Conversation and Digital Sentiment Recorded during the First Round of the 2022 Costa Rican Electoral Process

Abstract

Social networks have become essential means of communication and have modified the concept of political communication. Social media have nowadays an increasingly important impact on election campaigns worldwide, and, therefore, the latest election processes within the Latin-American context are ideal environments for this analysis, due to both the volatility and the richness of the political-electoral competition, and their capacity to influence the exchange of political information through the different emotions of the audiences. This paper presents a systematized study of the communication that took place in social media during the first round of the 2022 Costa Rican electoral process (February 6th). The information has been collected from the data available at the Digital Media Communication Observatory of the Universidad Latina de Costa Rica, using the social listening tools Minerva Data, Kantar IBOPE Media’s Adspend and Mention, with the objective of revealing the digital conversation trends in this campaign, an unprecedented electoral process with 25 presidential candidates. The reports from the Digital Communication Observatory show the evolution of the electorate’s behavior in terms of interaction, sentiment, topics and voting intention, during the first round of the 2022 electoral process, as well as the general dynamics perceived in the social media and public web environments.