Tweeting Locally: The Role of Social Media in Brazilian Municipal Elections

• In Event: Poster Session: Health Policy and Politics & Information Technology and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Information Technology and Politics

Abstract

Electoral campaigns are increasingly making use of social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to push campaign messages in an open and less regulated environment. This move to online forms of campaigning was strengthened due to the Covid-19 pandemic which limited politicians’ ability to have in-person interactions with voters across the globe. The individual nature of social media also has the potential to encourage personalist campaigns, limiting the importance of party organizations and brands. To understand how digital campaigning operates in an understudied context, I use a novel keyword-based sampling method to construct a sample of nearly 350,000 tweets from 925 mayoral candidates in Brazil’s 2020 municipal elections. I then use a mixture of hand coding and a human validated dictionary method to classify each individual tweet as either relating to one of four highly salient in the 2020 municipal elections: the Covid-19 pandemic, corruption, unemployment, and education, or none of these. A time series analysis reveals how the salience of these issues varied over time and between identifiable groups of candidates, suggesting that mayoral candidates largely avoided the pandemic as a campaign issue, while focusing strongly on traditional campaign issues such as economic growth and public services like education. The analysis also reaffirms the importance of party brands and issue ownerships, as even in the fragmented non-ideological context of local Brazilian politics party affiliation strongly predicted which candidates were most likely to publish tweets about each topic under investigation. Further analysis suggests that these new campaign tools have been most strongly adopted by highly resourced, educated, left-wing, and incumbent candidates, suggesting that online platforms may be reinforcing as opposed to overturning traditional hierarchies. This study suggests that while social media is dramatically changing the ways in which candidates get their messages out, promises of a totally transformed, more egalitarian campaign space may be exaggerated.

Author

• Jacob Turner, University of Notre Dame