A political campaign designed to promote a candidate for public office, set around and happening before a public poll; such a campaign looks to achieve the mobilization of citizens to make them vote for a given candidate against others, or to choose a political position against another in plebiscite 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.