Political participation in Mexico through twitter

Abstract

We used survey data and collected data from the Online Social Network (OSN) Twitter between October the 5th and November the 9th (time window) to provide an overview related to political participation in Mexico. With the survey data we provided a qualitative assessment of political participation in Mexico by examining electoral participation, levels of political participation between regions, Mexicans’ interest in politics and their sources of political information. With our collected data, we described the intensity of political participation in this OSN, we identified locations of high Twitter activity and identified political movements including agencies behind them. With this information, we compare and contrast political participation in Mexico to its counterpart through Twitter. We show that political participation in Mexico seems to be decreasing. However, according to our preliminary results political participation in Mexico through Twitter seems to be increasing. In this regard, our research points towards the emergence of Twitter as a significant platform in terms of political participation in Mexico. Our study analyses the impact of how different agencies related to social movements can enhance political participation trough Twitter. We show that emergent topics related to political participation in Mexico are important because they could help to explore how politics becomes of public interest. The study also offers some important insights for studying the type of political content that users are more likely to tweet.