Mémoire
| Résumé : | In the age of Twitter, where concise information is consumed and forgotten in an instant, election campaigns follow suit, changing character very quickly. As political parties find themselves in an increasingly instable electoral market with volatile constituencies, the importance of campaigning has increased, which can make them susceptible to go negative. However, there are reasons why one party is more likely than another to attack its opponents. One of the most popular incentives in the academic literature is that parties in opposition are more likely to run negative campaigns than those in government. This paper compares the percentage of negative appeals by conducting a quantitative content analysis of ‘media’ tweets that the Spanish political party Podemos published on the social media site Twitter during the election campaigns for the 10 November 2019 general election and the 4 May 2021 Madrid regional election. The results contradict the incentive and suggest that, at least on Twitter, Podemos was more likely to campaign negatively when in government than when in opposition. |
