Democracy, Populism and the Printed Ballot Discourse: Facebook Content Analysis Through Text Mining and Semantic Networks

Abstract

Social media have been heavily mobilized by the debate over printed ballots (paper trail). This study examines whether discourse in favor of printed ballots, promoted by a set of Facebook users, can be framed as a populist threat against democracy. For that purpose, it advances a theoretical proposition: populism is a threat to democracy when its discourse opposes popular sovereignty to representative liberal mechanisms. The use of text mining and semantic network methods, addressed in utilities and limits, on a corpus including 29,124 posts produced by 6,277 users revealed the predominance of advocacy for printed ballots in a clearly distinctive set of posts. Their discourse is typically populist, including elements such as we-they antagonism, conspiratorial content, values attributed to “the people” and represented by a “we”. Also it is antidemocratic in its challenge to processes and managing bodies of Brazilian democracy, besides its own political opponents. The paper finally highlights the usefulness of text mining and semantic network resources to analyze situations in which actors employ non-institutional forms of interaction to threaten democracy.

paper trail; social media; digital populism; content analysis; democracy