Framing strategies of the political discourse in Twitter

Framing strategies of the political discourse in Twitter

This work is part of a project focused on the political discourse in the Twitter campaign of the 2015 Spain General Election. The general election of December 20 2015 in Spain was marked by the emergence of new parties claiming new ways of understanding politics. For these parties the use of social media is a key element of democratic regeneration (Mancera & Pano 2013, Fuchs 2014). Regarding Twitter, it was used as a main tool for political communication by all the parties, even the most traditional ones.

Our corpus comprises the messages sent by the five main parties and candidates, a total of 16,305 texts. Twitter is a very popular microblogging platform for publishing short texts of up to 140 characters.

The approach we follow in this project is based on both articulation (Howarth 2005) and frame semantics (Fillmore 1982, Langacker 1991, Huckin 2002). In these theories special relevance is given to lexical selection and framing strategies. We follow a quantitative/qualitative methodology (Partington et al 2013) where we take as reference both statistics of words related to the topic and the frames they convey.

Results include several research publications and MarcoPolo, a web for visually surfing the frames.

Team members

Manuel Alcántara Plá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Ana Ruiz Sánchez (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Marisol Benito Rey (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)

Vanessa Amessa Martín (independent)

Alejandro Martín Jano (independent)

Funding

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad, programme I+D “EXCELENCIA” (2015-2018), reference FFI2014-53958-P.