Twitter’s messages during a governor election: abundance of one-way, top-down and auto-referential communications and scarcity of public dialogue

This paper examined how a public dialogue between citizens and politicians was developed on Twitter within an electoral campaign. This study focused on analyzing the messages that circulated on the Twitter accounts of five candidates that ran for governor in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, in 2012. Twitter is one of the most popular social media platforms in the western democracies and recently has been an important communication channel in the political field, especially in electoral periods. The questions this study investigated includes: What is happening within Twitter in electoral competitions? How are the users communicating with the politicians? What kind of public dialogue can be found in these communication processes? These questions were tackled through qualitative textual analysis of messages that circulated through the Twitter accounts of five Mexican politicians that competed in an electoral campaign. The major finding indicates that there was a scarcity of public dialogue on Twitter during Jalisco’s local campaigns. Nevertheless there was evidence of an incipient public dialogue between candidates and citizens within Twitter interactions