Emotional Politics on Facebook. An Exploratory Study of Podemos’ Discourse during the European Election Campaign 2014.

摘要

The results of the European elections 2014 in Spain were characterized by the outstandingrise of a new party, Podemos, which obtained five seats in the European Parliament,despite being founded few months before the elections. The present study analyzes boththe content and the presence of emotions in Podemos’ discourse on Facebook during theEuropean electoral campaign. In particular, the affective content of both the party’s discourseand the comments of its followers will be analyzed through a pragmatic linguisticapproach applied to a corpus of 163 posts and 215 followers’ comments. Results show aninsistence on positive emotions in the party’s discourse and a prevalence of negative emotionsin the comments of the citizens.