Polarization in Colombia: The Impact of Depolarizing Twitter Messages

• In Event: The New Polarization in Latin America and Its Implications for Democracy

Abstract

Are de-polarizing messages from political candidates on social media effective, and under what conditions? Polarization has become a widespread threat to democracy (Carothers and O’Donohue 2019; McCoy, Rahman, and Somer 2018; McCarty 2019). Extant studies show it decreases trust and tolerance (Hetherington and Rudpolph 2015), while enhancing support for anti-democratic behavior (McCoy, Simonovitz and Littvay 2020).

Although it has not received much attention, polarization has become pervasive in Latin America, where populism–an inherently polarizing phenomena (Urbinati 2019; Roberts 2021)–has been particularly common (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2012; Conniff et al. 2012). Leveraging social media, populist leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, Alvaro Uribe and Andrés Manuel López Obrador have fostered animosity in order to mobilize supporters and win elections. Is there a way to reverse this trend?

This paper seeks to explore this question using the case of two Colombian presidential hopefuls: Gustavo Petro–a populist radical left-wing candidate–and Rodolfo Hernández–a non-radical populist. Following previous studies on the spread of false information (Vosoughi et al. 2018, Guess et al. 2019, Grinberg et al. 2019)), we propose to analyze the length, speed and depth of polarizing and de-polarizing messages related to their accounts on Twitter to better understand the conditions that enhance the distribution of the latter vis-a-vis the former. We will work with twitter data collected between February and May 2022, as the presidential campaign unfolds. Though we expect polarizing messages to spread further, faster and deeper than their de-polarizing counterparts, we hope to draw lessons that will inform the conditions that bolster the spread of messages that counteract the statements of populist political entrepreneurs.

Authors

• Laura Gamboa, University of Utah

• Lisa Zanotti, Diego Portales University

• Sandra Botero, Universidad del Rosario