Social media mining, debate and feelings: digital public opinion’s reaction in five presidential elections in Latin America

Abstract

The present article, placed within the epistemological framework of Political Communication, analyses citizens’ reaction to politicians’ messages on the social network Twitter during the presidential elections in Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, Honduras, and Chile, held between 2015 and 2017. Through a script developed for the present research, almost 200,000 tweets have been studied according to the following questions: What are citizens’ emotional reactions to the messages of presidential candidates? Does digital public opinion analysis have a predictive nature from the electoral point of view? As a result, we note the existence of “sympathy currents” and “antipathy currents” on social media, where positive emotions prevail, especially towards candidates on the right side of the ideological spectrum, with progressive politicians generating a higher anger and sadness index than conservative ones. Similarly, emotions on social media largely correlate to the subsequent electoral result.