The Peruvian campaign on Twitter. Analysis of affective polarization during the second round of the 2021 general elections

Summary

Twitter is one of the digital spaces that generates great attraction for political candidates during elections due to its usefulness to disseminate proposals and generate conjunctural debates. This research aims to analyze the affective polarization in feelings and emotions generated by the mentions of the presidential candidates –Pedro Castillo and Keiko Fujimori– during the second round of the 2021 general elections in Peru. The data source prepared by the Monitoring of Social Networks of the National Directorate of Education and Citizen Civic Training of the National Elections Jury was used. A total of 1,202,297 tweets were analyzed with R statistical software. Results show that affective polarization occurs in the extreme feelings of users towards the candidates, and the emotional loads even tend to temporary instability of support or rejection.