Abstract
This article connects the sociology of public problems with the categorisation of participatory publics proposed by Hasebrink et al. Building on our work on depopulation in Spain, we propose to analyse the conversation on Twitter/X between 2019 and 2023 to create a proof of concept of its typology: polity publics, topic publics, and group publics, which tend to intersect and form hybrid publics. This article aims to operationalise the concept of publics proposed by Dewey by combining a theoretical model with data obtained from the analysis of a sample informed by existing ethnographic work using automated computational analysis techniques and data visualisation. Our source is the digital postings with which participants in the public related to depopulation set out their positions and relations with other actors in the public problem. On this basis, we conclude that it is necessary to understand the participatory public as a process rather than as a set of ideal types, assuming the existence of time cycles that depend on the actors’ ability to introduce their problem into the public sphere.
Introduction
Forms of participation in the public sphere have changed significantly in our mediatised contemporary world. Not only have the tools changed but so have the roles and communicative processes. In this context, the survival of John Dewey’s (1927/2012) conception of the public as a model of democratic and communicative participation is surprising. Aggregations capable of mobilising a collective not directly affected around a public problem to demand solutions that Dewey defined abstractly require the attention of researchers to analyse their elements, dynamics, and functions and to operationalise this notion in applied research.
In this article, we conduct a proof of concept of the operational description of publics proposed by Hasebrink et al. (2023). These authors argue that a public is composed of a certain constellation of actors who share frames of relevance and a set of communicative practices entangled with a media ensemble, a combination of media specific to a social domain (Hepp, 2020, p. 176). They argue that the actors engage with the public on the basis of a repertoire of connections that respond to affective, cognitive, motivational, and conative factors. Structured through these “public connection repertoires,” actors form different categories of publics, which, in their pure form, can be polity publics, topic publics, or group publics; however, the authors recognise that these tend to overlap to form hybrid publics.
This approach interests us, first, because it focuses on communicative practices as a constituent element of the public. Second, because it outlines a multiscale analytical scheme that facilitates both bottom-up research strategies, focused on how actors connect to publics through their individual practices (Merten, 2020), and those strategies attentive to the collective and social dimension of the public, which are accessed through the forms of its appearance and entry in the public sphere (Arendt, 1958/1993).
Finally, this strategy makes it possible to investigate the composition of a hybrid public from an interpretation of the public as a process rather than as an ideal type. It emerges from the dialogue between this theoretical model and Dewey’s pragmatist perspective, based on the idea that publics depend on inquiry processes, shared affectivity, and situational articulation.
The object of the study is the public committed to the demographic challenge of depopulation in Spain, which we analyse on the basis of their registration on Twitter-X, a platform that is part of the media ensemble, that is, the set of media that the actors involved in this issue use to communicate their points of view, link up with others and, in general terms, participate democratically vis-à-vis this public problem. We start from the hypothesis that the public around depopulation in Spain is constituted through a process of inquiry and experimentation that blends characteristics of polity, topic, and group publics. These dimensions are articulated and vary in importance over time depending on the socio-political conditions shaping the evolution of the public problem. This proof of concept allows us to identify the model’s usefulness and its limitations and to formulate questions that help refine this proposal for operationalising publics.
In the first part of this article, we frame this proof of concept within the pragmatist sociological perspective on public problems (Guerrero et al., 2018) and extract the basic elements of the theoretical model of Hasebrink et al. (2023) to serve as a guide. In the second part, we present the mixed methods used in the analysis and describe the sample. The third part breaks down the evidence of the hybrid composition of the public with respect to depopulation. Finally, in light of the case study, the conclusions are geared towards methodological reflections derived from the analytical implementation of the theoretical model considered.
Theoretical Framework
Participatory Publics
This article is framed within the sociology of public problems (Cefaï, 2023; Guerrero et al., 2018; Nardacchione & Acevedo, 2013) and seeks to look in greater depth at the characterisation of publics proposed by the pragmatist philosopher Dewey (1927/2012). For Dewey, for a social problem to become a public problem that demands solutions or changes in the status quo (Gusfield, 1981), a network of actors must be able to capture the attention of other actors who are not necessarily directly affected by the problem, so that the discussion is inserted into the public space.
In other words, Dewey (1927/2012) defines a public – henceforth identified as a participatory public – as “a community of action saturated and regulated by mutual interest in shared meanings” (p. 102). Its constitution involves several factors, including mutual and joint attention to a situation, objective, or issue (Quéré, 2017). For this joint attention to occur, a communicative exchange is necessary through which the actors coordinate their imaginations. This not only involves mobilising common meaning systems, encyclopaedias, and imaginaries but also mutual recognition and dialogue from each particular perspective on the problem, even if they differ with regard to the definition of the problem. Such an exchange also presupposes the existence of a common sensitivity; the public not only shares knowledge and interests, but also affections (or disaffections), with varying degrees of intensity.
The task of the participatory public will then be “to observe the consequences of joint activities on the conditions of coexistence and try to regulate what provokes these consequences, either to reinforce them or to suppress them” (Quéré, 2017). This regulation requires a process of research and experimentation in search of solutions to common problems: the public is characterised by a “constant and well-equipped observation of the consequences they entail when acted upon, and subject to ready and flexible revision in the light of observed consequences” (Dewey, 1927/2012, p. 131). However, Dewey also emphasised that participatory publics are fragile, complex, and demanding experiences of democratic life: their emergence is difficult, and their institutionalisation and long-term sustainability are never guaranteed (Zask, 2019). As Jenkins underlines, “participatory politics does not guarantee any specific outcome,” so it is necessary to “protect the opportunity for meaningful participation” (Jenkins & Jie, 2024, p. 18).
In order to recognise themselves as a group and acquire self-awareness, it is necessary for the public to develop communicative practices, among other things, to generate, manage, and deliberate on arguments and evidence in different public arenas with respect to what is true and false and the fairness or legitimacy of different points of view on the issue (Cefaï, 2016). In today’s mediatised societies (Hepp, 2020), public actors mobilise media repertoires (Hasebrink & Domeyer, 2012) in this task to produce and consume content (including news), circulate their points of view, and engage with subjects involved with the issue to varying degrees.
Finally, if the public has been successful through its research and experimentation actions, it will have succeeded in turning a problem that, in principle, is connected to individuals into a common issue shared by the public as a whole. The emergence of the public as a democratic public experience means overcoming fragmented publics attentive only to a specific issue or concern. However, Dewey (1927/2012) warned that a participatory public is a complex, demanding and fragile form of democratic experience, because it must engage in research actions to find solutions and alternative views to the status quo. It has difficulties in emerging and, even more so, in sustaining itself over time, in becoming institutionalised and successful in performative terms (Zask, 2019).
This ontological fragility poses a methodological challenge. Hasebrink and his team’s model is somewhat restricted, as it is based on the certain existence of an active public. However, its processual nature also requires attention to the emergence and disarticulation phases, when the existence of the public is less evident but cannot be assumed to be absent as a field of experience. This necessitates a theoretical modelling that accounts for the different phases and conditions of a public’s life. Dewey’s (1938/1997, p. 27) principle of the “continuity of experience,” which “means that every experience both takes up something from those which have gone before and modifies in some way the quality of those which come after” (Dewey, 1938/1997, p. 27), reinforces this perspective, suggesting that publics endure as experiential connections even when disarticulated or lacking visibility in the public arena.
Controversies are propitious junctures for democratic experimentation: they drive participation, foster the scrutiny of information, and, by bringing a public to the surface, generate collective identities (Munk & Ellern, 2015). Methodologically, we therefore approach public controversies as privileged moments for studying public participation, as they are effervescent situations for democratic activity, complex, and resistant to reduction (Venturini, 2010), because they configure an experience of paradoxical interdependence. During controversies, actors agree on their own disagreement and on the fact that they inhabit a context of uncertainty, a consensus that is maintained even when they are in conflict over the very definition of the issue as a problem, over what belongs to the issue and what does not, as well as the frameworks and narratives from which to make sense of it.
In controversy, mutual attention to a problem or issue operates as a form of singular attention, a joint attention; each actor examines things as they operate in the other’s experience and not only in his or her own experience (Collins, 2004). From there, they not only manifest their singular point of view but also communicate that they know themselves to be part of that shared experience of exchange, of public deliberation.
In a context of mediatisation, this shared experience is materialised through communicative exchanges that leave a trace, a registration (Latour, 2001, pp. 365–366), nowadays primarily digital, that allows processes of mutual attention and has the effect of recognising the public as such, allowing the actors to position themselves as part of it. This is particularly relevant in the dynamics of active participation in terms of the co-production, circulation, and interaction that social media demands from its users. The digital records produced by communicative processes help a social consciousness to emerge among the public (Collins, 2004; Quéré, 2017).
Although the model we use as a reference (Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017; Hasebrink et al., 2023) proposes the investigation of individual practices through the analysis of media repertoires, that is, the set of media outlets that subjects use daily in cross-media dynamics (radio, press, social media, etc.), in this article, we focus on the communicative practices of “social domains,” identified as “media ensembles” (Breiter et al., 2018; Hasebrink & Hepp, 2017). Media ensembles, as collective practices of media use, facilitate the assembly of production, circulation, and consumption practices of media content. In the current highly mediatised context, media ensembles are the basis for creating meaningful experiences for the participants, insofar as through them, interests and informational needs are covered: for the production of evidence and arguments, for the creation of identity and the generation of links, and for the mobilisation of common meanings and symbolic territories. Media ensembles allow for entries in shared spaces, giving collective existence to participatory publics.
Types of Publics
As noted above, Hasebrink et al. (2023) propose conceptualising publics on the basis of three principles: polity, topic, and group. Polity publics are constructed around common and shared needs, interests, and issues in a given geopolitical space accessible to all through participation in the political system, broadly understood, on which citizens are informed and deliberate (Arendt, 1958/1993).
Topic publics, for their part, are based on individual orientations and preferences regarding certain sub-areas or themes, which promote specialisation. The constellation of actors includes those who are interested and show a certain degree of expertise in the subject matter, and the production of specialised media can be observed. In this case, the discourses are not produced from a position of enunciation that appeals to the public as a whole, but rather they configure a target public that is already interested, with basic knowledge of the particular subject matter.
The last category is the group publics that are sustained on specific aspects of identity, such as gender, race, and a particular condition in relation to health/illness. The shaping of these publics responds to a strong sense of belonging, and any aspect that reinforces the shared identity serves as a framework of relevance. Like the previous ones, these publics have information needs associated with their group membership. They also promote communicative practices that foster the definition of objectives, horizons of expectation, systems of meaning, and common affective configurations, that is, cultures of belonging.
These three models are ideal since, in empirical terms, the three categories or vectors can be hybridised to form a public, as is the case in the so-called issue publics, which are a combination of polity publics and topic publics. Hasebrink et al. (2023) explain that a thematic interest can be connected to a specific area of public policy, just as a predominant characteristic of a certain group can be strongly connected to political deliberation. The practical dynamics in which actors, media devices, affective repertoires, interpretive frameworks, and political agendas are assembled – as explained by actor-network theory (Bassett & Archer, 2017) – allow us to understand the hybrid public as a process and not merely as an intersection of other types of publics. In this sense, hashtags, symbolic affiliations, shared rhetorical styles, or dual activism (e.g., as experts and residents of rural areas) operate as concrete forms of activation and assemble to become a “hybrid public.” It is thus an effect of heterogeneous relationships established in a technological and cultural convergence framework that dissolves boundaries between various public arenas, facilitating the circulation of discourses, emotions, and forms of participation. It is a form of public appearance shaped by situated and changing assemblages, not a stable category.
The pragmatist process explained by Dewey (1927/2012) of shaping a public refers, to a certain extent, to the displacements that occur between group publics and topic publics towards the polity public, in the model of Hasebrink et al. (2023). It is a process whereby the successful sharing of concerns about a problematic situation progressively encourages the public as a whole to explore the search for solutions to a challenge defined as common.
This progression implies not only a widening of the visibility of the problem but also a transformation of collective inquiry practices. Actors not only express discontent but also explore, identify causes, assign responsibilities, and develop action plans. This public experience is always experimental and is not exclusively owned by experts, but it is constructed through interaction with everyday knowledge and the life experiences of affected people, who help to reshape interpretive frameworks, action repertoires, and actor connections. Therefore, the formation of a participatory public does not occur by mere accumulation but by progressive assembling and reorganisation of this complex field of experience associated with public problems.
Public Components and Ways of Connecting to the Public
According to the theoretical model, actors play several different roles in communicative spaces: they can be experts, mediators, or observers. Some experts (academics, institutional spokespersons, or activists) are priority sources in the production of discourse. Then there are mediator actors (or professional observers): those who interpret, evaluate, and disseminate expert discourses (understood in a broad sense). Finally, there are observers who seek not only to be informed and form an opinion but also to actively participate in the conversation, usually by commenting on and, above all, circulating the content.
This distinction is, above all, analytical, since the boundaries between the different positions are de facto blurred, and the actors can occupy different roles depending on the subject or juncture of the conversation. This perspective broadens the notion of the public as a structure of consumer subjects towards the public as co-creators of media discourses. It expands a reductionist view of collectivity linked to the consumption of certain media products or issues. In the transition from audience to public, a combination of roles takes place in which the actors transform their status by participating in their institutionalisation as part of the field of experiences around a common public problem and committing themselves to the search for solutions. For this to happen, however, it is necessary to be aware that the public exists, that one is part of it and, ultimately, of the position one occupies in relation to the other actors and perspectives mobilised.
A public also implies sharing certain frameworks of relevance, which do not necessarily have to be common and homogeneous for the whole, since the public is characterised by its constitutive heterogeneity. These frameworks change according to the type of public we are referring to (polity, topic, or group).
Case Study: The Public Problem of Depopulation in Spain
Rural depopulation is one of the problems associated with what has been defined as the demographic challenge. Although depopulation processes in rural areas are common in several parts of Europe (Collantes & Pinilla, 2011), in Spain, their origin is linked to the rural exodus that began in 1950, driven by the dictatorship’s developmental and industrial policies. As a result, a good number of municipalities in inland Spain have been experiencing a progressive loss in the number of inhabitants for more than half a century.
For many years, the depopulation process in villages has been a concern expressed mainly by the most affected regions, where public initiatives have arisen that have demanded improvements in living conditions and the maintenance of basic services. However, in the last 7 years, there have been two important milestones that represent a change in the dynamics of the problem: the first was the creation of the Demographic Challenge Commission in 2017, which has now become a ministerial department; and the second took place in 2019, when 100,000 people from provinces in demographic decline came together to demonstrate in Madrid, the country’s capital, and demand policies that would guarantee the survival of rural areas. This demonstration, known as the Revolt of “Emptied” Spain, 1 captured the interest of the country’s local and national media.
Since then, connected with the revaluation of natural spaces that occurred due to the pandemic, interest in the issue has not waned. However, it does not register the media presence it attracted in 2019. Today, it continues to form part of the strategic action of the Government of Spain, which has steered the search for solutions to the demographic challenge as something that concerns society as a whole, as a matter of territorial sustainability, equity, and social justice (Molina & et al, 2023). Although it is not an issue that generates a polarised debate, it has emerged in the electoral discourses of political parties (López Ruiz, 2021) and has been used ideologically (Cuenca et al., 2023). It is also part of the European agenda, as several countries share the aim of addressing rural diversity and halting demographic decline (Pazos, 2022).
Methodology
Inspired by Nelson’s (2020) “computational grounded theory” perspective and an adaptation of “situational analysis” (Marres, 2020; Marres et al., 2023), we applied a mixed methodology that combines qualitative interpretation techniques, based on ethnographically-based expert knowledge, with pattern recognition procedures through automated computational analysis techniques and data visualisation.
The case study on the public interest in depopulation is part of a broader project that uses the multi-sited ethnography defined by Marcus (1995, p. 110), based on the “follow the conflict” approach. This fieldwork not only guides the interpretation of results but also the design and methodological strategy.
In 2019, we began a follow-up that involved the discursive agenda analysis of press publications, 20 in-depth interviews and a workshop with key actors, 4 focus groups with the general population, and another with communicators. In addition, we attended events organised by citizens, academia, and public administrations, as well as fieldwork through observation and ethnographic interviews in depopulated villages in Castilla-La Mancha. This longitudinal approach means that the interpretation of the results is grounded in prior knowledge of the key aspects of the problem, both in terms of relevant actors and the evolution of the public debate. The formal metric analysis and mapping techniques using graphs (Goyal & Ferrara, 2017) dialogue with ethnographic field results, helping to identify methodological challenges and, at the same time, to deepen the interpretation of the public’s composition and dynamics.
This mixed analysis also focuses on the “biases of the setting” of the platforms (Marres, 2015). In the case of Twitter, which is our object of study on this occasion, it implies recognising that priority is given to certain types of content (news content, as well as recursive content through retweeting), forms of circulation through trends and campaigns, and specific practices (retweeting, mentioning, commenting, use of hashtags), along with other algorithmic logics that are difficult for researchers to access (Marres, 2015).
The construction of the Twitter dataset took these issues into consideration and was based on a variety of keywords between May 1, 2019, and May 31, 2023, the period being delimited by the holding of regional elections in several regions affected by depopulation. In order to filter the set of publications using hashtags, we included not only the keyword “depopulation” as a generic term but also other terms that we considered equally significant to refer to the issue, detected thanks to the ethnographic monitoring. These are (in translation from the Spanish): demographic challenge, depopulated Spain, empty Spain, emptied Spain, abandoned Spain, and silenced Spain. 2 Despite the fact that a priori each keyword appeals to different frameworks, it is possible to presuppose for all of them a shared territory and horizon of meaning through which they enter into dialogue with each other, either to establish alliances or to question each other using alternative terms. We chose to collect content only in Spanish and not in other co-official languages of the territory because we prioritised the national scale of the debate and because depopulation mainly affects regions in central Spain, where no complementary language is spoken.
The sample comprises 328,714 publications (including original posts and retweets) involving 93,412 accounts. Cleaning and preprocessing operations were performed on this dataset in order to carry out subsequent analyses. To do this, the Python programming language was used, which facilitated the tokenisation of the text, the suppression of empty words, and the detection of hashtags.
The chronological evolution and the volume of interactions over the 4 years were then explored in order to detect moments of emergence in the debate. From the retweet and mention operations, as indices of the interactions between nodes (accounts), graphs have been constructed for the general period using Gephy software and two statistical measures have been calculated that provide guidance on the centrality of the nodes/actors in the conversation: “eigenvector centrality” to assess the relevance of a node based on its connection with other equally relevant nodes and “betweenness centrality,” a metric that reflects the ability of a node to build bridges between different communities of nodes.
The frameworks of relevance mobilised have been worked on by analysing the frequencies of the hashtags used in the 328,714 publications. In addition, the frequency analysis of the geographical entities at different scales (Spain, Spanish autonomous regions and provinces) has been carried out, using the nomenclature published by the National Geographic Institute as a basis.
Alongside these computational tools, and in a complementary manner, a qualitative analysis of the 100 most retweeted original tweets has been carried out to enhance the categorisation of actors and their frameworks of relevance, assuming that their content is the most circulated of the entire sample at specific times during the period.
Results
Constellation of Actors, Evolution, and Frameworks
Network of Actors
The public interested in depopulation in Spain can be traced from the digital records of the constellation of actors that comprise this public, which is visualised by means of graphs that show both the accounts involved and the relationships between them. As part of the sample, it is assumed that the actors (nodes) share depopulation as a focus of interest. However, they do so from different perspectives, with varying levels of involvement and commitment, as well as different degrees of interest and affective relationship towards the subject. Nevertheless, all of them participate from these heterogeneous positions in the common democratic task of public deliberation on this issue, through actions such as framing, discussing, and making proposals, as well as confronting or allying with other actors to appropriate the issue.
The graph (Figure 1) and the centrality measures (Table 1) allow us to identify those actors that have been most relevant (eigenvector) in a sustained manner over the 4 years and those that have been most important in connecting nodes that would otherwise remain isolated, thus acting as mediators (betweenness).
Graph of the full sample with profiles with a minimum of 150 interactions.
Ranking of the 20 Nodes With the Highest Values in the Two Measurements.
Bold Indicates profiles that rank among the top positions in both measures.
According to the theoretical model, the categories that serve to analyse the network of actors are not mutually exclusive but operate as functions that can be exercised in priority and combined with others. Thus, the central actors in the graph share their expert status above all, albeit for different reasons. Expert actors promote their own discourses and reinforce specific perspectives.
In this category we find, in the first place, national institutions: the Government of Spain (@desdelamoncloa), the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge (@mitecogob), the State Secretariat for the Demographic Challenge (@RDemografico), the two chambers of the national parliament (@Congreso_Es and @Senadoesp), and the regional institutions, such as the Regional Government of Castile and Leon (@jcyl). A second group is that of political parties, which includes both organisational accounts and those corresponding to their national spokespersons. This group of profiles includes the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez (@sanchezcastejon of @PSOE), and other political figures such as Pablo Iglesias (@Pablo_Iglesias_ of Podemos) and Santiago Abascal (@Santi_ABASCAL of @vox_es).
The third group within the experts is that of the public associations that have led the activism against depopulation, such as Teruel Existe (@TeruelExiste_) and Soria Ya (@SoriaYa), which have been active for more than two decades. It should be noted that the former, standing under the formula of an electoral grouping in its electoral debut, won an Member of Parliament (MP) in the national elections of November 10, 2019. The seat was subsequently key to the success of the investiture of the socialist candidate Pedro Sánchez as President of the Government. This position as a strategic political party was the catalyst for several territorial organisations in different parts of Spain to transform themselves into political parties in 2021 under the brand name España Vaciada (@EspanaVaciada), which also plays a central place in the sample.
In contrast to politicians who tend to link themselves almost exclusively to their own community accounts, there is a second category of mediator actors, which is included in the ranking of the betweenness metric. These are actors that, without losing their specialised status as experts, stand out as nodes of connection between communities. Through the selection, circulation, and interpretation of discourses, they act as a bridge between clusters. There are mediator actors such as the journalist Manuel Campo Vidal (@mcampovidal), President and founder of the Network of Rural Journalists (@PeriodistaRural), or the now defunct digital medium Poder Rural (@poder_rural). There are also national groups such as the Network of LEADER Local Action Groups (@resespanola), the Federation of Rural Women’s Associations (@Fademur), or groups operating in various territories such as the business lobby Red de Áreas Escasamente Pobladas (Network of Sparsely Populated Areas) (@ssspa_network). Also included are personalities from academia who contribute to the interpretation of demographic and economic data and public policies. Examples of these profiles are Ignacio Molina (@imolina), a geographer at the University of Valladolid and a ministerial advisor, and the @SCeltiberica account of the Association for the Development of the Celtiberian Mountains, promoted by a professor at the University of Zaragoza.
The third group comprises observer actors: they consume information, comment on it, and circulate it. They are citizens, activists, and people linked experientially to the depopulated territory. In this case, it is difficult for them to register high values in the centrality metrics related to mentions and the popularity of the profiles, although some of them, such as @mjdelrio, have published some of the most retweeted tweets in the sample, as we shall see.
Figure 1 shows how this constellation of actors is interrelated, showing the networks that focus on institutional activity (blue and green clusters), while others articulate associative activity (purple cluster). Between the nodes highlighted, the media are in an intermediate place along the different clusters: @eldiarioes, @diariodeteruel, @heraldoes, @laSextaTV, and @aragontv, among others.
Changes Over Time
Figure 2 shows the changing volume of conversation over the 4 years, as well as the three moments when interactions on this issue intensify.
Changing participation: nodes and publications between May 1, 2019, and May 31, 2023.
The first, between October 2019 and January 2020, corresponds to the election campaign for the 10 November elections, in which Teruel Existe, the territorial grouping with its basis in the fight against depopulation, competed for the first time in a general election and won representation in the national parliament. This peak extends into January, due to the negotiations between various political parties to achieve the investiture of the socialist candidate as President of the Government. The context of political opportunity favours the emergence of the issue in the electoral campaign and in the parliamentary debate in terms never achieved before.
After the decline caused by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the second peak occurred in March 2021, coinciding with two important institutional actions: the Ministry presented the Plan of 130 measures to tackle the Demographic Challenge and Law 2/2021 of 7 May, on Economic, Social, and Tax Measures to Combat Depopulation and for the Development of the Rural Environment in Castile-La Mancha was passed, considered pioneering in regional legislation and also in the European Union.
The third moment was between January and February 2022, starting with the launch of the campaign “La España silenciada” (Silenced Spain) by the far-right party VOX for the regional elections in the region of Castile and Leon (Figure 3). VOX is a party with a very effective network strategy (Castro Martínez & Díaz Morilla, 2021), which explains the high centrality values of the party, its leader, and the campaign account (@EsSilenciada) with respect to the sample as a whole.
Map of the number of mentions of the provinces in the sample.
Frameworks
In addition to the time milestones, the 100 most used hashtags in the sample provide evidence of the frameworks of relevance that structure the discussion. The tags guide the priority themes and encapsulate imaginaries and systems of meaning shared by the public confronted by the problem of depopulation. The importance of territory – and thus, the basis of a group public – is reflected in the use of place names as hashtags, which accounts for 39% of the total. These places range from the hashtag #Spain (3,891 mentions) to specific villages such as #Almanzora (3,733 mentions), with just 513 inhabitants. The second largest category is that of slogans that have been used to promote campaigns, following the logic of the use of this social media platform. These account for 20%, and among them, there are some launched by civic platforms based on a specific claim (#YoParoParoPorMiPueblo, #SigueLatiendo, #PueblosConFuturo, or #SerPocosNoRestaDerechos), while others correspond to institutional campaigns (#ElRetoDeTodos) or political party campaigns (#DefenderCyL, #VotaPSOE, or #Españasilenciada). These slogans point to a mixed substratum of topic and polity publics.
This group is followed in percentage by topic tags referring to different issues such as the economy, health, or environmentalism, which account for 19%; political parties or events account for 6%; and 8% are made up of the categories of generic terms such as #mediorural, #rural, or #pueblo, as well as others, where the words do not fit into any of the above categories.
Over the period, certain frames such as rural environment or depopulation have remained stable as thematic aggregations of the issue. However, the conversation is largely characterised by contingent labelling, in line with the fact that the public has a task and a practical orientation, which in a mediatised environment is associated with campaigns through which it seeks to “appropriate” the problem (#yoparopormipueblo, #laEspañasilenciada). These logics hinder the creation of a stable framework of mutual recognition and highlight the importance of controversies in the formation of publics.
The Emergence of a Hybrid Public
Group Public
If we follow Dewey’s logic, the first connection with the public is related to being an actor directly affected by the problem, which in the model are the group publics defined by identity elements that connect their participants. In the case of depopulation, this identity component is evidenced by the explicit connection to the territory and the status of inhabitants of depopulated places. There are, therefore, two important orientations: one of a geographical nature that can be observed in the position of enunciation from a specific place mentioned in the publications and the profiles and another of an affective nature that alludes to a shared feeling. The depopulated territories are spoken of by mobilising a common imaginary that seeks affective resonance through the circulation of discourses with a high degree of emotional intensity (Saiz Echezarreta, 2023), whether in terms of pride, grievance, hope, despair, and so on. This emotional framework points to a shared desire to inhabit the place and appeals, in general terms, to the idea of a rural “we” as contrasting with urban subjects, conveyed through adjectivations and terms that express the experiential.
Individual citizens allude to the territory as a mark of rural identity. Among the authors of the 100 most circulated tweets, we find @darioserranopue, who defines himself in his profile by his location of “Fuentepelayo (Segovia),” also @boticariagarcia, who does so as “tireless Cuenca,” or @VirginiaHGZ, who accompanies her name with an icon of ears of corn in the countryside.
The connection with the group public arises from a direct relationship, from the link with what is close, and from the assumption that there is a rural we that is interested and concerned about what happens in these places; hence, it is possible to ask for help from the group, even if it is large and geographically distant. This dimension of the public is possible because it is united by depopulation as an inherent feature. Hence, among the 100 most retweeted posts, we find this one asking for financial help to maintain the church of a village of seven inhabitants (Figure 4).
Representative tweet related to the group public.
The mention of places becomes relevant in order to reinforce the territorial framework. The map of the terminological frequencies of the Spanish provinces in the sample clearly reflects the prominence of those most affected by depopulation and where activism is most widespread. Soria and Teruel stand out for the prominence of their platforms, but also Leon, mainly due to the volume of publications on the elections in the region of Castile and Leon.
Among the most frequently mentioned places is Madrid, the capital of the country and epitome of central government in the demands that are expressed in dichotomous terms between “those from Madrid,” as the archetype of the urban subject, and us, the depopulated rural people. In the following post (Figure 5), this dichotomy serves to talk about the oblivion, neglect, and historical lack of attention to these rural areas, which is precisely what the group public denounces and against which they mobilise to demand their recognition.
Representative tweet related to urban/rural dichotomy.
Finally, the emotional connection is condensed above all in the hashtags promoted by the associative movement. The hashtag #YoParoParoPorMiPueblo (8,124 mentions) (Figure 6) is the second most used hashtag in the entire sample and corresponds to a protest strike organised by citizens’ associations on October 4, 2019, in which, according to the organisation, 3,800 towns and the capitals of 23 provinces were involved (Figure 7).
Representative tweet related to emotional connection.
Graph of #yoparopormipueblo in the full sample.
In this case, the campaign managed to mobilise leading political parties, including the President of the Government, who, however, got involved from a distanced position – “Today they stop so that their people don’t stop” @sanchezcastejon – which places him outside this group public but opens the horizon towards the emergence and stabilisation of a polity public.
Topic Public
Group publics made up of directly affected actors need to generate evidence to legitimise and extend their claims (Cefaï, 2016). This task falls to topic publics, which involve actors who show a certain level of specialisation and mastery of the issue and interpret or produce specific knowledge. In the case study, figures from journalism and academia are important, as we can see in the general graph (Figure 1), and their way of connecting to the conversation is based on the use of studies, data, and maps, as can be seen in the following examples (Figure 8).
Representative tweets that rely on elements such as studies or data.
This type of public also deals with sectoral issues which at certain times have been associated with depopulation. As has been pointed out, 19% of the 100 most used hashtags are related to topic orientations, distributed as shown in Table 2.
Topics Among the 100 Most Used Hashtags.
The context of the pandemic explains the importance of the health issue. The rural/depopulated environment was presented as a revalued place in which the demands of confinement could be met more amiably, in contrast to the overcrowding of the cities. Demands were also articulated to protect these territories due to their higher percentages of ageing and at-risk populations.
Furthermore, a concern for climate issues and environmental sustainability can be detected in both strategic lines of the Ministry of Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge, as the government agenda of the Socialist Party is aligned with the objectives of the 2030 Agenda in the formulation of the Plan of 130 Measures. Citizen actors and activist groups share this framework in their actions to reject the creation of macro-farms in their territories in order to preserve the natural environment and promote ecologically sustainable production models.
The hashtags also allude to two core historical issues in the movement to reclaim depopulated territories: employment and infrastructure, in particular the railway because of its symbolic relevance as a means of interconnection. Throughout the period under study, there was a constant demand for the maintenance of basic public services and the promotion of economic activity to guarantee the survival of villages. This happens in reaction to specific situations of suppression of resources or as part of the dissemination of public policies, as shown in Figure 9.
Representative tweets related to topic public.
Polity Public
Finally, the shaping of the polity public around the issue of depopulation is achieved when it is framed as a process that affects the whole of Spain and presented as shared between those who suffer its effects directly and those who, although they do not experience it, interpret the issue in terms of equity and collective responsibility (Molina & et al, 2023). Accordingly, it is expressed through the use of frameworks that allude to it as a matter of state policy, that demand institutional policies at a state level, and that project it on the basis of equal rights among Spaniards.
The prominence in the debate of both individual actors on the national political stage and national institutions is a sign that this issue has been elevated to the state political sphere and has achieved a noteworthy degree of institutionalisation. Similarly, the 10 November election campaign and the investiture debate of the Spanish President of the Government confirm that the discussion, at least at the start of the period under study, was held in the public domain, capturing national media attention. Other evidence includes the creation of the State Secretariat for the Demographic Challenge in January 2020, which at the end of the same year launched its Twitter profile with a post that reinforces the idea of a common issue and collective challenge (Figure 10, left). Another key moment for the consolidation of a polity public regarding depopulation is the presentation of the Plan of 130 Measures, as shown by the post of the President of the Spanish Government (Figure 10, right).
Representative tweets related to polity public.
The polity public, however, is not only made up of national political figures but also involves a wide range of actors. Among the 100 publications that have circulated the most, we find some from associations or private citizens seeking the complicity of the public as a whole to resolve the challenge (Figure 11).
Representative tweets related to polity public.
In 2022, the political party VOX made use of the importance of depopulation as a national policy problem (alluding to its magnitude as proof), to question government policy (Figure 12).
Representative tweet of the VOX party.
This campaign #LaEspañaSilenciada (12,803 mentions) responds to a 15-day condensed participation model, in which the set of observing actors replicates the contents of the expert actors (the accounts of campaigns, the party, and main leaders). Focused on its own community, this campaign was successful in terms of volume and visibility.
For its part, the State Secretariat for the Demographic Challenge participated in the framework of political relevance between December 2020 and May 2023 with the hashtags #ElRetoDeTodos (2,188 mentions) and #retodemográfico (36,939 mentions), tags that are among the 100 most used and with which the institution seeks to involve the public as a whole. However, Figure 13 shows how it does not manage to mobilise other relevant actors outside the institutional network and the Socialist Party, which is a limitation for the discussion of the problem, as it does not extend to other communities such as those formed, for example, by civic platforms.
Graph of the use of the hashtag #retodemográfico.
Alongside this, another barrier encountered by the polity public is that when national leaders have discussed depopulation, the conversation has not always dealt with concerns related to the problem as such, but it has been mentioned in a circumstantial manner, for example, acting as a secondary issue when the parliamentary negotiations for the investiture of the President of the Government were established. This may have prevented debates on specific measures or on relevant issues such as the territorial model in Spain. And, in the medium to long term, it may have weakened the stabilisation of a polity public in the area of depopulation (Esparcia, 2024).
Beyond its institutionalisation and projection as a matter of state policy, the polity public also reveals an affective layer that should not be overlooked. Following Cefaï (2016), publics are not only cognitive formations but also “communities of feeling” shaped by shared sensitivities. In this case, emotions such as civic solidarity, empathy with rural communities, and a sense of national responsibility become crucial resources for enlarging the scope of the public. These affective orientations differ from the territorial pride and grievance characteristic of group publics, but they are no less important: they translate local experiences into broader civic values and enable the articulation of depopulation as a collective challenge. Political emotions can also act as vectors that promote the hybridisation of publics. As Jasper (2018) underlines, political emotions motivate collective action and, through affective entanglements, connect the pride, hope, or grievance typical of group publics with civic solidarity in polity publics. At the same time, political emotions can stimulate thematic interest, as in the case of indignation, which demands evidence and proof in order to sustain itself. From this perspective, hashtags such as #ElRetoDeTodos exemplify how political empathy and civic responsibility are mobilised to connect distant actors to a shared issue, expanding the common sensibility of the polity public.
The analysis shows the composition of a hybrid public, but it is important to emphasise that this is not a mere superposition or substitution of roles nor a simple distribution of functions among actors. Rather, it is a more complex process of articulation. The Plataforma Teruel Existe illustrates this process of hybridisation: originating as a group public anchored in territorial identity and affective belonging, it later consolidated its role as a topic public by providing expertise, data, and specific claims to legitimise its demands. This knowledge, generated through the investigative work characteristic of publics, subsequently supported its experimental role when it decided to participate as a political party and run in elections. Once it achieved parliamentary representation, the same actor shifted again into the polity public, framing depopulation as a matter of state policy and negotiating directly in the national legislature. However, this actor did not lose the affective identity ties of the group public nor its evidence-based strategies as a topic public, thus diversifying its resources for action. Other examples include actors who initially intervene as experts (topic public) but, through alliances with other actors and their involvement in defending specific territories, may adopt roles closer to group publics (identity) or even influence institutional politics (polity). This is the case of the aforementioned scholar Ignacio Molina, who combines research expertise as a geographer with a policy-oriented role as a ministerial advisor. The categories of publics do not simply merge, but in a sequence of displacements, their dimensions are articulated with one another, depending on political opportunities and communicative settings.
Conclusions
The case study confirms the existence of a hybrid public around the problem of depopulation in Spain, as evidenced by the analysis of digital activity on Twitter/X between 2019 and 2023. A constellation of actors with varying degrees of specialisation and commitment was identified, organised around three dynamics: territorial-identity (group public), thematic-advocacy (topic public), and political-institutional (polity public). These categories produced interdependent communicative practices that sustained the public conversation and enabled collective mobilisation. The temporal evolution of the debate showed peaks of effervescence linked to political and electoral events, followed by periods of latency, highlighting the structural fragility of participatory publics. The integration of computational methods with prior ethnographic knowledge was essential to capture both the structure of relationships and the relevance frameworks mobilised by the actors.
Our proof of concept of the public model proposed by Hasebrink et al. (2023), in dialogue with the sociology of public problems and in its application to the case study of depopulation in Spain, has proved useful. Their model, centred on the action of actors, helps strengthen empirical research on the transformation and dynamism of publics, allowing for comparative and/or longitudinal analyses around a specific public, as in our case study.
As a limitation, it should be noted that the segmentation of publics proposed by Hasebrink et al. (2023), especially in the description of polity publics, is focused on information repertoires, that is, on generic needs and desires to be informed, inheriting to a certain extent the Habermasian vision of the public sphere. However, it should be borne in mind that the relevance of information is nowadays based on the individual and strong identities, especially in social media. In this regard, it is necessary to analyse deeper into the affective dimension of the forms of participation in the different types of publics, especially considering that the very logic of social media promotes a specific type of emotion derived from sharing: a new “collective emotion of exchange” (Quéré, 2017) is also generated, which perhaps does not take information as its basis.
Placing the affective question at the forefront leads us to wonder whether the group-identity dimension should not be seen as an essential transversal vector in the origin and mobilisation of participatory publics.
Taking this into consideration and with the aim of further enhancing Dewey’s notion of publics, we propose to place more emphasis on the processual reading focused on the shifts and the shaping process that takes place from the group to the polity dimension, passing through the necessary topic dimension of the generalisation and legitimisation phase.
From there, the analyses not only make it possible to trace this transformation but also account for the fragility and complexity of public participation, as it can be detected when the articulation between one and the other dimension of the public is favoured or hindered.
Moreover, this theoretical-methodological approach facilitates multiscale analysis and favours the combination of qualitative elements of the ethnographic approach and discourse analysis with computational methods capable of handling large samples.
In application to the case study, the process towards a hybrid public and the elements that have enabled it has been confirmed. This responds to the articulation of political, administrative, social, and cultural interrelationships between different geopolitical spaces and is an assemblage of these ways of connecting with depopulation, whether local, regional, or national. The combination of a polity dimension of the public with a particular projection, whether thematic or identity-based, explains the wide range of actors involved in the conversation analysed, from the Spanish President of the Government and ministers, to citizens from very small territories. These aggregations of actors demand action on a territory, show conflicting perspectives in an electoral contest, or have specific topics of interest, such as the discussion on renewable energies or infrastructures.
At the same time, at least in the case of depopulation, it can be observed that we are not only dealing with topic-based publics but also with group publics, as there is a transversal vector linked to territorial identities (Banini, 2021). The connection between group publics and polity publics is complex. On one hand, some actors connect with the general public by living in depopulated territories, since what is being discussed on that scale affects them directly. On the other hand, the existence of a topic public emerges as an opportunity to connect actors, especially those who are not directly affected, usually from urban areas, with those from depopulated rural areas, and also to modify the ways of understanding the problem.
The analysis has allowed us to identify the barriers to the long-term stabilisation and institutionalisation of a polity public. With regard to this issue, we observed:
First, there is a declining pattern over time in terms of the ability to capture attention, maintain interest, and force the issue on the agenda.
Second, although discourses that allude to the common question have been detected, there is a tendency to generate communities with their own unshared framework, partly derived from the logics of the network itself through hashtags. The model also allows us to observe how publics are also the product of their own strategies to articulate forms of appearance and entry in the public space. As we have seen, collective articulation does not take the same form in communities formed from institutions or from activism.
Third, the efforts of actors to consolidate their hegemonic position in the polity public do not always succeed, as in the case of the attempt of civic platforms opposing depopulation to gain parliamentary representation (Esparcia, 2024). This shows that a participatory public is a complex and difficult entity to maintain in the public space.
Finally, the results of the analysis of the conversation over time and ethnographic monitoring show that we may be experiencing a retreat towards the local dimension of the depopulation issue. This trend of decreasing interest in the problem in the national public sphere is also corroborated by the poor electoral results of the recent political platforms based on activism.
The decline in public attention and mobilisation around depopulation after 2022 confirms a key dimension highlighted by Dewey (1927/2012): the constitutive fragility of democratic publics. The formation of a public is neither guaranteed nor permanent, but a contingent process that requires the persistence of shared experiences and their institutional articulation, and nothing ensures its stability over time (Rogers, 2016, pp. 34–35). When this common experience is not sustained or does not become part of daily public life (Zask, 2011), the public disintegrates. In this case, the decline observed since 2022 reflects both the difficulty of civic platforms to consolidate politically and the limited renewal of media interest, pointing to a partial failure in the institutionalisation of the problem as a stable public cause (Dewey, 1927/2012, p. 126). Another relevant factor arises when leadership of the issue is predominantly assumed by experts, administrations, or institutions, which risks displacing citizens from their active role and potentially leads to disconnection and demobilisation (Cefaï, 2022; Zask, 2011). This pattern embodies a mode of disarticulation of publics: a process through which the connections sustaining collective visibility and coherence are weakened, dispersing the circulation of shared meanings, and reducing their capacity to influence the political agenda.
The difficulty lies in the fact that, without the media and organisational conditions that catalyse its emergence, the public withdraws into less visible spheres and becomes exposed to the erosion of its political density. This finding underscores the need to understand publics as unstable and experimental formations that fluctuate between moments of emergence and phases of weakening, and whose sustainability depends on media and social infrastructures capable of keeping alive the minimal conditions of attention, circulation, and deliberation (Cefaï, 2016; Dewey, 1927/2012).
A useful concept for addressing these transitions may be the incorporation of the concept of latency: a condition in which the public persists as a diffuse field of experiences, still recognisable in practices of identification and in minor communicative spaces but without the intensity or institutional visibility of a polity public. As Melucci (1996, pp. 392–393) argues, latency does not imply disappearance but a shift to less visible forms of collective existence, maintaining symbolic ties and repertoires that enable potential reactivation.
Building on Dewey’s view of publics as fragile and experimental formations that demand ongoing inquiry (Dewey, 1927/2012), future research should explore how these publics sustain themselves or dissolve over time. As Quéré (2017) notes, maintaining mutual attention and a shared sensitivity is essential for the persistence of participatory publics, yet this becomes increasingly challenging when connections weaken or the problem ceases to be perceived as urgent.
From this context, a theoretical–methodological question of interest emerges that would allow us to refine the model of categorising publics in the future. In line with the processual reading of the tested model of publics and Dewey’s perspective, what conditions enable the transition from group or topic publics to polity publics, and what mechanisms hinder their institutionalisation? (Zask, 2019) How do we describe the process of disconnection from that public when an issue loses salience on the public agenda? How do residual forms of connection persist, and by what methodological strategies can we capture these latent, fragmented publics? (Munk & Ellern, 2015) To what extent can the leadership of institutions or experts sustain a polity public when citizen actors disengage? (Dewey, 1927/2012, pp. 123ff) Do those who continue to participate through the topic and group dimension still have the status of polity publics, despite having lost the capacity to interest and affect the public as a whole? These questions are essential for understanding the sustainability of democratic participation in highly mediatised environments and call for methodological approaches capable of detecting not only stabilised inscriptions but also latent forms of connection that ensure continuity of experience in less visible spaces.
This means that advocating for a process-based rather than typological model should address: (1) the temporal dynamics of publics: their transition between activation, persistence, latency, or dissolution phases; (2) the relationships between the scales at which the public operates, such as territorial or institutional levels; (3) sustainability indicators to detect public fragility, resilience, or mutation; and (4) the affective and identity dimension as a transversal axis, both linked to belonging and to the “collective emotion of exchange” as an essential practice of a participatory public. Our conclusion is that the model could improve in analysing critical moments in the life of a public, requiring a vision that better captures the shifts and assemblages between group, topic, and polity dimensions, avoiding rigid classifications and attending not only to the constitution of publics but also to their vulnerability and intermittent forms of existence – in short, to their ontological condition of fragility.
In the case of depopulation, it may be that after a phase marked by symbolic condensation through a shared framework (also through dialogic dissent), the challenge finds logics of association and survives between cultural, political, and discursive sites that may become “only very fractionally coherent,” precarious spaces of encounter and translation (Munk & Ellern, 2015). In that case, once disjointed, what are the best methodological models for detecting that complex life form of the field of experiences that Dewey called public?
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
If the article is accepted, we can incorporate a link to the database with all the tweets.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is part of the R&D&I Project “Mediatized Problems and Publics: Emotions and Participation” (PID2021-123292OB-I00) 2022–2025, State R&D&I Program for Knowledge Generation Projects, Ministry of Science and Innovation (Spain).
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.