Emotions of Candidates on Twitter in the 2023 Seville City Council Election: A Second-Order Campaign?

Abstract

This paper analyses the messages that candidates emitted on the social network Twitter (now called “X”) during the campaign for the 2023 municipal elections in the city of Seville and the emotions they used. This type of electoral process has usually been deemed as second-order elections within multilevel governance political systems, implying that the national arena may affect local dynamics to some degree. Thus, the main research objective is to determine the extent to which elements of nationalisation were used in candidates’ rhetoric, along with the emotional components associated with each political formation during a local campaign somewhat relevant on the state level. A total of 960 tweets were retrieved through R Statistics and the Application Programming Interface of the social network itself. They were then analysed drawing upon the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count programme. The results show that certain elements of nationalisation were indeed used by candidates, in addition to emotional-level differences present in their messages. This accentuates the evident need for further research on municipal elections and campaigns, as well as on their potential distinctive features regarding political jurisdiction.