New leaders, new speeches? Twitter analysis of Andrés Arauz’s electoral campaign in Ecuador (2021)

Abstract

The emergence of social media has come to modify not only the habits of information consumption, but also the political and electoral processes themselves. In this framework, and taking into account the very characteristics of digital information, political speeches have also been affected by having to adapt to new formats. All this, in a context of increasing personalization of politics and, furthermore, in a period in which populist leaderships coexist with other emerging ones. In this paper we carry out an analysis of the speech of the presidential candidate Andrés Arauz on social media (Twitter) during the Ecuadorian elections of 2021with the aim of identifying if it incorporates populist characteristics and what its particularities are. To do this, we app ly a discourse analysis to the corpus formed by all the tweets published by the candidate’s account (@ecuarauz) during the first round of the electoral campaign. In total, 341 tweets are analyzed. The results show that Arauz discourse has no populist traits and that it is characterized by having a sophisticated tone, constructed from three fields: Hope, campaign proposals and political crisis.