Is it All About Independence? A Closer Look of Public Discussion in Polarized Elections

Recently in Europe, an increasing number of political parties have flown the self-determination flag in several regions. Moreover, those parties have improved their electoral results at regional, national and European parliament level in the last electoral cycle, polarizing the electoral spectrum among secessionists vs. non-secessionists as the central explanatory cleavage. Some of them have gathered institutional power to celebrate, in particular ways, an independence referendum, as it is the case of Catalonia. This phenomenon poses an electoral scenario of extreme polarization in which inter-block shifts seem impossible but reinforcing eco chambers behavior, as polls have shown. This polarization is being enhanced and fed by political parties, but also by the media who had played a key role on clearly support one position or another. On reinforcing eco-chambers the relevance of social media is being largely studied with mixed results, especially in multiparty systems with high competitive scenarios. In this paper we try to pose that, although candidates and media try to mediate the discussion through the yes/no independence cleavage, there are still other traditional policy issues (employment, welfare, education, trust) that matter for the median voter that will account in the final race. To that end, we use twitter electoral campaign discussion as a proxy to observe, in an unfiltered media channel, to what extent the polarization discussion dominates the debate among the median voter. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are the following: Analyze candidate’s and partie’s behavior online, as well as the debates that took place during the Catalonian campaign; The effect of candidates’ campaign post in twitter on mediatization the debate across the twitter conversation; Analyze the presence of regular topics in the general twitter discussion and its impact. To that end, we tracked the discussion on Twitter of 100k accounts localized in Catalonia who tag a set of policy issues, and the accounts of all the parties running as well as 300 hundred candidates’ accounts. The method design is based on text analysis among other econometric models to validate our hypotheses.