Mnemonic politics among Philippine voters: a social media measurement approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT Nostalgic rhetoric has proven effectiveness among frustrated voters in democratic elections. Studies have introduced various measures for nostalgic sentiment, but the debate remains with regard to finding a suitable instrument. Using a social media approach, we propose a method to identify nostalgic rhetoric and investigate observable patterns, leveraging the Philippine presidential election in May 2022. We conduct text-as-data analysis and investigate sub-national and individual variation in nostalgia for Ferdinand Marcos Sr. Our approach, which combines machine learning and human labelling, identifies a significant share of tweets about Marcos Jr. as having nostalgia for Marcos Sr. Using these nostalgic tweets as a measure for authoritarian nostalgia, we explore regional variation in Marcos nostalgia across Philippines’ provinces and run statistical analysis with existing predictors for Marcos nostalgia. Our analysis shows that voters in provinces with higher support for Rodrigo Duterte in the 2016 election are more likely to post nostalgic tweets. We further explore individual variation and find that individual accounts that express negative assessment of their current status are more likely to use nostalgic rhetoric. Combined results from this paper provide among the first empirical analysis of large-scale data on how voters discuss and distribute nostalgic rhetoric for a former dictatorship.