Othering mechanisms among political opposition on Twitter during the 2017 Mexico state elections

Abstract

This document reports results from a qualitative content analysis carried out on a sample of 11,607 tweets from opposition sympathizers during the 2017 election campaigns, stemming from discussion around the candidates for governor of the state of Coahuila. This project’s aim was to identify the othering mechanisms at play in the social construction of binary opponents to political self-identity among citizens, in light of the radicalization of ideological divides in democracies worldwide, both online and offline. The study found that left-leaning sympathizers tend to dehumanize those with differing opinions by characterizing them as conspirators in exhaustive plurals, such as «la Mafia del Poder» (the Power Mafia), and that right-leaning sympathizers make extensive use of contempt as an othering mechanism. The document concludes that both practices are unproductive and very harmful to the construction of citizen dialogue and to the country’s public sphere discourse, in that they contribute to a view of democratic processes not as a search for the best government for the common good, but as a zero-sum game in which defeating the opposite side is paramount.