cohesive and resilient structure of the 15M movement is maintained in the cluster formed by the movements’ activists.

In the last few years, a new global wave of citizen protests has emerged: the Arab Spring, the 15M movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street, #YoSoy132 in Mexico, Occupy Gezi in Turkey, the Brazilian movement #VemPraRua, Occupy Central in Hong Kong, etc. All these movements share common characteristics, such as the demand for new models of democracy, the strategic use of social media (e.g. Twitter), and the occupation of physical spaces.

Barcelona en Comú (BeC) is an emerging grassroots movement-party which won the 2015 Barcelona City Council election. The candidacy was devised by activists involved in the 15M movement in order to institutionalise citizen outrage and thereby generate deeper social change.

Many arguments and hypotheses have been put forward about the inevitability of centralisation during competitive, pressure-filled election times. The aim of this D-CENT-led research is to investigate the feasibility of maintaining an open and decentralised social movement structure during election campaigns, in an attempt to counter these arguments.

Authors

Pablo Aragón, Rosa Borge, Antonio Calleja-López, Andreas Kaltenbrunner, David Laniado, Arnau Monterde, Yana Volkovich.