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Social networks have become essential means of communication and have modified the concept of political communication. Social media have nowadays an increasingly important impact on election campaigns worldwide, and, therefore, the latest election processes within the Latin-American context are ideal environments for this analysis, due to both the volatility and the richness of the political-electoral competition, and their capacity to influence the exchange of political information through the different emotions of the audiences. This paper presents a systematized study of the communication that took place in social media during the first round of the 2022 Costa Rican electoral process (February 6th). The information has been collected from the data available at the Digital Media Communication Observatory of the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica, using the social listening tools Minerva Data, Kantar IBOPE Media's Adspend and Mention, with the objective of revealing the digital conversation trends in this campaign, an unprecedented electoral process with 25 presidential candidates. The reports from the Digital Communication Observatory show the evolution of the electorate's behavior in terms of interaction, sentiment, topics and voting intention, during the first round of the 2022 electoral process, as well as the general dynamics perceived in the social media and public web environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the evolution of the electoral use of Instagram in Spain, from its origins as a political communication channel to its current consolidation. A content analysis of eleven variables is applied to the formal, spatial, personal, thematic-discursive and interactive dimensions of the activity carried out on this social network by the candidates for the presidency of the Spanish Government of the parties that ran with the highest vote expectations in the General Elections of December 2015, June 2016 and April and November 2019 (571 posts). The results show the consolidation of Instagram as a political communication tool and the growing interest of the parties in it, as well as the increasing importance of short videos as a format. The electoral use of this social network is carried out with an increasingly mobilising intention, as evidenced both by the themes chosen and, above all, by the purpose of the publications, the spatial context represented and the hashtags used. The growing characterisation of candidates as leaders of the masses is also evidence of the personalisation of political leadership that occurs in this medium during electoral campaigns. Finally, the phenomenon of polarisation and the presence of populist stylistic traits are also beginning to be noticeable, as reflected in the increase in political issues and negative emotional appeals in the messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the informative coverage of 9 Latin American newspapers on the general election held in Spain on November 10, 2019. This is considered an important event that helped close a turbulent period of the national political life. A content analysis sheet was applied to all texts regarding the campaign appeared between November 1 and 11 (n = 35), considering, among other variables, location, extension, authorship, sources, genres, nature of the content and frame. The results allow concluding that the selected newspapers dedicated a wide space to the November 10 election. Furthermore, media outlet granted part of their coverage an interpretive dimension and offered a vision on the campaign dominated by the strategic and game frames, since they placed the focus on the polls and the possibility of post-electoral agreements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to assess the importance of political communication in the Mexican political culture, this paper probes into the behavior of digital communities in Twitter during the 2018 Mexico's presidential election. Research followed a two staged design. First, a large sample of tweets were collected on a daily basis using the package "rtweet" in the R programming environment. Following that, the collected tweets were filtered, cleaned, and a codebook was designed to analyze their contents. The results show that, out of a sample of 4664 publications, candidate Jose Antonio Meade had the largest number of mentions (47%), followed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador (29%) and Ricardo Anaya (24%). "Common citizens" issued 31% of the tweets analyzed, out of which 20% show links to online news outlets, while journalists and media publications accounted for 40% of the sampled tweets. The authors consider that these results characterize the observed digital communication practices as either transformations or extensions of the offline public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on media coverage of electoral campaigns point to an increasing mediatization. This paper seeks to corroborate whether the trend also takes place in exceptional circumstances, such as those surrounding the regional elections in Catalonia in 2017. The analysis compares the frames observed in six newspapers (El País, El Mundo, La Vanguardia, El Periódico de Catalunya, Punt Avui and Ara) with those adopted by the seven political parties represented in the autonomous parliament (JuntsXCat, ERC, PSC, PP, Ciudadanos, En Comú- Podem and CUP). The results indicate that the symbolic frames characteristic of collective action were dominant in the political discourses, although the media logic once again became hegemonic in global terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The crisis in mass media and the emergence of internet based media have generated mutations in political discourses. In this paper we will focus on the study of one aspect of the digitalization of politics: media interaction. We use tools of socio-semiotics, the mediatization of politics theory and theories of new media. The corpus consists of accounts in Facebook of the candidates for president in the election of 2011 in Argentina. Our hypothesis is that digital politics discursivities involve operations of apropiation of television discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]