Analysis of the digital conversation in elections affected by political violence and insecurity

Abstract

After the political crisis, exacerbated by levels of violence never recorded in the history of Ecuador, President Guillermo Lasso decreed the early termination of the legislative and presidential period, a process known as "Muerte cruzada", to call for early general elections on August 20, 2023. The campaign suffered a breakdown after the assassination of the presidential candidate Fernando Villavicencio, on August 9, 2023. The news, which made headlines on a national and international scale, provoked an intense social conversation on different social networks with an impact on voters given that the level of indecision increased. In this study, an x-ray of that digital conversation was carried out during the following seven days from the turning point that the assassination meant, in order to understand the frames of the conversation and the possible levels of connotation in the context of a topic that it lends itself to polysemy, redundancy and fragmentation. With the data obtained from social networks thanks to Golden Cía.'s Social Scan software, different categories were analyzed such as the number of posts, the size of the audience reached, the percentage of sentiment polarization, complemented with elements such as key terms, emoticons and verbs. The results confirm the impact that that moment had on the campaign by contrasting the topics of conversation with electoral preferences, the relevance of insecurity, the story about the search for culprits and, later, in the framework of the presidential debate, the effect on the relevance of some candidacies over others. The value of digital conversation analysis in understanding the strategic behavior of campaigns is highlighted.