The digital behavior of voters in interactions with the social media posts of candidates running for elections

Abstract

The extensive use of digital tools and digital marketing strategies over the last few years has become increasingly more frequent and characteristic in political campaigns Within this scenario, this study aims to investigate the use of SM in contemporary political communication, seeking to understand the features that influence the engagement of voters in posts by politicians on their social media profiles. As a case study, we have focused on the Brazilian presidential election in 2018. The investigation was based on an analysis of politicians’ posts on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook (N = 1319) in the last two weeks before the elections, which investigated features such as functional approach, the Aristotelian rhetoric adopted, and the type of content, among others, and established relationships between these features and user engagement. This study also proposes to investigate the feasibility of using machine learning models to predict the level of engagement of the candidate's posts. Finally, another objective of this paper is to find similarities or differences between the digital campaign strategies, and their impacts on the level of engagement, of the two candidates with the best electoral results. Our main results indicate that the platform with the highest level of engagement was Instagram, together with polarized discourses that presented speeches of attack and defense or emotionally charged topics tended to engage more. Regarding the predictions, the Gradient Boosting model proved to be efficient, R² =0.77, to make the predictions. Regarding the digital campaign strategies, although the two candidates are from opposite political sides, it was possible to find more similarities, such as: functional approach, content structure, and content type, and others...than differences. However the few differences found also represent a valuable result for the understanding of the political landscape, there were divergences for example in Aristotelian rhetoric, content type, and rhetorical device. All these results helped to understand how the electorate interacts with the candidates' speeches in a new era of digital campaigning.