Suchergebnisse

Eres quien crees ser: destino compartido y opciones electorales entre votantes latinosAnalistas de la política americana han considerado por mucho tiempo el creciente poder de la población latina en los Estados Unidos como una variable significativa de las elecciones. No obstante, el supuesto de que los latinos comparten perspectivas y comportamientos políticos similares permanece en el mejor de los casos indeterminado con resultados mixtos. En esta investigación, usamos datos originales para probar si el votante latino actúa basado en la perspectiva de que su destino individual está conectado con el destino de su grupo de adscripción racial o étnico o si actúa basado en su propio interés. Ponemos a prueba estas motivaciones/proclividades en dos elecciones. Nuestros hallazgos muestran que la identidad del grupo es un predictor significativo del comportamiento electoral de los latinos.

In this research, we explored how foundational issues can become subtext in political discourse by studying how statehood was debated in social media prior to two plebiscites in Puerto Rico. Historically in Puerto Rico, local parties are divided on this issue instead of along the more common conservative versus liberal division that is found in most parts of the United States. We collected the corpus of Twitter communication by members of Puerto Rico's Legislature for the term of 2017-2021. Using latent topic modeling techniques, we classified the political discussion along party lines. Surprisingly, statehood was not a major topic in our model when using the full corpus of data. However, when we filtered the data to include only those tweets discussing statehood and sub-sampled them by major party, the sub-topics within statehood communication became clear and coherent, as was the partisan divide. Ultimately, while there is a clear division about statehood between the parties, the issue has become so intrinsic to the political sphere in Puerto Rico that it no longer commanded significant attention in the political discourse during this period.

Communication research has extensively addressed the influence of social media on protest. We seek to add to this body of research by examining how sentiment contained in Twitter communication about protest can condition the public reach of this communication. Specifically, we are interested in whether Twitter communication couched in negative sentiments like anger, disgust, and fear will drive this reach more than communication couched in positive sentiment such as trust, joy, and surprise. We rely on sentiment analysis to examine roughly 30,000 tweets surrounding the summer of 2019 Protests in Puerto Rico. These protests centered on a scandal involving former Governor Ricardo Rossello that ultimately led to his resignation. The analysis required adapting an English language sentiment dictionary to Spanish. Our results suggest that protesters frequently tweeted with both positive and negative sentiment when calling for the governor's resignation, but ultimately, those tweets couched in negative sentiment, when compared to those with positive sentiment, had the most reach. That said, those tweets including either positive or negative sentiment had more reach than those absent sentiment.

AbstractObjectivesWe investigate to what extent partisan political candidates in the United States pay attention to different issues in their campaign communication, and whether they systematically deliver messages using different types of sentiment.MethodsWe analyze the 267,538 tweets issued by candidates for the U.S. Congress during the 2018 midterm elections using a combination of latent topic modeling, sentiment analysis, and regression analysis, estimating both issue emphasis and the emotional tone of communications.ResultsWe find that candidates discussed a small number of distinct issues. Sentiment analysis reveals that the emotions used to convey these topics varied considerably more than interparty emphasis. Moreover, we observe that Democrats and Republicans discussed the same topics in very different ways, with Democrats—the out‐party at the time—proving more negative in their messaging.ConclusionsWhen partisans discuss those issues their respective parties "own," there are asymmetries in the emotion they use to communicate about these issues. The concept and measurement of issue ownership are complicated.

Passive online media use refers to the act of merely reading and observing political information on a users' feed. Alternatively, active use refers to the conscious decision to share information, comment, challenge, fact check, or engage in related activity. We argue that these types of social media use have fundamentally different relationships to offline political participation. We use original survey data from Malaysia and the Philippines to test two propositions: (1) active political use, such as online protest or resistance, substitutes for offline protest and (2) passive users who encounter critical information and do not engage in active use will participate in offline protest. Our results confirm these expectations.

We use original survey data from China to examine gender differences in exposure to, and the exchange of, information critical of their respective governments via the Internet and social media. Existing research suggests that men, generally, tend to be more politically engaged than women. We set out to test whether this extended to dissident political engagement in the Chinese context, and if it translated into variation in support for protest across gender, and across political context. Compared to other Asian nations, China has relatively high gender equality. Yet, due to the social, cultural, and political structures in China, we expect that women will be less active online, less likely to consume critical media, and less likely to engage in political dissidence than their male counterparts. We did find that men were more likely to be critically digitally engaged in China. However, we found that while critical digital engagement was positively related to support for protest, this effect was actually stronger for women in China. We offer some speculation regarding these counterintuitive results.