An electoral mechanism in which the two most voted candidate for an executive or legislative position participate in a second round of elections, where the most voted will have at least 51% + 1 of the votes, thus allowing a clear majority of the electorate to support him or her. In Peru it has been used exclusively for presidential elections, but in countries such as France is used for both presidential and congressional elections.
Published in Chapter:
Salience, Self-Salience, and Discursive Opportunities: An Effective Media Presence Construction Through Social Media in the Peruvian Presidential Election
Eduardo Villanueva-Mansilla (Department of Communications, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru)
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 16
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-1828-1.ch013
Abstract
Peruvian electoral campaigning, centered on the candidate and lacking a significant connection with contention politics occurring in years previous to the poll, is a very diverse exercise, trying to achieve success through a variety of actions while facing a common-sense interpretation of politics as unreliable and not trustworthy. This fixes an agenda from which candidates have to develop their campaigns, focused on convincing others of their commitment to specific groups and willingness to change whatever does not directly affect each specific constituency that is being appealed to for voting. This behavior is replicated even in Facebook, where candidates try to fix their own issues as salient, but usually failing to respond to the media-set agenda. The potential effectiveness of social media, particularly Facebook, would rest in using discursive opportunities emerging during the campaign to construct self-salience, countering the biases of conventional media.