Search Results (138)

This study investigates the function of hashtags as performative political communication on Instagram during the 2024–2025 U.S. presidential electoral cycle. Through computational web-scraping processes, a dataset of over 300,000 posts (N = 17,750) yielded hashtags that were categorized according to (1) pro-Trump terms and (2) conspiracy-theory terms. Eight hashtags include #blacksfortrump, #donaldtrump, #freemasonic, #illuminatis, #impeachbiden, #latinosfortrump, #MAGA, and #secretsocieties. They are analyzed through negative binomial regression on comment engagement. Results reveal that identity-affirming and partisan condemnation hashtags (#blacksfortrump, #MAGA, #impeachbiden) were associated with higher levels of digital interactions, whereas conspiracy hashtags were associated with lower levels of engagement. Specifically, the hashtags #freemasonic and #illuminatis show negative associations with engagement, while #secretsocieties slightly elevated engagement with pro-Trump anti-elite narratives. These results indicate that not all forms of political communication are equally effective in mobilizing interactions on Instagram. Comment engagement was driven more heavily by identity performance and moralized partisan signaling than by conspiratorial narratives. These findings add to our knowledge on political communication in contemporary digital media environments. Full article

From the Red Shirt heartlands of the North and Northeast to the conservative South and the fragmented middle-class electorate of Bangkok, Thailand’s regional divisions reflect a deeply contested relationship with centralized power. How these divisions shape citizens’ relative trust in local versus central government remains an open empirical question. Drawing on three waves of the Asian Barometer Survey conducted between 2014 and 2022 (pooled N = 3600), this study examines whether territorial location produces differential trust in local relative to central government. The findings are mixed. Regional differences are observable in baseline models, but their explanatory power diminishes once individual-level evaluations of political institutions and economic conditions are taken into account. Rural residents exhibit a smaller trust gap, indicating a weaker relative preference for local over central government, consistent with central welfare transfers sustaining support for the central tier. At the contextual level, higher regional poverty rates are associated with a compression of the trust gap between levels of government. Once poverty is introduced, the overall temporal increase observed by 2022 is no longer statistically significant. Structural economic geography explains much of the aggregate shift. Regional dynamics, however, are not uniform. The Northeast diverges sharply in the final wave, and the pattern holds across model specifications. The shift points to accumulated political alienation rooted in repeated episodes of electoral disenfranchisement. The findings carry direct implications for decentralization policy and territorial development strategy. Where regional trust gaps are driven by fiscal constraints on local government and accumulated political alienation, administrative redesign alone cannot restore citizen confidence in sub-national governance. Full article

This study examines how political public relations strategists perceive and manage the structural tension between the embodied ritual of in-person militancy and the demands of media spectacle in a digitized campaign environment. Although frequently dismissed as obsolete in the era of digital mediatization, the electoral rally embodies a productive paradox: its physical rituality generates precisely the emotional content demanded by television and algorithmic platforms. Guided by the COREQ reporting criteria, a qualitative interpretivist study was conducted based on 19 in-depth semi-structured interviews with Portuguese political consultants and campaign directors, analysed through NVivo-assisted thematic analysis. Three analytical axes were identified: (1) the Paradox of Fabricated Authenticity, whereby media scenography instrumentalizes physical co-presence to generate platform-ready emotion; (2) the Catharsis of the Tribe, whereby the rally functions as a secular liturgy reinforcing militant identity and cohesion; and (3) the Leader as Media Sorcerer, operating a rhetorical duplicity that fuses epideictic communion with deliberative soundbite logic. The findings reveal a broad spectrum of professional perceptions, demonstrating that contemporary PR strategists do not uniformly abandon physical rituals. Instead, they act as “paradox managers”, constantly navigating the structural tension between traditionalist demands for organic militant communion and pragmatic requirements for fabricated digital spectacle. Full article

In Ghana’s political landscape, actors from both ruling and opposition parties deploy a range of linguistic and rhetorical strategies in their pursuit of political power. Prominent among these is political labeling, a discursive practice used to construct favorable self-images while delegitimizing opponents through derogatory and face-threatening expressions. This study examines how political labeling functions as a strategic tool for identity construction and power negotiation in Ghana’s electoral landscape. Situated within the fields of political discourse and communication studies, the study demonstrates how labeling operates simultaneously as a rhetorical and framing device that reflects and reinforces underlying sociopolitical power dynamics. Drawing on empirical data from major Ghanaian news portals, the study adopts an integrated analytical framework combining Framing Theory and the Theory of Impoliteness. It analyzes public labeling directed at three prominent political figures across three election cycles (2016, 2020, and 2024). The findings show that politicians, activists, and their supporters strategically deploy labels to reconstruct rivals’ identities, inflict reputational damage, and provoke ridicule, thereby undermining their perceived competence and public credibility. Focusing on derogatory labels, we argue that political labeling serves primarily to generate emotional responses, shape public perception, and mobilize collective action, ultimately influencing the trajectory of national political discourse. By examining the interplay between language, identity construction, and power, this research offers a nuanced account of how political labeling shapes individual attitudes, group dynamics, and the broader political culture in Ghana. Full article

Objectives: Government surveillance of American Muslims has grown following 9/11, yet little scholarship has analyzed how this activity impacts political participation. We examine racial and ethnic variation in American Muslims’ experiences of state surveillance, as well as the connection between those experiences and voter turnout. Methods: Using a survey of 1000 American Muslims, we identify racial and ethnic patterns in being singled out in airports and by the police. We then analyze how being stopped in these venues shaped turnout behavior in the 2016 presidential election. Results: Black Muslims are more likely to encounter surveillance from the police, while Muslims who identify as Asian report the highest degree of monitoring in airports. We find that police encounters are linked to decreased electoral participation, but being singled out by airport security is not tied to a change in turnout. Conclusions: These findings provide a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of who is impacted by surveillance in the US and how that surveillance shapes American democracy. Full article

Digital media have reshaped electoral communication, yet official campaign websites, owned and strategically controlled media spaces, remain underexamined within hybrid media systems. This study investigates how these websites function in Portugal’s 2026 presidential election, focusing on the tension between participatory affordances and strategic control. A qualitative-dominant comparative content analysis of all eleven candidate websites is conducted using an integrated multi-model framework combining interactivity, web campaigning, functional analysis, digital sophistication, and political framing. The findings reveal a stratified digital landscape in which most websites operate as unidirectional communication hubs prioritizing narrative coherence and mobilization over deliberative interaction. Rather than functioning as democratic equalizers, campaign websites reproduce and amplify pre-existing strategic and organizational asymmetries. A key contribution of the study is the identification of a systematic association between the strength of campaign framing and the level of digital infrastructural investment. The study contributes by conceptualizing campaign websites as central media infrastructures and by reframing digital campaigning as a strategy-driven, rather than technology-driven, process. Full article

Over the past decade, far-right parties have moved from the political margins into the mainstream of several European democracies. This article examines how migration functions not primarily as a demographic driver of electoral change, but as a discursive resource through which democratic boundaries are redefined. Drawing on a qualitative comparative analysis of political speeches, party manifestos, and public debates in selected European countries between 2014 and 2022, the study investigates how migration is constructed as a threat to welfare systems, national cohesion, and liberal-democratic order. The analysis integrates three complementary frameworks of ethno-pluralism, welfare chauvinism, and civic nationalism to demonstrate how exclusion is legitimized through moralized appeals to culture, fairness, and liberal values. Rather than rejecting democracy outright, far-right actors reinterpret concepts such as citizenship, solidarity, and equality in conditional and culturally bounded terms. Migration thus operates as a symbolic condensation of broader anxieties related to globalization, economic insecurity, and political distrust. The findings show how democratic language itself can normalize exclusionary interpretations of membership, contributing to gradual forms of democratic erosion across Europe. Full article

Traditional media have progressively lost electoral centrality, while social media platforms have become key arenas for political communication. Although digital campaigning has been widely studied, limited cross-platform research has examined how social media engagement relates to broader patterns of digital public attention, particularly in Southern European multi-party systems. This study analyses the digital strategies of Portuguese political parties during the 2024 Legislative Elections, drawing on an original dataset of 6251 posts and 8.5 million interactions across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, and TikTok, combined with Google search trends data. The main findings show that ideologically extreme parties generate significantly higher engagement, especially the far-right. However, high engagement does not necessarily translate into broader digital attention. Televised debates remain decisive in structuring peaks of online interest, confirming the persistence of hybrid media dynamics. By integrating cross-platform engagement metrics with search data, this study demonstrates the limits of engagement as a proxy for political attention and electoral impact. Full article

During elections, information manipulation on social media has accelerated the use of artificial intelligence, yet the evidence is difficult to interpret without an integrated view of methods, data, and evaluation. We mapped 557 English-language journal articles from Scopus and Web of Science, combining performance indicators, science mapping, and a focused full-text synthesis of highly cited papers. The literature grows sharply after 2019, peaks in 2025, and shows geographically uneven production, with collaboration structured around a small set of hubs. The thematic structure suggests that, during the pandemic era, infodemic-related research served as a catalyst, intensifying scientific attention to fake news and disinformation and expanding the associated detection and monitoring agendas. In addition, socio-political harm constructs such as hate speech, extremism, and polarization appear as recurrent and structurally central targets, highlighting that election-relevant work often extends beyond veracity assessment toward monitoring discourse risks. Blockchain also emerges as a novel and adjacent integrity theme, aligned with authenticity and provenance-oriented mitigation rather than mainstream detection pipelines. AI for electoral disinformation is not reducible to veracity classification, as influential studies also target automation and coordinated behavior, verification support, diffusion analysis, and estimation frameworks that focus on exposure and impact. Evaluation remains heterogeneous and is often shaped by benchmark settings, making high accuracy values hard to compare and potentially misleading when labeling quality, topic leakage, or context shift are not characterized. Overall, the findings motivate evaluation protocols that align operational objectives with modeling roles and explicitly address robustness to temporal and platform changes, asymmetric error costs during election windows, and representativeness across electoral contexts and languages, while also guiding future work on emerging integrity challenges and governance-relevant deployment settings. Full article

This study proposes a theoretical–empirical framework for analyzing political regimes based on a structural analogy between electoral behavior and spin-glass systems in statistical physics. Society is modeled as a system of interacting agents (voters) influenced by both interpersonal interactions and external factors such as media and institutions, formalized through a social Hamiltonian. By introducing a partition function and free energy, political regimes are interpreted as distinct macroscopic phases governed by four effective macro-parameters: external field, conformism, interaction heterogeneity, and inverse social temperature. Democratic societies correspond to a multistable regime characterized by sensitivity to initial conditions and replica symmetry breaking (RSB), reflecting the coexistence of competing social configurations. Authoritarian regimes, in contrast, arise when a strong unidirectional external field, high conformism, and low effective social temperature stabilize a single dominant macroscopic state, producing a regime analogous to replica symmetry (RS). A central result of the model is the distinction between the predictability of macroscopic outcomes and structural social multistability, as well as between natural and externally imposed homogenization of collective behavior. To illustrate the empirical relevance of the framework, the model is applied to the transition from the Weimar Republic to the National Socialist regime (1919–1933), using aggregated electoral data to construct proxy indicators for the effective parameters governing social interactions. The proposed approach enables structural identification of early signals of authoritarian transition through changes in the parameters of social dynamics. Full article

Individuals on the autism spectrum have been stigmatized as not being expected to engage in certain activities, such as interpersonal interaction and communication, which are related to the capacity to exercise leadership and may have implications for their capacity to effectively function in political roles. In this paper, we profile four politicians (who happen to be state legislators) with autism who have beaten the odds with electoral success. We examine their routes to office, their range of activities, including how they represent autism, and the intersectionalities (in addition to autism) that impact their lives. Full article

Social media platforms have become central arenas for political communication, electoral mobilization, and institutional contestation. This study examines how TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram were used during and after the 2025 Romanian presidential elections to circulate populist, sovereignist, and anti-institutional narratives. Drawing on a mixed-method content analysis of 764 public posts and over 2000 associated comments collected between 1 April and 30 June 2025, the study identifies dominant themes, discursive frames, and forms of user participation across platforms. The findings reveal marked platform-specific differences. TikTok emerges as the primary space for emotionally charged, visually oriented political communication and post-electoral contestation, while Facebook facilitates more argumentative and institution-focused discourse. Instagram plays a marginal role in political communication within the analyzed context. The results further indicate that content challenging the legitimacy of electoral institutions persists beyond the electoral moment and is amplified through coordinated dissemination patterns and interactive forms of participation, including AI-modified visual materials. By integrating thematic, discursive, and participatory analysis in a comparative platform framework, this study contributes to the literature on digital political communication and online populism. It highlights the role of social media platforms as amplifiers of symbolic conflict in democracies undergoing processes of institutional consolidation. Full article

This study evaluates the effectiveness of Jordan’s judiciary in overseeing electoral appeals within the framework of a constitutional monarchy. Adopting a mixed-methods approach, it combines doctrinal legal analysis of key constitutional provisions and Election Law No. 4 of 2022 with a comparative examination of electoral adjudication in Tunisia, Egypt, and Lebanon. The study is further strengthened by a structured content analysis of 120 appellate rulings issued between 2015 and 2023 and by qualitative insights drawn from anonymized interviews with judicial personnel engaged in electoral dispute resolution. Although Jordan’s legal framework formally empowers the judiciary to adjudicate electoral disputes, five structural limitations persist: narrow standing rules, rigid evidentiary thresholds, judicial reluctance to exercise investigatory powers, opaque reasoning in judgments, and the absence of specialized electoral courts. These constraints reflect systemic tensions between formal judicial independence and the realities of constrained discretion in hybrid regimes. An empirical analysis of 127 Jordanian electoral appeal cases from 2013 to 2020 reveals that a mere 7% of disputed electoral outcomes were overturned, whereas 73% of allegations were disregarded due to insufficient evidence. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that only 31% of rulings were publicly accessible, in stark contrast to the 89% accessibility rate observed in Tunisia. By identifying and addressing these systemic limitations, the study contributes to ongoing discourse on institutional reform and democratic resilience. In doing so, it underscores the importance of robust electoral justice mechanisms for sustaining public trust, rule of law, and inclusive governance—principles central to political and institutional sustainability as reflected in Sustainable Development Goal 16. Full article

This study analyzes the political speeches of Brazilian federal representatives from the Liberal Party (PL), the primary platform for Bolsonarism, to identify patterns and features of conspiracy theories. Two core concepts are used: conspiracy theories as a worldview that addresses unpredictability and complexity of life in contemporary society, and Bolsonarism as a fundamentally conspiracist worldview grounded in reactionary authoritarianism and populism. Analyzing speeches delivered between 2019 and 2024, our inductive methodology identified both epistemological (logic) and narrative (rhetoric) elements. These individual elements organically integrated to form a pervasive, overarching conspiracy theory that we term “The Grand Collusion”. This theory was strategically deployed to support electoral campaigns and structure political opposition to the Lula government. “The Grand Collusion” alleges a vast alliance between the top echelons of the Judiciary (led by STF Minister Alexandre de Moraes) and the Brazilian Left (led by Lula), with assistance from major media and multilateral organizations. Its alleged objectives include rigging the 2022 elections and orchestrating the systematic persecution and censorship of Right-wing politicians and conservative citizens. Full article

This study uses natural language processing (NLP) techniques to analyze the political discourse of the surprise presidential candidate, focusing on linguistic patterns, sentiment distribution, and recurring themes. This study addresses the problem of how TikTok virality and algorithmic amplification mechanisms can influence electoral outcomes in Romania, analyzing whether heuristic boosting strategies can distort traditional political paradigms. The text corpus included over 3915 words extracted from the candidate’s speeches, with the most frequent terms being “sovereignty” (271 occurrences), “democracy” (164 occurrences), and “freedom” (80 occurrences). The analysis revealed that 57.8% of the content was neutral, 10% conveyed positive sentiment, and negative sentiment was absent. A word frequency analysis highlighted the candidate’s strategic emphasis on concepts related to national identity and participatory democracy. Sentiment analysis revealed an intentional use of neutral language to maintain balance, with occasional positive terms maintaining confidence and optimism among voters. Full article