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Emotions and engagement in the digital messages of the candidates for the 2019 general elections

Abstract:

In recent years, social networks have become an important communication platform through which candidates promote the political engagement of their constituents. One of the variables that could influence this ability to generate engagement through social networks is the use of messages with a significant emotional charge, both positive and negative. Our research aims to delve into the analysis of this relationship between political engagement and emotions in social networks, through the Sentiment Analysis in the tweets of the main candidates in the general elections of April and November 2019 in Spain. For this we resort to the technique of text extraction and its analysis with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software, relating the level of presence of positive and negative emotions, with the level of engagement reached by the candidates during the electoral campaign. Our analysis helps to demonstrate the existence of a relationship between the emotional charge of the discourse on social networks and the level of engagement it generates, although this seems to be also mediated by the political agenda and the campaign strategy of the parties. We also verify that the relationship between emotional discourse and engagement towards a leader is not exclusively endogenous, but may also be due to exogenous elements due to the presence of shared digital communities.