Spanish Politicians Research Articles

Glottopolitics of Prophecy

Abstract This article examines the secular use of prophecy and its appearances in Spain during the 2020 pandemic. It argues that prophecy functions as a cultural and political gesture with prescriptive potential over the future. As a glottopolitical tool (i.e., one that imbricates language and politics), it is contested between elites and subalterns articulating class warfare. Here, prophecy from above is analyzed through the concept of the “new normal,” which allowed Spanish politicians to predefine immediate future and safeguard the integrity of the capitalist system. As an example of prophecy from below, the article analyzes Lengua o muerte, a poetic text by Dani Zelko and the Movimiento por la lengua, which denounces the death of Mohammed Hossein during the pandemic as a case of linguistic discrimination. The author concludes that the discursive undertaking deployed in the book involves prophecy as a strategy of resistance against dispossession and projects a future of inclusion and emancipation.

Humour, politainment and fandom: A semiotic-narrative analysis of unofficial profiles of Spanish politicians

In today’s media landscape, concepts like Americanization and professionalization of politics are evolving, driven by technological advancements and social media usage. The internet has transformed political communication, emphasizing emotional appeal and user response, leading to a rise in politainment and celebrity politicians. This shift towards ‘pop politics’ blurs the line between entertainment and information, with virality and humour playing key roles. This study conducts a semiotic-narrative analysis of unofficial social media profiles of Spanish political representatives, examining their language, content, and usage patterns resembling fan communities. Parodic Twitter profiles of prominent figures like Pedro Sánchez, Yolanda Díaz and Isabel Díaz Ayuso, along with Ada Colau's Instagram account, are analyzed. The findings reveal a trend towards employing politainment strategies to engage social media users, fostering emotional connections akin to non-political fan communities.

‘You are not empowered, you have neither character nor pride’

Abstract This paper aims to unveil the most frequent discursive practices of aggressive language addressed at three female Spanish politicians on X (formerly Twitter) and the themes around which these practices revolve. Isabel Díaz-Ayuso, Irene Montero, and Yolanda Díaz were selected for analysis. A mixed-methods analysis of 1,500 randomly retrieved posts was conducted. Aggressive language aimed at delegitimizing the politicians was manually coded based on existing taxonomies. A data-driven taxonomy was obtained with the most frequently involved themes to assess gender-based representations. Quantitative findings pointed to interindividual differences that were qualitatively analyzed. Aggression towards Yolanda Díaz was conveyed through insults and negative comments questioning her intelligence, physical appearance, and political affiliation. Replies to Isabel Díaz-Ayuso questioned the morality of her decisions regarding social issues. At the same time, Irene Montero received more insults and sexist negative comments focusing on her sexuality and subordination to male figures.

Delineating the discursive (de) legitimation strategies outlined by Spanish politicians in their no-confidence motion speeches

Delineating the discursive (de) legitimation strategies outlined by Spanish politicians in their no-confidence motion speeches

Disinformation in the Spanish public debate: an analysis of political speeches in the Congress of Deputies

Disinformation is one of the main challenges faced by modern democratic societies, becoming a crucial focus of study in political communication. Terms such as lie, falsehood, hoax, disinformation, or post-truth have become part of the daily language of the media, featured in numerous scientific studies, and entered political discourse. With the aim of delving into and determining the characteristic features of Spanish politicians' discourse on disinformation, a methodology of quantitative and qualitative content analysis is applied to a total of 1,115 interventions by members of the Congress of Deputies during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Spain. This period is chosen due to its high levels of disinformation and polarization. The results indicate that the issue of disinformation is a minor topic on the Spanish political agenda. Furthermore, metrics confirm a much higher use of terms such as lie, false, and hoax, to the detriment of other words like disinformation or post-truth. An impact of the pandemic on the main themes related to this phenomenon is also detected, with health and the economy being the primary frames identified. From an interpretative perspective, this is attributed to the tendency of Spanish politicians to use this issue as just one element within a polarizing and confrontational rhetoric, generally eschewing proactive debates on the measures needed to address disinformation.

Analyzing political party positions through multi-language twitter text embeddings.

Traditional monolingual word embedding models transform words into high-dimensional vectors which represent semantics relations between words as relationships between vectors in the high-dimensional space. They serve as productive tools to interpret multifarious aspects of the social world in social science research. Building on the previous research which interprets multifaceted meanings of words by projecting them onto word-level dimensions defined by differences between antonyms, we extend the architecture of establishing word-level cultural dimensions to the sentence level and adopt a Language-agnostic BERT model (LaBSE) to detect position similarities in a multi-language environment. We assess the efficacy of our sentence-level methodology using Twitter data from US politicians, comparing it to the traditional word-level embedding model. We also adopt Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to investigate detailed topics in these tweets and interpret politicians' positions from different angles. In addition, we adopt Twitter data from Spanish politicians and visualize their positions in a multi-language space to analyze position similarities across countries. The results show that our sentence-level methodology outperform traditional word-level model. We also demonstrate that our methodology is effective dealing with fine-sorted themes from the result that political positions towards different topics vary even within the same politicians. Through verification using American and Spanish political datasets, we find that the positioning of American and Spanish politicians on our defined liberal-conservative axis aligns with social common sense, political news, and previous research. Our architecture improves the standard word-level methodology and can be considered as a useful architecture for sentence-level applications in the future.

Испанская конкиста как культурная травма: легитимация травмирующего события в испанской прессе

The article examines the process of legitimation of the conquest in the Spanish mass media political discourse. The study appears to be relevant due to the recent intensification of controversy surrounding the justification of Spanish colonization, as well as the process of delegitimization of this historical event in the Latin American media. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in that it provides an analysis of cultural traumatization and legitimation as interconnected sociological processes that are linguistically represented in the Spanish political media discourse. The study is carried out on the basis of written and oral discourse of Spanish politicians and public figures legitimizing this traumatic event. In the course of the work, it was established that the process of legitimation of the conquest is most clearly manifested at the stage of theorization of the object of legitimation aiming to objectify its adequacy and is implemented through the strategy of moral assessment and the substrategy of analogy: the unpleasant facts of Aztec imperialism are described, there are references to the British, Arab and Dutch conquests, the expediency of which is not questioned by society. Where the Conquest is rationalized with the use of a predictive substrategy and a result-oriented substrategy, there are indicated potential negative consequences of the absence of Spanish conquest as well as the benefits of civilization that appeared in the conquered territory after the arrival of the colonizers. At the promotion stage, a strategy of appeal to authority is implemented – there are presented opinions of authoritative political and public figures and historical figures legitimizing the conquest and denying all accusations as well as the need to apologize to the former colonies. At the stage of final rooting, the conquest becomes a habitual social context.

A meaningless buzzword or a meaningful label? How do Spanish politicians usepopulismoandpopulistaon Twitter?

AbstractWhile there is substantial research on populism and populist discourse, research on discourses about populism is still developing. Scholars highlight the need to understand whypopulismis so widely used and what the rapid spread of this socio-political keyword tells us about political and media discourse. The main objective of this paper is therefore to understand discourses on populism. To this aim, we examine for what purpose the termspopulismandpopulist – henceforthpopulis* – are used and what they allow to do in discourse. Based on the analysis of a corpus of tweets produced by political figures in Spain, we show that, contrary to previous analyses,populis*does not have the sole function of being a randomly used buzzword or of proposing an anti-populist discourse. Indeed, our analysis shows that political actors resort to different patterns of use ofpopulis*depending on their political and communicative strategy.

How Transnational Exchanges Shaped Conceptions about Morality and Small Nations in Europe: Catalan (and Spanish) Readings of Václav Havel in the 1990s

This paper deals with appraisals of Havel made in Spain in the 1990s. During this decade, the Czech politician's popularity reached a peak in Europe, and Spanish politicians approached his vision of morality in politics in different ways, taking advantage of it to support different political and national projects. In the first half of the decade, interpretations of Havel were especially productive in Catalonia, where two almost antagonistic political projects drew inspiration from Havel and elaborated on different concepts of European small nations. The decade's second half gave way to a more one-sided vision of him, in which he was transformed, thanks to the Spanish conservative president José María Aznar, into a reference point to support conservatism and the Atlantic agenda.

Toeing the Party Line: Indexicality and Regional Andalusian Phonetic Features in Political Speech

Performative style is an important sociolinguistic variable among politicians, who accomplish agentive goals through speech. Examining 32 Spanish politicians, this article focuses on four Andalusian Spanish phenomena: the fronting of /t͡ʃ/ and the deletion of coda /s/, resyllabified intervocalic onset /s/, and intervocalic /d/. The analysis first looks at overall community production norms for the variants then turns to examine the style-shifting patterns of one individual who deviates from these norms. This individual is examined through a consideration of lectal focusing in interaction to track moment-by-moment variation. While coda /s/ and intervocalic /d/ deletion show usage patterns governed by regional and contextual factors, the deletion of onset /s/ and fronted /t͡ʃ/ reflect social variation and style-shifting. While politicians do not blindly follow partisan norms, normative expectations exist at the regional level that they can choose to depart from due to individual motivations and political affiliation in order to carry out identity work. This study combines quantitative examinations of community and individual variation to contribute to our understanding of style-shifting behavior in political speech and how politicians use linguistic tools to take on oppositional identities in the public sphere.

Positioning analysis of Spanish politicians through their Twitter posts versus Spanish public opinion

The evolution of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has changed the way we communicate. Access to the Internet and social networks has even changed the way we organise ourselves socially. Despite advances in this field, research on the use of social networks in political discourse and citizens’ perceptions of public policy remains scarce. So, the empirical study of politicians’ discourse on social networks in relation to citizens’ perception of public and fiscal policies according to their political affinity is of particular interest. The aim of the research is, therefore, to analyse positioning, from a dual perspective. Firstly, the study analyses the positioning in the discourse of the communication campaigns posted on social networks of Spain’s most prominent politicians. And secondly, it evaluates whether this positioning is reflected in citizens’ opinions about the public and fiscal policies being implemented in Spain. To this end, a qualitative semantic analysis and a positioning map is performed on a total of 1553 tweets published between 1 June and 31 July 2021 by the leaders of the top ten Spanish political parties. In parallel, a cross-sectional quantitative analysis is carried out, also through positioning analysis, based on the database of the Public Opinion and Fiscal Policy Survey of July 2021 by the Sociological Research Centre (CIS), whose sample is 2849 Spanish citizens. The results show a significant difference in the discourse of political leaders’ social network posts—which is more pronounced between right-wing and left-wing parties—and only some differences in citizens’ perception of public policies according to their political affinity. This work contributes to identifying the differentiation and positioning of the main parties and helps to guide the discourse of their posts.

Influential Spanish Politicians’ Discourse of Climate Change on Twitter: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Study

This piece of research explores language use in a sample of unprecedentedly studied discourse which is that of climate change communication by influential Spanish politicians via Twitter. For that purpose, we created a specialized corpus composed of tweets tackling climate change that were posted by influential Spanish politicians during the past decade. Our aim was to reveal prominent linguistic patterns that are susceptible of conveying a specific worldview (i.e.: the wording of reality) of climate change to Twitter users. Our analysis started with keywords analysis in order to gather quantitative data about the lexical choices deployed in our corpus, then by means of qualitative analysis based on semantic classification of keywords and the examination of their concordances we were able to point out distinctive features of our corpus’ discourse. Our results have revealed the prevalence of specific linguistic patterns, metaphors and frames that contribute to create a narrative of climate change as a villain and the human race, specifically political leaders, as the saviour.

The Personality Divide Between Citizens and Politicians: The Case of the Four Largest Spanish Parties

Abstract Despite the alleged increasing importance given to politicians’ personalities, the similarities and differences between citizens and politicians regarding their personality traits have been insufficiently studied. This research analyses the personality similarities and differences between citizens and politicians in Spain across party allegiances and ideologies. For this, we use two representative surveys for citizens and MPs. Our results show that Spanish politicians are a more homogeneous population—regarding their personality traits—than Spanish citizens, and that Spanish MPs are more sociable and imaginative and less lazy and artistic than the average citizen, which is consistent with a ‘politician’s personality’.

Who Did Spanish Politicians Start Following on Twitter? Homophilic Tendencies among the Political Elite

Political communication has undergone transformations since the advent of digital networks, but do these new platforms promote interactivity and a public sphere with a more democratic political debate or do they function as echo chambers of the elites? In this research, we study the accounts that Spanish politicians started following on Twitter from 2017 to 2020, with the aim of understanding whether they reproduce patterns of homophilic tendencies or if they give space to new voices. To do so, we selected a sample from the deputies that were in the Spanish parliament during the four years of the study and through a big data and machine learning software, we identified the accounts they started following as a network and categorized them. We combined manual and computational data analysis methods and used data visualization techniques to look for patterns and trends. The results suggest that the Spanish political elites exhibit homophilic behaviors in terms of account types and geographic proximity and present a gender balance among the accounts. This study also suggests that the behavior of the political elite presented particularities during the electoral period, where we can observe an intensification of the homophilic patterns.

Self-Regulation of Ethical Behavior: The Case of Political Parties and Parliament in Spain

Spanish politicians have attempted to respond to the growing concern about declining trust in representative institutions through ethical self-regulation and meta-regulation instruments. This article focuses on a study of Parliament and the six major political parties with parliamentary representation. It attempts to explain the reasons for adopting these new regulations and proceeds with an in-depth analysis of the existing rules, oversight, and enforcement methods in Parliament and within party organizations. As a result of European pressure, Spanish Parliament has developed a new code of ethics, but it has not strengthened internal procedures and mechanisms to bring them into compliance with the standing rules. Furthermore, political parties have developed an entire set of basic compliance measures influenced by the law on the criminal liability of legal persons. In both cases, oversight and enforcement are exceedingly weak. None of these measures has improved confidence in politicians in Spain. Two lessons can be learned. First is that without politicians’ commitment, ethical reforms do not work. Secondly, today’s new technologies, linked to a social network society, make window-dressing deception more difficult.

Current metaphoric models in modern Spanish media discourse

In the article, a metaphor as a universal category of thinking, a special cognitive analogy-based operation, and a method of modeling reality, is investigated on journalistic materials of modern Spanish media discourse, the online version of the Spanish newspaper EL MUNDO in particular from the discursive point of view. The use of various types of metaphors by Spanish politicians, which are part of the national-linguistic picture of the world, is examined on the example of media materials concerning the most significant events in the internal life of Spain and international community. Based on the classification by A.P. Chudinov, a semantic and quantitative analysis of metaphorical models in Spanish media discourse is carried out. It is concluded that at the time being Spanish political discourse abounds predominantly in anthropomorphic and sociomorphic metaphors. It was also found that the most frequent is the use of morbial metaphors, which reflect the crisis the Spanish society is undergoing in the pandemic period and its economic, political and social impact on the life of modern Spanish society.

Russians as Seen by Spanyards: Two Embassies of Piotr Potiomkin to Spain (1667—1668 and 1681)

The article deals with one of the aspects of the history of first Russian embassies to Spain, in 1667—1668 and 1681, headed by Piotr Potiomkin, — with the perception of Russia and Russians by Spanish politicians who negotiated with diplomats from Muscovy. This perception is examined in a broad context of the history of both embassies based on an analysis of published and unpublished Spanish sources. The matter of what knowledge and ideas about Russia the Spanish diplomats could rely on when they made decisions on organizing the reception of the embassy, the ceremonial of the royal audience, etc. is being investigated. In this regard, narrative and cartographic sources about Russia available in the Seventeenth Century Spain are examined. It can be traced how the lack of interest in Russian proposals influenced the attitude towards Potemkin and his companions. Some information is provided about the conflicts that arose. Visual sources on the history of the embassy of 1681 are also analyzed.

Using Oralstats for prosodic characterisation of speakers in different discourse genres

This paper presents the prosodic and morphosyntactic analysis of 437 intonational phrases, 2777 words and 12520 phones registered from the speech of four Spanish politicians in four different discourse genres (TV gathering, press conference, political rally and interview). Based on methods from forensic linguistics, sociolinguistics, phonetics and computational linguistics, a set of R scripts called Oralstats has been developed, which allows to carry out a multivariate, dynamic and interactive analysis of acoustic and textual data aligned with PRAAT. By doing so, a new computational approach is suggested for finding individual forensic marks, combining both phonetic and linguistic factors, such as lexical or morphosyntactic values. Data exploration comes from the visualization of prosodic and morphosyntactic variables collected through decision trees, heatmaps and boxplots. The results show how speakers behave in a significantly similar way when it comes to differentiating themselves by genre; however, in confrontational genres some unexpected phonic marks were found, such as low intensity or low pitch, (the expected behavior being the opposite), thus enabling us to single out some of the speakers.

Psychographic traits identification based on political ideology: An author analysis study on Spanish politicians’ tweets posted in 2020

In general, people are usually more reluctant to follow advice and directions from politicians who do not have their ideology. In extreme cases, people can be heavily biased in favour of a political party at the same time that they are in sharp disagreement with others, which may lead to irrational decision making and can put people’s lives at risk by ignoring certain recommendations from the authorities. Therefore, considering political ideology as a psychographic trait can improve political micro-targeting by helping public authorities and local governments to adopt better communication policies during crises. In this work, we explore the reliability of determining psychographic traits concerning political ideology. Our contribution is twofold. On the one hand, we release the PoliCorpus-2020, a dataset composed by Spanish politicians’ tweets posted in 2020. On the other hand, we conduct two authorship analysis tasks with the aforementioned dataset: an author profiling task to extract demographic and psychographic traits, and an authorship attribution task to determine the author of an anonymous text in the political domain. Both experiments are evaluated with several neural network architectures grounded on explainable linguistic features, statistical features, and state-of-the-art transformers. In addition, we test whether the neural network models can be transferred to detect the political ideology of citizens. Our results indicate that the linguistic features are good indicators for identifying fine-grained political affiliation, they boost the performance of neural network models when combined with embedding-based features, and they preserve relevant information when the models are tested with ordinary citizens. Besides, we found that lexical and morphosyntactic features are more effective on author profiling, whereas stylometric features are more effective in authorship attribution.

Bridging the Gap: How Gender Influences Spanish Politicians’ Activity on Twitter

Women have historically been underrepresented in politics. However, in the last few decades, more and more women have been elected to both upper and lower houses, particularly in Spain. Social media has become one >of the main channels for women to gain visibility, but the issue of unequal distribution of power and influence between men and women remains. This paper sheds light on gender differences among politicians on Twitter by analyzing the social media activity and influence of 277 of the 350 Members of the Spanish Congress of Deputies from March to June 2020. Our research shows there are still major gender differences regarding audience figures and amplification and that both male and female politicians still largely retweet more men than women. In addition, we found significant differences between parties and across the political spectrum, although these are less prominent (albeit not neutralized) in parties with a female leader. This is in keeping with studies that have found broad similarities between male and female politicians’ communicative practices, but a persistently large gap to be bridged in terms of their online influence. Female leaders are proposed as a means to bridge this gap.