doi.org/10.15178/va.2020.152.1-18
INVESTIGACIÓN
"AT LEAST WE HAD FUN’: TWITTER RESPONSES TO THE 4N ELECTORAL DEBATE"
"AL MENOS NOS HEMOS DIVERTIDO´: RESPUESTAS EN TWITTER AL DEBATE ELECTORAL" 4N
"PELO MENOS NOS DIVERTIMOS´: RESPOSTAS NO TWITTER AO DEBATE ELEITORAL" 4N
Mayte Donstrup1
1University of Seville. Spain.
This work had been conducted thanks to the funding of the “VI Plan Propio” of the University of Seville.
ABSTRACT
Electoral debates are one of the key events in political campaigns. On social networks, viewers comment on and share all kinds of opinions about the candidates’ performances or proposals. This work aims to reveal, by using a quantitative methodology, which types of responses have predominated on Twitter regarding the electoral debate held on November 4, 2019, on TVE. The findings indicate the predominant position of humorous observations on this social network. The discussion of the results revolves around a core issue: the ideological polarization that prevails on Twitter.
KEY WORDS: Memes, elections, politics, reception, humour, internet, social media.
RESUMEN
El debate electoral es uno de los eventos clave en las campañas políticas. En las redes sociales los espectadores comentan y difunden todo tipo de opiniones sobre la actuación o propuestas de los candidatos. Este trabajo pretende poner de manifiesto, empleando una metodología cuantitativa, qué tipologías de respuestas han predominado en Twitter respecto al debate electoral celebrado el 4 de noviembre de 2019 en TVE. Los resultados evidencian la posición predominante de las observaciones humorísticas en la red social. La discusión de los resultados gira en torno a un núcleo: la polarización ideológica existente en Twitter.
PALABRAS CLAVE: Memes, elecciones, política, recepción, humor, internet, redes sociales.
RESUMO
O debate eleitoral é um dos eventos chave nas campanhas políticas. Nas redes sociais os espectadores comentam e difundem todo tipo de opinião sobre a atuação ou às propostas dos candidatos. Este trabalho pretende mostrar, empregando uma metodologia quantitativa, que tipologías de respostas predominaram no Twitter em relação ao debate eleitoral realizado em 4 de novembro de 2019 na TVE. Os resultados mostram a posição predominante das observações humorísticas na rede social. A discussão dos resultados gira em torno de um núcleo: a polarizaçao ideológica existente no Twitter.
PALAVRAS CHAVE: Memes, eleições, política, recepção, humor, internet, redes sociais.
Como citar el artículo:
Donstrup M. (2020). At least we had fun’: Twitter responses to the 4N electoral debate. [`Al menos nos hemos divertido´: respuestas en Twitter al debate electoral 4N]. Vivat Academia. Revista de Comunicación, 152, 1-18. doi: http://doi.org/10.15178/va.2020.152.1-18 Recuperado de http://www.vivatacademia.net/index.php/vivat/article/view/1229
Correspondence:
Mayte Donstrup: University of Seville. Spain. mdonstrup@us.es
Recibido: 20/04/2020.
Aceptado: 29/05/2020.
Publicado: 15/09/2020.
1. INTRODUCTION
Debates are important events during a political campaign due to different reasons. According to William Benoit (2013) one of the main functions of an electoral debate is to provide knowledge about both the main arguments that each political party stands for and the candidate who is running for president: “Televised political debates are an important source of information for the electorate because viewers can learn more about different political issues and policy positions” (Marien, Goovaerts and Elstub, 2019, p. 18). In conjunction with other political marketing tools, debates allow citizens to have an idea about the political parties and candidates who run for elections, but with some defining characteristics that differentiate it from the other elements of the campaign. In this sense, the possibility of unexpected questions or comments in the debate format promotes a perception of greater transparency or frankness from candidates than the speeches or the television advertisements thoroughly elaborated (Benoit, 2013).
In addition to the spontaneity of debates, Mitchell McKinney and Diana Carlin (2008) add its great attraction capacity to it. Several techniques combine for the debate to acquire sensationalist connotations that spur additional interest; for example, adding entertainment elements into this space –Infotainment- or the media coverage that portrays the candidates in a competition and asks audiences about who is going to win in said space: the so-called Horse race (Rebet and Benoit, 2001). The setting of this show can produce ruptures in its main function: providing knowledge about all the candidates, since, by presenting them with opposing points of view, it is more likely that viewers pay more attention to that perspective that is closer to theirs and use the information deriving from observation to reinforce their original stance (Coleman and Moss, 2016). For its part, infotainment generates issues regarding if the information disseminated is accurate and credible (Ferrín, Fraile and García-Albacete, 2019).
Precisely, the effectiveness or not of electoral debates to draw the electorate is one of the most debated matters in scientific literature (Pfau, 1987; Koopmans, 2007; Benoit, 2007; Chadwick, O’Loughlin, and Vaccari, 2017); however, the findings of the different empirical studies about these political effects are rarely conclusive.
1.1. Twitter and electoral debates
The possibility offered by social networks of accessing huge amounts of information immediately and having a loudspeaker without investing important economic resources has entailed a revolution in all senses. Galais and Cardenal (2017) affirm that the more an individual surfs on social networks during an electoral campaign the more doubts he/she will have about the decision of his/her vote; which, ultimately, would increase the possibilities of voting for a small party. The opportunity of giving voice to alternative organizations / political actors is one of the appealing aspects of social networks, on which traditional journalists intermingle with bloggers, the audience and the very candidates to produce a broad variety of electoral comments (McGregor, Mourão and Molyneux, 2017). Specifically, the microblogging Twitter service has become one of the most important social networks, with 251 million monthly active users all around the world (Global digital review, 2019).
Although most of the messages posted on this platform are personal updates, the use of Twitter with political purposes has increased during that past recent years (Barberá and Rivero, 2015). The political use of this microblogging social network is not limited to candidates and political organizations running for elections, since there is an important amount of citizens’ activity during key moments of an electoral campaign, such as the rebroadcast of electoral debates (Rodríguez Fernández and Saavedra Llamas, 2017). According to Barberá and Rivero (2015), watching this online discussion of the electoral debates can offer some valuable ideas about how the audience perceives the political ideas of these events. In this sense, Twitter is useful to know the way how the audience interprets the debate, the performance of candidates and also the quality of the arguments stated (Trilling, 2015): “Moreover, the fact that voters and the political elite frequently turn to Twitter to express their opinions on various issues creates in valuable opportunities to measure political ideology using Twitter text as data” (Tuna and Yildirim, 2019, p. 169).
Political events are those with sufficient status, salience, and importance to be televised. Live annotation implies individuals to provide commentary about the event and to view commentary about the same event posted by other people utilizing a social media platform. Twitter is uniquely situated to offer live annotation through the use of hashtags. A hashtag is a word or phrase preceded by the number sign (#) and used as a label. Hashtags can be searched so that all tweets containing them can be collected, and users can then post to that same stream (Thorson, Hawthorne, Swasy and McKinney, 2015, p. 169).
1.2. Study case: electoral debate November 4
The electoral campaign subject of study is set in a context in which the irruption of new parties, since the 2014 European Parliament Elections in Spain, has arranged a new political panorama that has put an end to the traditional two-party system: “The combination of broken election promises, perceived corruption, failure to overcome the crisis and the imposition of an array of unpopular policies brought confidence in the main parties down to unprecedented levels of disapproval” (Cordero and Montero, 2015, p. 176). In this sense, up until 2014, the Spanish Government and its autonomies and councils had been managed by the People’s Party (PP), integrated by a wide right spectrum or the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) traditionally linked to the center-left. However, since the European elections, the emergent organization from the left 15M movement, Podemos, appeared steeply in the electoral arena (forming a coalition with the communist party United Left in 2016, 2018 and 2019), followed soon after by the Catalonian Party Ciudadanos, which leapt to the national arena by defining itself as progressive liberal. More recently, the extreme right party VOX has obtained a significant parliamentary representation.
Following the 2014 European elections, Podemos and C’s took advantage of the electoral momentum and vied for a larger vote share. Adopting an anti-establishment rhetoric and focusing on the need for change, the two new forces were able to grasp a considerable portion of votes. In addition, in some significant cities, like Madrid and Barcelona, newly formed grassroots leftist coalitions performed particularly well, replacing the PSOE as the leading leftist force and winning the mayor’s office (Rodon and Hierro, 2016, p. 353).
The transformation from a two-party system into a multiparty one has entailed the governance to depend on agreements between parties with analogous programs, and in the face of the incapacity to achieve agreements two elections were held (April and November) during 2019: “Spanish politics is in a deadlock situation. The formation of a stable government seems highly unlikely, although political parties are not in favor of a new election” (Medina and Correa, 2016, p. 417). The debate under analysis in this study is set in a context of uncertainty deriving from the later elections. The program was held on November 4 at the Academia de la Televisión [EN: Television Academy] and rebroadcasted by Televisión Española, Antena 3 and La Sexta. The television program lasted 150 minutes structured with one initial question –How do we break the deadlock? -, and five segments of 25 minutes each: cohesion of Spain, economic policy, social policy and equality, democratic quality and international policy. The participants of this debate were the candidate of the Spanish Socialist Party, Pedro Sánchez; the leader of Peoples’ Party, Pablo Casado; the president of Ciudadanos, Albert Rivera; the general secretary of Unidas Podemos, Pablo Iglesias; and the president of VOX, Santiago Abascal.
2. OBJECTIVES
The main purpose of this work is to conduct an analysis of the messages posted by citizens on the social network Twitter during the Spanish electoral debate broadcasted on November 4, 2019. In order to achieve this general purpose, the following specific objectives were proposed:
3. METHODOLOGY
In order to achieve the goals set, we propose a quantitative approach by conducting a content analysis (Krippendorf, 1990), a tool that allowed classifying 773 tweets. The universe of the messages was collected through the Twitter Query program. These tweets have been filtered using the hashtags with the highest level of activity during the debate (Cool tab, 2019): #DebateElectoral and #Debatea5RTVE. The period selected was 25 hours: from the beginning of the electoral debate (22:00 hrs) and during the day after (November 5, 2019) until the 23:00 hrs. The size of the sample, with a 95% confidence level with a ±5 error, resulted in a total of 257 units to which a random probability sampling has been implemented. To this regard, it is important to point out that professional journalists or politicians’ personal accounts were excluded from the sample. This last aspect was known by reading their Twitter biography (presentation).
The Twitter Query application was linked to an online Excel data base that collected automatically the tweets of users that fulfilled the established parameters (#DebateElectoral and Debatea5RTVE during the time under analysis). In the sheet generated by the program, in addition to the information regarding users’ profile, some general data of the message were gathered: number of retweets, number of times it was marked as favorite and mentions made to other accounts.
With the purpose of exploring these data, the classification elaborated by Tremayne and Minooie (2015), who established the following analysis variables to study the responses on Twitter to the electoral debates, was adapted to the Spanish context:
Table 1. Content analysis variables.
Source: author’s own creation.
To illustrate this, some of the most relevant indicators used during the development of this research are detailed hereunder:
4. RESULTS
The exploitation of the quantitative data according to the variables taken into consideration has allowed identifying the mentions about the political candidates and the general characteristics of the messages.
The study of the messages on Twitter about the electoral debate held during November 4 has permitted identifying a set of general trends. First, from an overall perspective, the fact that the humoristic/sarcastic category prevailed for all the parties/candidates (less references to Santiago Abascal from Vox or mentions to all the parties) stands out (Graphic 1). With 13.04%, Albert Rivera prevailed among users with a higher percentage of humoristic/sarcastic comments, followed by Pedro Sánchez in this same category, who obtained 8.70%. Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal generated 4.35% of humoristic tweets each, while Pablo Casado, who generated less total activity, was mentioned in the humor/sarcasm category on 3.26% of the tweets.
Graph 1. Responses on Twitter.
In the humor/sarcasm category, the use of humor prevailed with 69.4% of the tweets, on which the use of memes containing intertextual references to the mass culture products stands out (Albert Rivera being compared to Joe Quimby from The Simpsons, in the episode on which the mayor intends to win the sympathy of journalists with a puppy, for example) or intertextual references to the debate (expressions or gestures made by the candidates; to illustrate Pablo Iglesias’ mistake when stating manada/”mamada” [EN: Herb/”blowjob”]). Hereunder, there is a brief compilation of humorous graphic images according to their popularity (retweets) on the network:
Illustration 1. Twitter.
Illustration 2. Twitter.
As for the cases of Íñigo Errejón, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Casado and Albert River, the use of humor was focused on the characteristics of the performance of the candidates (Pedro Sánchez looking constantly at the floor, for example) or the appearance of the candidates (the juvenile appearance of Íñigo Errejón). Santiago Abascal and Pablo Iglesias generated a greater variety of responses, since, in addition to the humor based on the superficial characteristics of candidates or their performance, their ideological proposals had humorous impact. As for the case of Pablo Iglesias, the illustration makes an intertextual reference to the Spanish series “Aquí no hay quien viva” (Antena 3: 2003-2006). Specifically, this meme compares this politician from the purple organization to the character Emilio Delgado, the janitor of the housing complex where the events of this series take place. That is, by wearing an informal outfit, Pablo Iglesias was linked to the working class. In the random sampling, two memes that alluded to the comment stated by Santiago Abascal during the “Cohesion of Spain” segment emerge: “I have been to many towns and have met many people, and they all share the same indignation: having a government that deems as more urgent exhuming a body when they are facing real social emergencies” (TVE, 2019); the two images created by users demonstrated the disagreement with the statement of this candidate and exhibited a stance opposing Francoism.
Albert Rivera also received repercussions thanks to intertextual references, but in this case, they have been linked exclusively to his performance during the debate. For his case, the memes made references to his material presented during the program with allusions to series such as Doraemon (Nippon TV: 1969- ) or Inspector Gadget (DIC Entertainment: 1983-1986); both being characterized by characters capable of bringing out objects out of the blue.
For their part, the sarcastic tweets were less graphic, with short yet incisive comments (Table 2):
Table 2. Sarcastic comments.
Source: author’s own creation.
Sarcastic tweets (examples in table 2) are of a more varied kind. In general, the tweets about Albert Rivera and Pedro Sánchez have maintained the line of graphic comments. As for the case of the candidate of Ciudadanos, the emphasis was placed on the objects used during the debate, while the tweets meant for Pedro Sánchez were criticism to his performance due to his reading or looking at the floor. The emphasis placed on the mistakes made by the candidates does stand out in these types of messages; for example, the conjugation mistake made by Pablo Casado. More personal reflections about the government formation or the suitability of the candidates were posted in this category; statements that have not been underpinned with data or arguments beyond the deadlock.
If in the humor category (Graph 1) Albert Rivera prevailed (13.04%), the leader of Vox, Santiago Abascal, stood out by receiving more complimentary hashtags meant for candidates (7.61%), followed by Pablo Iglesias from Unidad Podemos with a notable difference (3.26%). Pedro Sánchez, from PSOE, did not receive any positive mentions, while Pablo Casado (1.09%) and Albert Rivera (2.17%) barely receive some. In Table 3, some messages characteristic of this category have been exemplified, in which adjectives like brilliant or awesome prevailed and were occasionally accompanied by proposals of the candidates (“to defend the sovereignty of nations” by Santiago Abascal). It is interesting to note that in this classification the opinion of a person from an opposing ideology has been used twice to justify the good performance of the candidate that is being defended (in this case, Pablo Iglesias).
Table 3. Praise.
Source: Twitter.
The category of mentions of the good proposal or criticism about the proposal of candidates (Table 4) was one of the least used ones by Twitter users regarding all the participants of the debate, except when referring to “other parties”. In this sense, those who are loyal to other candidacies –especially to Más País- have used the microblogging platform to praise the proposals of the political organization that did not participate in the debate. In this classification the generalized criticism towards all the participants of the debate also stood out, who were blamed for the lack of interesting proposals. Three users have criticized the general system of the debate, deeming the formula as an ineffective source of information for citizens. As for the results about the mentions of the proposals of the candidates, news sources were used (such as links to journalists news) to underpin their criticism or praise. For example, the statement by Santiago Abascal about the universal health system has been refuted by a user with data collected from El Diario.
The candidate who received the greatest amount of criticism due to the proposals presented during the electoral debate was Santiago Abascal (6.52%), who was also the one that received the highest amount of positive mentions as candidate (7.61%). Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias and Santiago Abascal only obtained 1.09% of mentions praising their proposals.
Table 4. Criticism.
Source: Twitter.
The comparative mentions between candidates have been the least used by Twitter users: Pedro Sánchez (1.09%), other parties (1.09%), Pablo Iglesias (2.18%) and Santiago Abascal (9.79%). In these scarce posted comparisons, users made parallelisms between the appearance and behavior of the candidates. Santiago Abascal was the only candidate at whom Twitter users aimed a higher number of thematic comparisons. In this sense, the trademarks in the discourse of Vox’s candidate (separation of the “progressive consensus” and “the cultural framework imposed by the other candidates”) has sunk in among Twitter users, who have noticed they consider Santiago Abascal to be different from all the political leaders.
Table 5. Comparisons.
Source: Twitter.
5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
The electoral debate held on November 4 has been characterized by the variety in proposals from the candidates, who, far from presenting themselves –for the most part- in a personalist manner, have presented key ideological matters of their political organizations. For example, Albert Rivera, in the equality segment, mentioned what the vital cycle of a president should be in the life of a citizen: to provide studies, a decent job, being able of forming a family and to receive a pension. It is interesting that he mentioned, broadly, the principles of the ideology (Rivero, 2008) that prevails in the program of Ciudadanos: liberalism. However, the reflections given by this candidate who comes from the orange grouping were centered on more banal aspects, making the discussion Twitter users had to revolve around the objects Albert Rivera used during the debate. In fact, the humoristic mentions have been the most used ones by these users regarding all the political candidates, corroborating the findings from other works that demonstrate the success of humor among users with regards to the political comments on Twitter (Jivkova-Semova, Requeijo-Rey and Graciela Padilla-Castillo, 2017; Meso-Ayerdi, Mendiguren-Galdospín and Pérez-Dasilva, 2017.
As for the findings obtained, we coincide with the statements of Trilling (2015), and Vergeer and Franses (2015), who claim that Twitter, although not being characterized by the predominance of reflection, it does serve as a foundation for an initial political deliberation:
One should not mistake the Twitter discourse for a purely rational political debate: Fun, irony, and sarcasm play at least as big a role as constructive discussion. Twitter does not seem to be used as the ultimate tool for deliberation—but it can at least be a first step (Trilling, 2015, p. 273).
That first step to reflection has been observed in the use of memes that, even using simple expressions and graphs, have come to make –in some cases- parallelisms between social classes or the extreme right and authoritarian systems. That is, according to Shifman (2014), the results in this work demonstrate that memes can serve as an expression of political thinking. In this sense, in addition to the humorous resource about the performance or the mistake made by that candidate, the memes tweeted by users during the electoral debate have demonstrated, consciously or unconsciously, ideological stances (to illustrate this, the intertextual reference comparing Pablo Iglesias to the janitor of the Spanish series Aquí no hay quien viva) or have brought up hot topics with graphic images (the issue of corruption of Peoples’ Party).
Therefore, even it is interpreted as a humorous code; it is true that to a certain extent debate has served to provide knowledge about the proposals or the candidates (Benoit, 2013). Additionally, the broad leadership of memes as a discursive resource is linked to one of the trends of television networks, who present information with entertainment features (infotainment); the results indicate that the recipients have also used intertextual reference from other sources to explain and give sense to the performance/proposals of the candidates.
It is important to point out that the participants in the debate have made a great amount of allusions to their opponents, being Pedro Sánchez (PSOE) the candidate who received a greater number of propaganda attacks –that is, the expressions made by the sender of the message mentioning the negative features of other parties, proposals or candidates (Pineda Cachero, 2006) – with a total of thirty eight attacks. The strategy of targeting the weaknesses of opponents has coincide with the criticism posted on Twitter by users, since Pedro Sánchez has been the one who got a greater percentage of negative mentions aimed at the candidates.
The candidate that received the greatest amount of criticism due to his performance in the debate, Pedro Sánchez (6.52%), was the one who later obtained the best results during the electoral elections. To this regard, it is important to mention that this candidate belongs to one of the traditional parties of the Spanish democracy, PSOE, and the settled political organizations are characterized by a partisan identification (Alaminos and Alaminos-Fernández, 2018).
All in all, in the same way as the humorous nature of messages has prevailed, the recipients have spoken out in a greater percentage about aspects related to the candidates, being Santiago Abascal the one who received the majority of the positive comments about his performance during the debate (7.61%). However, the leader of Vox was also the one who received the highest amount of negative messages about his proposals (6.52%), demonstrating, and in accordance with other studies (Guerrero Solé et.al., 2014; Guerrero-Solé, 2018), the existing political polarization on Twitter. Moreover, in general, the findings of this work have demonstrated the tendency of the advocates of a political party to focus on the characteristics of its leader. On the contrary, once they have been predisposed to invalidate a party that opposes their ideals, Twitter users have focused on the proposals presented in order to invalidate the candidate or the political organization being represented.
AUTHOR/AUTHORS:
Mayte Donstrup
Mayte Donstrup is a Trainee Researcher Personnel (VI Plan Propio US) at the Audiovisual Communication and Advertisement Department of the University of Seville. She is currently working on her doctoral thesis on ideological reception of television series with political content. Her lines of research are focused on the ideological analysis of audiovisual storytelling and the study of audiences.
mdonstrup@us.es
Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6236-4967
Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=rdNqiE0AAAAJ&hl=es
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mayte_Donstrup
Scopus: N-5214-2018
Academia.edu: https://us.academia.edu/MayteDonstrup
The exhumation of Dictator Francisco Franco.