Economic and socio-political views of online participants in online political commentary during the 2014 South African general elections

Abstract

This paper seeks to look at economic and socio-political issues discussed by online participants in online news forums leading to the 2014 South African general elections. A qualitative content analysis was used to analyse viewers' comments about economic and socio-political issues discussed by online participants during the 2014 South African general elections posted online. A corpus of all commentary appended to 2014 South African general election news reports published online by Media24, Times Media Group, Mail and Guardian, Independent Newspapers, Caxton CTP, and TNA Media were selected. The study employed a purposive sampling technique and 1000 comments were extracted. The sample began four weeks before the election and ended two weeks after the event. NVIVO 11 was utilized to code these readers' comments into their respective categories. The findings revealed that participants have different perspectives on different economic and socio-political matters such as slate politics, and cadre deployment, economic meltdown.