Iberica 13
Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216
ISSN: 1139-7241 / e-ISSN: 2340-2784
Abstract
In Spain, politics is often seen as a profession rather than a service, and thus
political discourse should be considered a specialized genre subjected to specific
rules and convention. In the 2010s, a new tendency to campaign in politics was
the use of social networks, allowing the publication of messages in a virtual
environment and the possibility of interacting with other users, Twitter being a
popular network. The purpose of this research is to analyze a corpus of 630
tweets published by four Spanish political leaders in their personal Twitter
accounts, and consequently to describe their communication style in this social
network with the hypothesis that their political views and interests influence
their messages. In order to achieve our aim, this research focused on the analysis
of written text, emoji, multimedia affordances, and hashtags, and how these
elements influenced the politicians’ communication style when dealing with
some relevant topics at the time this study was carried out.
Keywords: written discourse, Spanish politicians, social networks, Twitter,
communication.
Resumen
Los políticos españoles en Twitter: un análisis lingüístico de su discurso escrito
En España, la política suele concebirse como una profesión más que como un
servicio, y, por ello, el discurso político debe interpretarse como un género
especializado que está sometido a una serie de reglas y convenciones específicas.
En la década de los años 2010 surgió una nueva manera de hacer campaña en
política mediante el uso de las redes sociales, las cuales permitían la publicación
de mensajes cortos en un entorno virtual y la posibilidad de interactuar con otros
usuarios. Una de las redes sociales más populares en la esfera política es Twitter.
En este artículo se analiza un corpus de 630 tuits publicados en las cuentas
Spanish politicians in Twitter: A linguistic
analysis of their written discourse
Ricardo Casañ Pitarch
Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain)
ricapi@upv.es
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personales de Twitter de cuatro líderes políticos españoles y se describe su estilo
de comunicación en esta red social, desde la hipótesis de que sus opiniones e
intereses políticos podrían interferir en sus mensajes. Para ello, el presente
trabajo se centra en el análisis de algunas formas de lenguaje, en concreto el texto
escrito, los emojis, diferentes piezas multimedia y los hashtag de sus tuits, y presta
atención al modo en que estos elementos influyen en el estilo de comunicación
que adoptan los políticos al tratar ciertos temas relevantes en el periodo en que
se realizó este estudio. Los resultados de esta investigación sugieren la existencia
de un vínculo entre el discurso adoptado en Twitter y los intereses políticos que
se persiguen. En este sentido, parece que los políticos han de adaptar su estilo de
comunicación en Twitter a su público objetivo, así como a sus propósitos e
intereses políticos, como también sucede en otros contextos no políticos.
Palabras clave: discurso escrito, políticos españoles, redes sociales, Twitter,
comunicación.
1. Introduction
Social networks first appeared at the end of the 1990s, and have been
defined as online virtual environments where users connect to other people
on the site (Boyd & Ellison, 2007; Chen, 2011; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
The purpose of social networks has progressively evolved since their origin,
and in addition to being a network of contacts, they also allow people to
share information, including ideas or personal thoughts (Pegoraro, 2010). In
this sense, Verger, Hermans and Sams (2011) point out that social networks
have changed the relationship between politics and their audience by adding
interactivity, hyper-textuality and multimedia to their written discourse. Since
its foundation, different personalities have been using Twitter as their
channel to communicate with broad audiences and broadcast information.
According to the second quarterly report provided by Twitter in 2018, 335
million people are actively using this social network; users also include
celebrities from areas such as sports, cinema, music, TV, art, literature, and
also politics. From a linguistic perspective, the interest of this paper lies in
the analysis of how Twitter is used by four politicians whose parties are
currently the most representative in the Spanish parliament: Prime Minister
Pedro Sánchez (psoe: partido socialista obrero español), Pablo Iglesias
(podemos), Pablo Casado (pp: partido popular), and Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos).
As an attempt to summarize the current political context in Spain, centre-left
PSoE has formed a left-wing coalition government with left-populist
Podemos, whereas the right-wing parties PP and Ciudadanos are part of the
196
current opposition. In this sense, it should be acknowledged that political
discourse can be considered a specialized genre since it concerns a specific
profession subject to certain rules and conventions, as it happens in
parliamentary debate (gavriely-nuri, 2010; Van dijk, 2005). In the case of
Spain, politics is often seen as a profession rather than a service (Montero,
2007); and these circumstances allow us to consider political discourse a
professional branch. This research aims at analyzing and describing the main
linguistic features of politicians’ written discourse in Twitter and at
discussing how their communication style helps them approach their
audience and consequently pursue their political interests and goals. To this
purpose, it should be acknowledged that, depending on the genre, the
language of politics has certain common rules and its own terminology,
which is constantly evolving, as is also the case in other professional and
academic fields. The specialization of this form of discourse may result from
that technical vocabulary whose use is associated with a specific, well-defined
genre. Consequently, political discourse, like journalistic and literary
discourses, is different from everyday language. This paper analyzes political
discourse conveyed through Twitter, resulting in digital interaction among
professional politicians and large audiences who are not necessarily experts.
Thus, this digital component (Twitter), whose nature is informal in terms of
communication, may give rise to a new hybrid form of specialized discourse.
2. Political discourse and Twitter
Twitter is a microblogging tool launched in 2006. This tool allows users to
share information expressed in a maximum of 280 characters with other
users, and to include multimedia content (initially the limit was 140
characters, which imitated the SMS system in mobile phones at that time, but
this was subsequently increased). Several politicians are currently using this
tool to spread information about political facts, campaigning, self-
promotion, and to state their opinions or to foster transparency within the
political system, among other purposes (Ausserhofer & Maireder, 2013).
Although tweets are a non-specialized textual genre, their use as a
professional tool has recently become widespread among politicians in their
campaigns as well as in their daily social interaction, with the aim of
maintaining or enhancing their public image and reputation (Chun, Shulman,
Sandoval & Hovy, 2010; Coliander, Marder, Falkmane, Madestam, Modig &
Sagfossen, 2017; Sams & Park, 2014). In addition, this network also allows
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interaction among users, both public and private, and enables people to
“quickly react to current events and gauge interest in and support for their
actions” (Johnson, Jin & goldwasser, 2017: 741). As a result, Twitter, as well
as other forms of social media, seems to have changed political
communication worldwide (Jungherr, 2014), and it has become one of the
political genres used professionally by politicians doing campaigns (graham,
Broersma, Hazelhoff & Van’t Haar, 2013). gallardo-Pauls and Enguix-
oliver (2016) suggested that this change began in 2008 during the national
elections in the US, when obama used social media widely. In this case, these
authors explained that the purpose of this software tool was to amplify the
impact of the messages delivered by involving the audience actively in a
discussion. The result was a breakthrough that changed discourse forms and
the way of doing political campaigns.
Prior to our research, some previous studies on how politicians and political
parties use social networks were identified. Rauchfleisch and Metag (2015)
analyzed the use of Twitter in political communication in Switzerland; in
their case, the study focused on explaining the shift from equalization
towards normalization with the diffusion of some political information
within this social network. Similarly, graham, Broersma, Hazelhoff and
Van’t Haar (2013) analyzed the information posted by the politicians in
Twitter and how they interacted with their followers. other examples include
those provided by Zappavigna (2011), who examined the use of evaluative
language to affiliate in tweets, and Mancera and Pano (2015), who analyzed
the syntactic and discursive properties of a corpus of hashtags extracted
from the tweets of different politicians in Spain. More recently, Alcántara-
Plá and Ruiz-Sánchez (2018) published a book chapter in which they
discussed the 2015 election campaign in Spain and the role of Twitter. In
their research, they analyzed 16,300 messages published in Twitter by the five
most popular parties and their candidates in a period of two weeks. They
found that the analysis of their corpus required not only a linguistic study,
but also a need to analyze text from a multimodal perspective, which also
included multimedia content such as video, audio and links to other websites
as well as the use of emoji. From this perspective, this is a reason to justify
the view that political discourse has changed thanks to the widespread use of
social networks, in this case Twitter.
As explained in the introduction, the purpose of this research is to analyze
and describe some linguistic features of the written discourse of four
Spanish politicians in Twitter. To this purpose, this research focuses on the
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analysis of the length of their tweets in terms of characters, words, and
sentences, the use of non-linguistic forms such as multimedia, hashtags, or
emoji, and their interest in certain topics. In this sense, some authors have
commented how these elements and linguistic features can influence
communication.
Regarding the effects of language style on communication, different
discourse forms can have certain reactions on the audience; in this sense,
Heylighen and dewaele (1999) suggested that various features mark the
difference between formal and informal language. on the one hand, formal
elements are more cognitively demanding than informal ones, and
consequently they are also more restrictive to audiences with lower cognitive
skills, although there are fewer chances to misinterpret those messages. on
the other hand, informal elements presented for being high cognitively
demanding remain more ambiguous and subjective, giving the audience an
opportunity to take their own interpretations, either favoring or disfavoring
the communicator’s message. For example, djafarova (2008) suggested that
audiences are more attracted by brief messages; in this sense, short sentences
are far more effective than those ones built with more words than necessary.
In previous research, Casañ-Pitarch (2018) found that the American Prime
Minister donald Trump used shorter sentences in his oral discourse (mean:
11.58) in comparison to his predecessor ex-Prime Minister Barack obama
(mean: 21.58); in this case, Mr. Trump was clearly addressing part of his
campaign to working classes suffering from job insecurity. Furthermore, if
the word order is the standard (S+V+o/C), the information is conveyed
more fluently and the message is clearer to the audience than if the standard
order is altered; simple language increases the possibilities of being
understood (djafarova, 2008). As explained, Twitter is a microblogging tool
with limited characters, but still it seems that the length of the messages and
their sentences could have some effects on their audiences.
Furthermore, the use of rhetorical questions also seems to be relevant in
political discourse. nguyen (2010) suggested that rhetorical questions are
used to persuade the audience by appealing to the addressee’s emotions.
Similarly, Lisowska (2017) explained that rhetorical questions in political
discourse are usually introduced with the aim of appealing the public.
Statements in the form of questions are used to make a point rather than to
eliciting an answer. In addition, by delivering a rhetorical question, the
speaker approaches the audience, who is indirectly invited to think and
reflect. This strategy helps speakers convince readers with their own
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arguments, by presupposing that their reflections are common sense. wong
and yap (2015) went further and classified the major functions of rhetorical
questions into four categories: persuasion, self-promotion, challenge, and
doubt-inducing. These categories can help us understand the different
purposes of politicians when they deliver a question in Twitter, as suggested
by gallardo-Pauls and Enguix-oliver (2016).
Concerning other forms of communication, Twitter is characterized by
some specific tools and features. In this sense, this social network allows
attaching multimedia to texts, permits the use of emoji, and the signs #
(hashtag) and @ are used for particular purposes. The first of these
elements, multimedia, is used to incorporate videos, images, or links to
written texts. In other words, written discourse in Twitter can be combined
with aural and visual media, and it offers hyper-textuality, which enable users
to freely move around large amounts of information which are
interconnected with links. The result of sharing videos with the audience is
that they can promote their image and somehow build brands or personality
cults (Balakhonskaya, Zhuravleva, gladchenko & Beresneva, 2018; Hwang,
2012; Millan & Ball, 2010); as result, this could reinforce their position as
party leaders as it does with corporate entities (weber, 2019). Regarding the
idea of the personality cult, Paltiel (1983) introduces some examples of this
practice during the Leninist Regime, a widespread practice in other eras and
places such as Franco in Spain or Mao Zedong in China, or more recently
with the image of obama in the media and his popular motto “yes we can”.
In addition to multimedia, texts in Twitter can also be accompanied by emoji,
which convey feelings and emotions and consequently provide the text with
an extended meaning (Vergeer, 2015). Stark and Crawford (2015) referred to
the use of smiles as a capitalist tool in the media since the 1960s; their aim
was to create social bonds by sharing a positive attitude. In the case of emoji,
they “help people in digital environments cope emotionally with the
experience of building and maintaining social ties within hierarchical
technological platforms and unjust economic systems that operate far
outside of their control” (Crawford, 2015: 8). Thus, emoji offer a way of
‘humanizing’ written discourse, making it more informal in an attempt to
approach the audience with emotions. Finally, hashtags are in-text keywords
introduced by the sign # and used to find similar information by clicking on
them. According to Bud (2013), hashtags can lead to discussions on a given
topic; and consequently, they help popularize and spread messages among
the audience as well as strengthening their information. Similarly, the sign @
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is used to mention a user’s account, which can also lead to increasing the
impact and diffusion of messages. It should be acknowledged that all these
forms are better understood and more often used by the youngest people,
since they have grown up with them, and this contrasts with their more
limited use by many older people (Jaeger, Xia, Lee, Hunter, Beresford &
Ares, 2018; Prada, Rodrigues, garrido, Lopes, Cavalheiro & gaspar, 2018).
For the aim of this research, the understanding of certain topics should be
reviewed together of campaigning and opposition strategies among
politicians in Twitter. To this purpose, the first issue that should be studied
is how right and left-wing parties conceive the concept of welfare and how
they handle it. In words of Spicker (2014), there are some general differences
between left and right-wing parties. According to this author, the left-wing
support social and institutional welfare, public provision, minority or
endangered groups, and collectivism; in the same way, he suggests that the
right-wing parties are individualistic, against welfare and public provision,
and support their residual welfare. In this sense, it seems that whereas the
left-wing tend to defend welfare from a social perspective which promotes
equality and public services, the right-wing defend individual rights based on
social orders and hierarchy, and focus on the economic power of individuals
in a capitalist society (Berlet & Lyons, 2018). Thus, it seems that, for the
right-wing, individual welfare is connected to economy factors (Barth,
Finseraas & Moene, 2015; Besley, 2016), whereas left-wing parties support
collectivism and social welfare (Aron, 2017; Jones, 2018). Thus, it seems
consequent that the left-wing will defend sensitive issues such as feminism
and racial equality, among others, or at least they will not react or show
attitudes against them (Funk, 2016). on the contrary, the right-wing might
look indifferent towards these issues, or show opposition against them;
instead, they may support measures that promote privatization of public
services or enhance individuals’ rights in the free market economy (Merkl &
weinberg, 2014; Saltman, 2015).
In addition to the concept of welfare, the strategies among politicians in
Twitter to conduct campaigns and perform opposition should also be
reviewed. Conway, Kenski, and wang (2015: 365) appointed Twitter as a
“new avenue for influence”. They justified it by stating that Social networks
serve a similar purpose to websites and blogs, which have been previously
used for the same goal. As has been previously suggested, Twitter allows
interactions among users (Verger, Hermans & Sams, 2011), and this can be
somehow advantageous since it can be a sign of proximity to their
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supporters. In addition, Twitter is an open global environment likely to
receive more visitors than websites and blogs, which visitors access
intentionally rather than finding information by chance or in the news board,
as it happens with social networks (Towner & dulio, 2012). In this sense,
Enli and Skogerbø (2013: 759) explained that social media constitute a useful
context for campaigning since they allow candidates to approach voters and
“market their candidacies, mobilize voters for the upcoming election, discuss
politics or a combination”. For the second aim, opposing other parties can
also be understood as a means of campaigning (graber & dunaway, 2017).
In this case, politicians tend to criticize and attack their political opponents.
According to López-Meri, Marcos-garcía and Casero-Ripollés (2017), this
function is especially used in Twitter by the parties in the opposition to
criticize and discredit other leaders or the current government. These
researchers analyzed the same context one year before the present study, and
they found that the leader of the opposition parties addressed a higher
percentage of their tweets to criticism compared to the right-wing Spanish
Prime Minister Rajoy.
3. Method
This study aims at analyzing and describing the main linguistic features
found in tweets sent by four leaders of the most representative Spanish
parties in their personal Twitter accounts, as well as discussing how their
communication styles influence their attempts to approach their audiences
and fulfill some of their political goals. To this purpose, our corpus contains
the tweets of the four politicians in a period of 27 days, from 15 September
2018 to 11 october 2018. The total amount of tweets analyzed was 630. The
period of 27 days was chosen because this was the time the current Spanish
Prime Minister needed to post 100 tweets. Then, the tweets from the other
politicians needed to be set in the same period of time so they were equally
contextualized.
In order to achieve the objectives of this research, this study focuses on the
quantification of language forms, and a qualitative analysis of their
communication regarding some current relevant topics. The first part of this
analysis includes a compilation and quantification of tweets, characters (with
spaces), words, and sentences, questions and exclamations, multimedia,
hashtags (#), mentions (@), and emoji. The second part of this study
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focuses on analyzing qualitatively how these politicians deal with welfare,
campaigning and opposition, and the nationalist and feminist movements in
Spain. The choice of these topics was based on their frequency, considering
the three most usual ones in the account of each politician, so their
communication strategies can be compared among themselves. Regarding
software, Antconc has been used in this research to quantify the amount of
sentences and words, and to identify the most frequent words.
4. Results
The first part of this study focuses on determining how frequent the four
politicians use Twitter. As can be observed in the following table, Casado and
Iglesias are the ones who use Twitter most often, whereas Prime Minister
Sánchez is the one using this tool the least. Concerning direct tweets, Casado
is clearly the most engaged in Twitter among the four; in fact, he is using it
137.30% more often than the Prime Minister and between 54.85% and
69.17% more than the other two politicians, Casado and Iglesias respectively.
Regarding retweets, Iglesias is the leader in this rank, in which Prime Minister
Sánchez is also the last.
In addition, this study also concerns the quantification of language forms.
The table below shows the length of the politicians’ tweets in terms of
characters, words and sentences. In the case of characters per tweet, the
amount used among them is similar except with Rivera, who clearly
introduced fewer than the rest. Regarding the amount of words per tweet,
the representatives of the oldest parties used more words per sentence than
the newbies. For example, Casado introduced a mean of 40 words in each
tweet, and a fact contrasted with Rivera, who only wrote 34.05. The percent
variation between these two was 17.47%. Then, it was also observed that the
left-wing used fewer words than the right-wing; in this case, Iglesias used
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I
Tweets Retweets Tweets + Retweets
Tweets/Day
(Tw/27)
Retweets/Day
(Tw/27)
Total Tw.
Daily
Pedro Sánchez 100 71 171 3.70 2.63 6.33
Pablo Iglesias 153 161 314 5.67 5.96 11.63
Pablo Casado 237 77 314 8.78 2.85 11.63
Albert Rivera 140 86 226 5.19 3.19 8.37
Table 1. Interactions on Twitter: 15/09/2018-11/10/2018.
10.61 words per sentence, whereas Casado used 17.17, being this percent
variation 61.83%. At last, regarding sentences per tweet, Iglesias used more
sentences in contrast to Rivera, the percentage variation between these two
politicians was 54.49%.
next, table 3 shows some features as to how the four politicians use Twitter.
These features refer to the use of questions, exclamations, hashtags, mentions,
emoji, and multimedia. As can be observed, the Prime Minister does not
deliver questions in his Twitter account, whereas the other politicians do.
These questions tend to be addressed to the Prime Minister or other parties;
in this sense, Casado and Rivera addressed most of their questions to Prime
Minister Sánchez and they were related to the Catalonian secessionist crisis.
Some examples are “Mr. Sánchez, why did you move coup-leader prisoners to
Catalonia and why are you considering possible pardon?” or “where is Pedro
Sánchez in a moment of chaos and violence sown by secessionist in
Catalonia?” In the case of Iglesias, he often uses rhetorical questions to
promote critical thinking among the audience and against political and juridical
corruption. Some examples are “who does not want to protect nature?” or
“which is the limit of power company’s greed?” Regarding the use of emoji,
the newcomers Iglesias and Rivera were the leaders. The former used a wide
range of emoji, and his choice was associated to the content of the tweet,
whereas the latter also used emoji forms related to the content of his tweets
but it was significant that flags, mainly the Spanish one, were used in 21 tweets.
Last, the use of multimedia should also be commented. As can be observed,
these politicians tend to attach videos, images and links to their tweets
(retweets have been excluded). Results show that the Prime Minister was the
one who used the fewest resources, whereas Casado used the most. In the case
of the PP leader, he was the main focal point of the image or video in most of
his tweets (94.51%). The other politicians also tended to be the focal point of
their images and videos, but percentages were lower: Prime Minister Sánchez
(62.32%), Rivera (38.52%), and Iglesias (20.47%).
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Characters with Spaces Words Sentences
Characters/
Tweet
Words/
Tweet
Words/
Sentence
Sentences/
Tweet
Pedro Sánchez 25,344 3,826 296 253.44 38.26 12.93 2.96
Pablo Iglesias 38,021 5,505 519 248.50 35.98 10.61 3.39
Pablo Casado 59,801 9,480 552 252.32 40.00 17.17 2.33
Albert Rivera 30,015 4,767 307 214.39 34.05 15.53 2.19
Table 2. Language forms: characters, words, sentences.
The second part of the research focused on analyzing qualitatively how these
politicians deal with certain relevant topics in Spain, such as welfare,
campaigning, and the nationalist and feminist movements. As shown in the
following table, there are some noticeable differences among the four
parties. To start with, both left-wing politicians seemed to be more interested
in social welfare than the right-wing rivals. In this respect, Casado was more
interested in the people’s economic welfare, whereas Mr. Rivera did not
publish much information on this topic. In table 4, some terms on social
welfare issues were identified; for example, Prime Minister Sánchez used
nouns such as compromiso (commitment, 0.42%), derecho (right, 0.31%), apoyo
(support, 0.26%). with the same purpose, Iglesias frequently used the terms
gente/personas/ciudadanos (0.65%), derecho (right, 0.38%), trabajo (job/work,
0.24%) or vida (life, 0.24%). Among the top ten most used words by the
right-wing participants, Casado used the word apoyo (support, 0.28%),
whereas Rivera used derecho (right, 0.34%).
Concerning political campaigns in Twitter, it has been observed that the two
left-wing political leaders have similar percentages in terms of political
propaganda, and the same happens with the two right-wing candidates,
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? ! # @ !! Multim. ?/Tw !/Tw #/Tw @/Tw !! /Tw
Multim./
Tweet
Pedro Sánchez 0 16 202 39 16 69 0.00 0.16 2.02 0.39 0.16 0.69
Pablo Iglesias 11 16 37 72 73 127 0.07 0.10 0.24 0.47 0.48 0.83
Pablo Casado 22 0 129 124 5 237 0.09 0.00 0.54 0.52 0.02 1.00
Albert Rivera 7 20 69 54 54 135 0.05 0.14 0.49 0.39 0.39 0.96
Table 3. Other forms: questions, exclamations, hashtags, mentions, emoji, and multimedia.
Pedro Sánchez Pablo Iglesias Pablo Casado Albert Rivera
Welfare
Social 29% 24.84% 3.38% 1.43%
Economy 6% 8.50% 13.08% 0.71%
Campaigning
Propaganda 42% 41.18% 34.60% 32.86%
Opposition 1% 4.58% 17.72% 22.14%
Feminist Movement 20% 3.27% 0.84% 0.71%
Nationalist Movement 4% 0.65% 29.96% 41.43%
Others 2% 2.61% 0.42% 0.71%
Table 4. Main topics.
despite the fact that first group tweeted more propaganda than the second
one. However, these groups vary a great deal when it comes to oppose the
other parties. In this case, the complaints to the opponents were more
frequent in the right wing than the left. Regarding campaigning, the four
parties used the word gobierno (government), estado (state), país (country), and
españa/españoles (Spain/Spaniards) quite often. whereas the left-wing parties
mostly used them to refer to their positions in government, the right-wing
introduced these terms to attack and make opposition. In these cases, the
right-wing parties frequently named the Prime Minister sánchez (Casado:
0.37%, Rivera: 0.90%), or created the word sanchismo with a sense of
imposition from the Prime Minister (Rivera: 0.02%). They also addressed the
government with the word estado (state, Casado: 0.25%, Rivera: 0.36%); and
Casado regularly called for elecciones (elections, 0.23%).
Lastly, both parties showed a great concern towards certain social
movements, such as the nationalist crisis in Spain and feminism. In the case
of Rivera, nationalism was especially relevant among his tweets (41.43%).
on the contrary, the left-wing parties did not seem to pay the same degree
of attention to this crisis, and in the case of Iglesias, he only tweeted about
this issue once. Rivera and Casado seemed to be the most sensitive towards
this topic and they regularly used the noun words Cataluña/Catalanes
(Catalonia/Catalans, Casado: 0.43%, Rivera: 0.44%). Rivera used other
words such as separatistas/separatismo (separatist/separatism 0.57%), the
Catalan Prime Minister Torrà (0.42%), or ley (law, 0.38%) and democracia
(democracy, 0.38%). In addition, they also mentioned artículo 155 (Casado:
0.21%, Rivera: 0.06%), which is an article in the Spanish constitution that
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Sánchez % Iglesias % Casado % Rivera %
Gobierno* (25) 0.65 Gobierno* (26) 0.47 Españ* (107) 1.13 Españ* (67) 1.41
Mujer* (24) 0.63 Españ* (22) 0.40 Gobierno* (70) 0.74 Sánchez (42) + Sanchismo (2) = 44 0.92
Españ* (20) 0.52 Gente (13) + Persona* (9) = 22 0.40 Cataluña (41) 0.43 Separatis* (27) 0.57
Igualdad (18) 0.47 Derecho* (21) 0.38 Sánchez (35) 0.37 Catal* (21) 0.44
Comprom* (16) 0.42 Polític* (18) 0.33 Apoy* (27) 0.28 Torrá (20) 0.42
Derecho* (12) 0.31 Presupuesto* (16) 0.29 Nacional (25) 0.26 Gobierno* (20) 0.42
País (10) -es (2) 0.31 Euros (14) 0.25 Estado (24) 0.25 Ley* (18) 0.38
Estado* (11) 0.29 Ciudadan* (14) 0.25 Elecciones (22) 0.23 Democra* (18) 0.38
Apoy* (10) 0.26 Trabajo* (13) 0.24 Educación (19) 0.20 Estado* (17) 0.36
Cariño* (8) 0.21 Vida* (13) 0.24 Prime Ministere* (19) 0.20 Derecho (16) 0.34
Table 5. Most frequent noun words.
allows the government to intervene politically and militarily in any region
that promotes territorial secessionism. As to the feminist movement, Prime
Minister Sánchez was significantly more supporting towards the feminist
movement than his government supporter, Iglesias, and much more than the
right-wing politicians in this study. The most usual words tweeted by the
Prime Minister were mujer (woman, 0.63%), and igualdad (equality, 0.47%),
whereas the word cariño (love/affection, 0.21%) was mostly used to give
condolences to female victims of domestic violence.
5. Discussion
As these results illustrate, Twitter seems to provide some information about
politicians’ communication styles. The connection of these results will be
discussed in this section with the aim of describing some significant
linguistic features of their written discourse through this social network, and
how their strategies and styles help them achieve their political goals.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez is in the privileged position that the other
politicians strive achieve in the next elections, if not earlier. He aspires to
maintain his Prime Ministerial seat in the government; and thus, his strategies
and objectives may differ from those of the other candidates. It should be
noticed that he is the politician who tweets the least among the four leaders,
and maybe this could be related to the fact that he does not need to promote
himself through social networks as much as the others since he is the main
focus of attention for the national media. In addition, his language also
seems to be cautious and he avoids starting discussion with controversial
issues such as the Catalan secessionist crisis. Instead, the Prime Minister
makes his own propaganda, which includes supporting current sensitive
issues such as the feminist movement. This connects with the idea of Funk
(2016), who suggested that left-wing parties support social causes and they
never react against them. In fact, he is the one among the four politicians
who has paid the most attention to feminism. This seems to be a strategy to
obtain female votes, especially considering that the magnitude of this
movement and society’s awareness has significantly increased in recent years.
As appointed by Spicker (2014), left-wing parties tend to support social
welfare in terms of collectivism and helping minority or endangered groups.
with reference to his language, Prime Minister Sánchez has used
approximately 3 sentences in each tweet, and they tend to be relatively
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Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216 207
shorter in comparison with those of the right-wing opponents. This results
in direct messages which are less cognitively demanding; as explained by
djafarova (2008), audiences are more attracted by short sentences and they
are easier to be understood. In other words, by using plain language, Sánchez
seems to focus on people with basic education rather than on those with an
advanced level, who are used to receiving more cognitively demanding
messages, as suggested by Heylighen and dewaele (1999). This fact does not
necessarily imply that voters with right or left-wing ideologies have inferior
or superior cognitive skills, but that these groups can be approached with
some specific language forms; for example, the right-wing American
President donald Trump also used shorter sentences in his campaign in
order to approach individuals with lower cognitive skills (Casañ-Pitarch,
2018). next, Pedro Sánchez also seems to be quite neutral, neither too
formal nor too informal. In addition, his political party is one of the two
most traditional ones in Spain, and although they are tagged as progressive,
he could be chained to maintaining certain language manners and formality
in Twitter in order to keep certain proximity with their older voters.
However, it may be acknowledged that this formality does not seem to
prevent him from using emoji forms, which add emotion and they approach
the young and the middle aged. As suggested by Stark and Crawford (2015),
emoji can help establish social bonds by sharing a positive attitude. Among
other features of his language, the current Spanish Prime Minister seems to
have a relaxed neutral tone, which in general addresses to left-wing
supporters, especially women and working class people of all ages.
Iglesias is currently giving support to Prime Minister Sánchez in the Spanish
government. His political views are more left-wing than the current Spanish
Prime Minister and some opponents have even tagged him as a radical. His
main propaganda seems to be twofold: on the one hand, it concerns his fight
against corruption, elitism, and right-wing parties and, on the other, he aims
at offering more social benefits to middle and low classes as well as
promoting social equality, as it is expected from a left-wing parties (Aron,
2017; Jones, 2018). In this sense, he mainly promotes social welfare, but also
focuses on the economy and industrial development. His tweets do not tend
to attack the other parties, but a few examples of opposition towards PSoE
and the right-wing have been found. So, this seems to be a sign that he is not
taking side with anyone, although he can either support or attack other
parties. Regarding his views on the feminist and Catalan movements, it
seems that he wants to avoid entering into conflict with certain topics, and
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has not tweeted about them very often (Spicker, 2014). The reason can be
that his opinion would be definitely magnified by the media and affect his
propaganda. Concerning his language, his tweets contained more sentences
(3-4) than the other parties, but they were the shortest. This could be
interpreted as a sign to make his messages less cognitively demanding and
easier to remember. This idea is supported by djafarova (2008), and Iglesias
and Sánchez seem to follow the same principle with the aim of targeting
voters with less cognitive skills. He also seems a closer politician with the use
of emoji, which help transfer emotions through his messages (Vergeer,
2015). These facts clearly imply that he is addressing his messages to the
lower socioeconomic levels within society, and especially to younger people
concerned with job insecurity.
Pablo Casado’s party has historically been the main opposition to PSoE, being
conservative and right-wing. In 2018, The PP party was involved in an
institutional crisis after receiving a vote of no confidence, and consequently
they lost the presidency in the government. Since then, it seems that some
conservative voters decided to find alternatives and some of them choose
Ciudadanos, which is also right-wing but more progressive in aspects like
religion. As a response to this crisis, the new leader should promote
regeneration within the party, and at the same time it seems that he also
keeps certain parallelism with their counterpart in Ciudadanos, although this
fact cannot be confirmed. However, Casado does not seem to be supported
by all his party members; and thus, it is likely that he needs to show that he
can be a solid and strong leader. Consequently, the need for both internal and
external political propaganda could justify why he is the leader who has
posted most tweets in the same period, as an attempt to reinforce his image
as leader and enhance his party reputation (weber, 2019). Furthermore, he
always accompanies his texts with multimedia as photos and videos in which
he appears as the main protagonist in his photos and videos. As appointed
by some authors (Balakhonskaya et al., 2018; Hwang, 2012; Millan & Ball,
2010), it seems that he needs to promote his image with the purpose of
maintaining his position as a good party leader with cult to his personality, a
strategy that has been used in the past by other historical leaders (Hammond
et al., 2017; Paltiel, 1983). As for his main focus as political leader, his
understanding of welfare seems to relate to the economy rather than social
rights and benefits, as it is expected in right-wing leaders (Berlet & Lyons,
2018). Casado is also concerned with the nationalist movement; and he
devotes a great number of tweets to this issue. This political strategy could
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Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216 209
be an attempt to recover the confidence of some of his dissatisfied voters in
Catalonia, the region where the party Ciudadanos was founded and is most
popular. Finally, he constantly opposes the leader of the current government
with different arguments, being corruption one of the main topics. In fact,
his party lost control of the government due to its presumed corruption, and
he seems to counterattack Prime Minister Sánchez with the same topic. As
suggested by López-Meri et al. (2017), this strategy is usual among the
parties in the opposition to criticize and discredit the current Prime Minister
and his government. Concerning his language style, the PP leader is the one
who writes the longest tweets and sentences among the four leaders. This
contrasts with the style of Prime Minister Sánchez and Iglesias; thus, it
seems that this style is addressed to people with better cognitive skills, and
this tend to be found more often in people with advanced education than in
those with basic one (Heylighen & dewaele, 1999). His language is rather
formal and avoids exclamation marks or emoji forms. This formal language
register seems to be suitable to communicate with his elderly conservative
audience (Jaeger et al., 2018; Prada et al., 2018), but his young physical
appearance (39) could also be an attempt to attract younger and middle-aged
people.
Initially, Ciudadanos tagged itself as a center-left-wing party. However, it
seems that as time passed by their political interests and views have clearly
changed towards the right-wing. It also seems that the aim of this party is to
confront the Catalan secessionist movement. According to the information
and data collected from his tweets, it seems obvious that his target audience
is twofold: non-secessionist Catalan people, and dissatisfied right-wing
voters, mainly from Casado’s PP. As can be observed, there are three main
topics that he covers in Twitter, and the main one concerns his opposition
to Catalan secessionism. Then, he is continuously attacking the current
government with the aim of complaining as for its soft attitude against
secessionism, and demanding new elections. As was also the case with
Casado, this is a usual strategy among the parties in the opposition (López-
Meri et al., 2017). His style looks fresh and is aimed to attract right-wing
voters, most of them dissatisfied with other parties. Therefore, his posts
tend to include emoji; and among them, the Spanish flag is frequent. This
enhances the image of a patriotic party and leader. The power of emotions
transferred by emoji has been previously explained by Vergeer (2015).
Regarding his writing style, his sentences are longer than the other three
politicians; and although this fact may be a sign of eloquence, his messages
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Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216210
are cognitively more demanding than the rest, and consequently the
information is more difficult to retain. As explained by djafarova (2008),
simple language increases the possibilities of being understood; therefore,
his target audience seems to be oriented to voters with tertiary education.
6. Conclusion
Social networks are partially responsible for some of the communication
changes that society has experienced in the two decades. In addition to the
normal use of Twitter to publish and share information with other users, and
interconnect those messages and people with hashtags and @ signs,
politicians seems to have found their use for their political campaigns
beneficial. As it happens with other forms of discourse, political discourse is
also subjected to specific rules and conventions, which make it a specialized
genre. In addition, politics is increasingly becoming a profession rather than
a service; and for that reason, its specific language forms could be tagged in
the same category as other professions such as banking, medicine, or
engineering, among many others. The popularity of this social network
makes that political leaders need to be present in Twitter in order to
approach a part of their target audience. In this research, some tweets from
the current Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez (PSoE), Pablo Iglesias (Podemos),
Pablo Casado (PP), and Albert Rivera (Ciudadanos) have been analyzed with
the aim of describing some relevant linguistic features of their written
discourse in Twitter.
The major findings in this research are that there are some common
characteristics that distinguish left and right-wing parties, and also
government and opposition. In this sense, the messages conveyed by left-
wing parties, PSoE and Podemos, were addressed to social causes and welfare,
supporting minority or endangered groups (Feminism), and never reacting
against them (Catalonia Secessionism). This contrasts with the right-wing
ones, PP and Ciudadanos, who continuously attacked Catalonia Secessionism
and almost ignored the feminist movement. Concerning their language, both
Prime Minister Sánchez and Mr. Iglesias used shorter sentences than the
right-wing leaders. This implies that these messages were easier to
understand; and this fact usually benefits people with inferior cognitive skills,
which mainly involve people with basic education and lower working classes.
The history of these two left-wing parties is associated to laborers; and being
SPAnISH PoLITICIAnS In TwiTTer: A LIngUISTIC AnALySIS oF THEIR wRITTEn dISCoURSE
Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216 211
a coincidence or not, the difference between the left and right-wing parties
on their sentence length seems to be a significant finding according to our
literature review. This fact suggests that language forms in politics are
modified around their interests and addressed to their target audience. In the
case of the right-wing parties, they tend to be associated with capitalism,
corporations and economy welfare, which results in the privatization of
public services. The fact of having better jobs also implies earning higher
salaries, and this leads to more possibilities to afford an advanced education,
which usually results in a better development of their cognitive skills.
Consequently, people with advanced education tend to have a better
capability to understand messages with a higher degree of complexity in
comparison to those with basic one.
Another noteworthy finding in this research is the fact that literature and the
results of our experiment coincide in the fact that opposition need to attack
the government, and not vice versa. In our corpus, it could be observed how
the right-wing parties continuously tried to discredit the Prime Minister. on
the other hand, Iglesias was more cautious on attacking his partner in the
government. In addition, it should also be emphasized the fact that some
parties used emoji in order to give emotion to their tweets. In this case, it
seems that this fact was related to the age of their target voters and
regardless of their political orientation. Ciudadanos and Podemos, the
youngest parties, were keener on their use than PP and PSoE, the historically
most popular parties in Spain. This fact could imply that the newbies
focused on younger audiences, whereas the traditional ones, perhaps, relied
on the loyalty of their older voters and avoided forms of language that are
not usual among older people. At last, this research has also found that some
politicians need to build reputation and a good image, and Twitter seems to
be a good tool since it allows introducing media. As previously said, this is
associated to the idea of promoting a personality cult, a usual strategy among
political leaders.
In conclusion, this paper has attempted to explain the connection between
the written communication styles and the political interests of the four most
popular political leaders in Spain in 2019. This study aims at justifying the
discourse forms used by these four politicians, and it seems that the ideas
introduced in the literature coincide with the results from the experiment.
Therefore, it seems that political discourse in Twitter could be considered a
specialized genre.
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Ibérica 40 (2020): 195-216212
Regarding limitations, it should be acknowledged that different
interpretations could have been made from the same results, and extending
the corpus or the participants would also be a great help to understand the
political context in Spain. In the same way, further research could also be
more specific and focus exclusively on one single politician or on one
individual element.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to acknowledge the support and help received from
Carmen Sancho and Ruth Breeze to review this article and attain the quality
standards required by ibérica.
Article history:
Received 30 January 2019
Received in revised form 09 March 2020
Accepted 20 April 2020
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Universitat Jaume I (Spain) and is currently Phd Associate Professor at the
Universitat Politècnica de València (Spain). His main research interests
include discourse Analysis and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching
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