The Programmatic Dimension of Political Communication on Twitter: The Case of Costa Rica’s 2022 General Elections

Resumen

This research seeks to analyze the use of the social network Twitter by presidential candidacies in the context of the first round of the 2022 electoral campaign in Costa Rica. This is a proposal that is articulated under an exploratory and descriptive scope, so that in the first place it tries to understand the characteristics under which politicians exercise a presence in digital environments and make general use of Twitter in the context of an electoral campaign, Secondly, it seeks to identify the programmatic dimension in the publications shared by the profiles of the candidacies with the highest voting intentions. The work makes a contribution based on the methodological background of the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR), to inquire about electoral communication exercised through a social network, from a multimodal approach. The findings prove the existence of a clear programmatic dimension within the activity of the candidacies on the platform that is articulated not only with government plans, but also with conjunctural elements of the campaign such as debates. Likewise, the work explores some non-programmatic uses and offers new lines of research within the field of political communication in Costa Rica.