Discursive Practices during an Electoral Cycle: Public Opinion and Political Disillusionment on Twitter

Abstract

Electoral cycles are highly charged, politically intense moments that influence public discourse. Political elites, citizens, and the traditional news media seek to generate opinions and interactions on social networks. This research is motivated by the following questions: What are the communicative and deliberative practices used in these spaces? Is it possible to identify the characteristics that –through deliberative conversations– potentially foster or undermine democratic debate, particularly when using populist and polarizing discourse? Using a mixed methods approach, we apply a social network analysis tool to track conversations and identify the volume of political discourse (N=346,000). Using selective and staged filtering, we identified posts from nine Peruvian Twitter accounts during the September 2022 electoral campaign in Lima: three candidates, three media outlets, and three accounts with high levels of engagement. Our data comprised the comments from these nine accounts and was extracted using an Application Programming Interface (API). Subsequently, we carried out ethnographic content analysis on publications with more than 30 comments. In this phase, we analyzed Twitter comments using a codebook to identify deliberative practices and user responses. Our findings underscore the significant role of principal media outlets in shaping political conversation on Twitter. We also discovered that attempts to interact and deliberate were often overshadowed by heated comments attempting to impose opinions on others. Most importantly, our research reveals a widespread disillusionment with politics, political institutions, and even the political preferences of fellow citizens in Peru, highlighting a key challenge for democratic discourse on social media. © 2024 Communication & Society.