Conmigo o contra mí: análisis de la concordancia y estrategias temáticas del Centro Democrático en Twitter

Abstract

Twitter is a tool increasingly used by politicians to communicate with their followers and to define their main ideological positions. This paper identifies whether the congressmen of the Centro Democratico have a homogeneous agenda in which they identify with their political party, or a heterogeneous agenda, in which they seek to position their image over that of the other members of their party, based on the theory of identity and political personalism. To that end, we used media mining to collect 114,777 tweets from the accounts of Centro Democratico congressmen, which were analyzed quantitatively to test the research hypothesis. The study showed that, as expected from the theory of social identity, the Centro Democratico congressmen have a homogeneous thematic agenda characterized by using an outgroup strategy that identifies President Juan Manuel Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia as the main antagonists and an endo- group strategy that identifies former President Alvaro Uribe and that party as the main figures of collective identification.