Abstract
This article develops a framework to analyze how political actors adopt social media in systems characterized by clientelism and populism, tracing the consequences and disruptive capabilities of the forms of social media adoption. The framework proceeds in two analytical stages. The first locates actors’ structural positions in the political system (internal/external) and their relationship with the mainstream media (allied/antagonistic). The second builds on pragmatism focusing on iterative problem situations actors face that explain forms of social media adoption. In examining the structural positions and problem-solving stages of Colombian political actors, this article articulates three paths of adoption: habit preservation, internal innovation, and external innovation. Preservationists understand the new technology in old terms, projecting their understandings of old media onto the new one. Internal innovators combine clientelist practices and communication ones, upholding core routines while integrating new ones; they show a potential to reshape the system internally, making viable part of it, but changing the balance of power between existing elites. External innovators develop practices that integrate physical spaces and online communication, displaying a disruptive potential for existing core practices and the political system. In this way, the framework and empirical case link and develop the literatures on clientelism and political communication.
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Source: Statista
Source: Twitter: twitterscraper. Note: The cut off is June 2018 – month of the runoff election. Humberto de la Calle only opened his Twitter account in January 2017
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Notes
An “ongoing” review of the literature with a quantitative and experimental emphasis can be found in Haidt and Bail (2022).
For a distinction between the political science approaches and the sociological and anthropological approaches to clientelism, see Auyero and Benzecry (2017). Comparative politics has “(1) limited the scope of analysis to electoral times, (2) narrowed the center of attention to vote-buying and/or turnout buying, and (3) created a strict division between clients and brokers (necessitated by formal modeling)” (Auyero & Benzecry, 2017, p. 181).
I center on the literature that has dealt with technological adoption of communication technologies by elite political actors and leave out the extensive literature that touches on social media and politics cited in the first paragraph of this paper.
This adds to the names of FDR and Kennedy as innovators in the realm of radio and tv, respectively (Epstein, 2018).
Facebook, Twitter, Tik-Tok, and Instagram fall under this understanding, as do other more recent social media sites.
The concept of outsider does not seem to map onto the definition coming from political science either. Notice, for instance, that the definition communication scholars use collides with the one employed in political science (Barr, 2009). For Barr (2009), an outsider “is someone who gains political prominence not through or in association with an established, competitive party, but as a political independent or in association with new or newly competitive parties” (Barr, 2009, p. 33). Under this definition, none of the politicians mentioned above would be outsiders.
Chadwick and others might argue that clientelist practices are a part of the medium. On the contrary, I distinguish between practices that are tied to technologies of communication that seek to mobilize voters through emotional or programmatic-ideological appeals and those that are proper of clientelism that mobilize voters through exchanges and relations of dependency. Here the Weberian distinction between types of social action is useful: I take communication practices to mobilize through value-rational and affectual oriented social actions, and clientelism to do so through instrumentally rational or habitual actions (Weber, 1922/2013).
Structural positions cannot substitute the empirical assessment of problem situations—otherwise, pragmatism would be useless for analysis—but it can contribute an assessment of what kind of problems actors confront.
As Gross (2018) has correctly argued, pragmatism, field theory, and combinatorial analysis are highly compatible.
This definition does not coincide with the definition of outsider-insider from political science (Barr, 2009) nor with the less structured ones coming from political communication that I mentioned above.
Notice that this second dimension can be an important factor to resolve the contradiction between Stokes (2013) and Pasotti (2010) because elites have different types of relationships to different types of communication technologies. Communication technologies that can be more tightly controlled and that are more expensive to speak through, like newspapers, particularly in the 1800s when it was hard to have a press, can be easily controlled by elites. On the contrary, social media can be easily accessed and is harder to block. Notice also the potential of the framework to theorize the different combinations between characteristics of the political field and characteristics of the technologies.
The two dimensions are spectrums creating a two-dimensional space over which actors can be placed rather than creating four fixed categories. Hence, there is variation across actors in how they are positioned over the field.
This understanding is compatible with a pragmatic understanding of culture in the discipline. Since Swidler’s (1986) refutation of the Parsonian framework, sociology has largely embraced an understanding of culture as a “repertoire or "toolkit" of habits, skills, and styles from which people construct "strategies of action” (p. 273). Much of the later development in the discipline’s thinking about culture is either highly compatible or derived from this toolkit model. With minor modifications, the model fits with an understanding of culture as constraints to strategic action (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012), schemas (Vaisey, 2009), and frames (Fligstein et al., 2017). As it is with the recent definition of schemas by Morh et al. “as a set of associations between concepts in memory acquired from experience and used for the purposes of categorization, recognition, and filling-in of missing information” (Mohr et al., 2020, p. 32). This paper is particularly interested in the relationship between schemas and strategic lines of action.
My framework offers some modest contributions to pragmatism. It shows its relevance to understand macro process and not only micro, following Gross (2018), and it shows pragmatism’s applicability to a question of technological change. Finally, it foregrounds the iterative character of changes in practices.
“Poverty headcount ratio at $1.90 a day is the percentage of the population living on less than $1.90 a day at 2011 international prices.” World Bank, https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.DDAY?locations=CO [Consulted on November 20, 2021].
Since the failure of the 1998 peace agreements until 2014, the U.S. government provided Colombia with $9.3 billion in aid (Otis, 2014).
The agreement later passed through amendments made in Congress.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/209109/number-of-internet-users-per-100-inhabitants-in-colombia-since-2000/ [Consulted on August 20, 2020] This data is similar to the data reported by the Colombian government in a survey in 2017. https://colombiatic.mintic.gov.co/679/w3-article-74002.html [Consulted on August 20, 2020].
Data for 2019 https://www.statista.com/statistics/1022709/number-monthly-facebook-users-colombia/ [Consulted on August 20, 2020] Data for 2010 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2010/jul/22/facebook-countries-population-use [Consulted on August 20, 2020].
Colombian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications https://colombiatic.mintic.gov.co/679/w3-article-74002.html [Consulted on August 20, 2020] Notice that the question about WhatsApp is only made to people who stated that they had internet access, which explains why the percentage of users is 65%.
Communication scholars have privileged a form of comparison over time that follows specific electoral competitions and actors in their processes of adoption. My comparison offers the advantage of comparing across the set of candidates competing in the same election and following those that competed in more than one election across time, allowing for a balanced, full set comparison (i.e., all candidates), that evolves over time.
During 2020, all the interviews were conducted over video-calls.
The entries occasionally include bloggers. LSV was intended to be a hybrid medium with blogging space. Such entries are rare in the archive.
The parallel trajectories of Juan M Santos and Lleras are striking. They both came from families tied to the national elites of the Liberal Party that had close ties to or their own media companies and shared similar political trajectories. It is reasonable to think that Santos only became president in 2010 because he had Uribe’s endorsement.
WPP (British), Dentsu (Japanese), Publicis (French), Interpublic Group of Companies (American), and Omnicom (American).
The same story comes over and over in the interviews of actors in this path. Sometimes they hired large agencies, sometimes local ones. In both cases, they delegated the work and were not involved in the routines of communication.
Verdad Abierta, De la Espriella: “Fui puente entre Uribe y Auc para negociación de Ralito” https://verdadabierta.com/de-la-espriella-y-pineda-eran-el-enlace-de-los-paras-con-uribe-mancuso/ Verdad Abierta, Caja menor de los ‘paras’ financió campaña de Uribe: ‘El Iguano’ https://verdadabierta.com/campana-de-uribe-se-financio-con-la-caja-menor-de-los-paras/ Verdad Abierta, “Hubo identidad política con Álvaro Uribe Vélez”: alias ‘Ernesto Báez” https://verdadabierta.com/hubo-identidad-politica-con-el-senador-alvaro-uribe-velez-alias-ernesto-baez/ Verdad Abierta, “El diario paramilitar del Bloque Central Bolívar” https://verdadabierta.com/el-diario-paramilitar-del-bloque-central-bolivar/ [All references consulted on June 20, 2021].
There is academic research and judicial cases indicating that Uribe had alliances with paramilitary groups and that fear and coercion played a role in his election. I do not engage with such evidence. It goes beyond the purpose of this paper and does not deny the fact that Uribe was a creative politician in terms of communication. Such research and evidence would suggest a more sophisticated combination of political practices and articulation of legal and illegal networks. The idea of a robust action is a promising framework to interpret it (Padgett & Ansell, 1993) as Uribe was able to mean different things to different sectors of the population, to craft multivocal action.
A two-round system was stablished by the 1991 Constitution for terms of four years.
Source: Gallup https://issuu.com/damg22/docs/gallup_2019_3 [Consulted on October 10, 2021].
Hugo Chávez in Venezuela was doing something similar at the time, which shows the independence of practices from political ideology. Chávez is regarded as far-left, while Uribe is considered far-right.
After the 2018 election, in 2019, members of this party articulated coordinated campaigns to create opinion trends on Twitter. La liga contra el silencio, “En las entrañas de una ‘bodeguita’ uribista” https://ligacontraelsilencio.com/2020/02/06/en-las-entranas-de-una-bodega-uribista/ [Consulted on August 20, 2020].
LSV, “Seis pistas para leer las revelaciones sobre el Ñeñe y Duque”, https://lasillavacia.com/historias/silla-nacional/seis-pistas-para-leer-las-revelaciones-sobre-el-nene-y-duque [Consulted on June 8, 2021].
El Espectador, “El audio completo que originó el escándalo de la "Ñeñepolítica"”, https://www.elespectador.com/judicial/el-audio-completo-que-origino-el-escandalo-de-la-nenepolitica-article-909607/ [Consulted on June 8, 2021].
Antanas Mockus 2010 campaign is regarded as the entry of social media into politics. It came to be known as “The Green Wave” because Mockus was the candidate of the Green Party. There are many similarities between the forms of activation Mockus and Petro generated. They both activated groups that would advocate for them online and articulate that online activation with offline demonstrations in a self-reinforcing way. For a narrative from one of the participants see Pérez (2013). He did not campaign at the presidential level again.
“Bogotá Humana” was the term he used for his period in office. Petro referred to his political program as “Colombia Humana.”.
In his campaigns, Petro did not hire large advertising companies. Interviewees argued that those agencies did not know enough about politics and regarded political communication as any type of marketing. Emilio explained it to me: “Contrary to what it seems from the outside, the experience is that campaigns can work very well without a large communications or advertising agency behind. We had different agencies at different times, no great agency. Never a big agency.”.
Appendix 2 shows the number of followers and number of tweets in which Petro and the other external innovators gain prominence as well as Uribe and the actors in the preservationist path that got elected as presidents or mayors.
When Vargas Lleras observed the mobilization Petro was generating in 2018 through the reactivation of plaza politics, he tried to emulate. His way of doing it was in accordance with his schema, paying people to come to the plaza with money, food, a T-shirt, or a drink. Interviewees from other campaigns acknowledge the authenticity of Petro’s plaza politics and the fakeness of Lleras’. Andrés, who was working for Sergio Fajardo’s campaign in 2018 recalls: “[Petro’s plaza politics] was very genuine. For example, I participated in Cúcuta one day. In February 2018 and Germán Vargas Lleras held a demonstration, they say that the largest in the history of Cúcuta, 100,000 people, that was … because you did not see the end. This was all a lie! I got in there and nobody knew what they were doing. They had been paid to go for T-shirt, a drink … None was for Vargas Lleras. You went to Petro's and there was a lot of authenticity in Petro's.” Vargas Lleras way of mobilizing to the square was through clientelist practices. He did not creatively match the online and offline as Petro did. In 2018, even though he was putting 17% of his advertisement budget in social media while Petro was only placing a bit more than 5%, Vargas Lleras did not trigger mobilization in the way Petro did.
The speech can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xmrJI9Ohxo [Consulted on November 11, 2021].
Petro won the 2022 election. In his closing speech in Bogotá on May 22nd, 2022—that I attended in the course of ethnographic research on the last electoral cycle—the performance was executed almost as described by the interviewees. In that speech, Petro said that during the 2022 campaign he had visited between 120 and 130 plazas.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank the interviewees who openhandedly gave me their time and shared their experiences with me. I am also grateful to Andrew Abbott, Alejandro Abisambra, Laura Acosta, Lauren Beard, Anna Berg, María Ceballos, Alex Diamond, Luis Galán, Kimberly Hoang, Nick Judd, Alex Kindel, Emilio Lehoucq, Nisarg Mehta, Shannon Morrissey, Javier Revelo, Benjamin Rohr, Susan Stokes, Stephanie Ternullo, and Ángela Zorro-Medina for insightful comments and feedback. I am particularly indebted to Elisabeth Clemens and Marco Garrido for their sharp comments and generous mentorship. Versions of this paper were presented at the University of Chicago’s Politics, History, and Society Workshop, the 2020 Ph.D. Writing Seminar at the Sociology Department, the Workshop of Latin American and the Caribbean, The Great Mediation Conference held on May 6th and 7th, 2021, and at the 2021 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association. Many thanks to all who participated in those venues. I am also thankful to Tomás Echeverry and Santiago Vargas for their research assistance. Finally, I wish to thank the reviewers and editors of this journal for their insightful comments. This research was partially funded by the University of Chicago Center of Latin American Studies’ CLAS Mellon Research Travel Fellowship. All errors are, of course, mine.
Funding
Partial financial support was received from the University of Chicago Center of Latin American Studies’ CLAS Mellon Research Travel Fellowship.
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Appendices
Appendix 1. Presidential candidates who received over 2% of the vote for each election
2010 Election
-
Juan Manuel Santos*+ (endorsed by Álvaro Uribe)
-
Germán Vargas Lleras*
-
Antanas Mockus
-
Noemí Sanín
-
Gustavo Petro*
-
Rafael Pardo
2014 Election
-
Juan Manuel Santos*+
-
Oscar Iván Zuluaga (endorsed by Álvaro Uribe)
-
Enrique Peñalosa
-
Clara López
-
Marta Lucía Ramírez
2018 Election
-
Iván Duque+ (endorsed by Álvaro Uribe)
-
Gustavo Petro*
-
Germán Vargas Lleras*
-
Sergio Fajardo
-
Humberto de la Calle
* Ran for two elections
+ Winner
Appendix 2. Twitter activity of politicians 2010–2019 (followers and tweets)
Figure 3
Source: The Internet Archive—Wayback Machine. Note: Apart from Petro, the two remaining candidates that also innovated in terms of their online-offline practices, Mockus and Fajardo, also show prominence in terms of followers. Actors that are in the habit preservation path only gain followers when they win office. Presidency: Juan M Santos and Iván Duque. Mayoral office: Enrique Peñalosa
Twitter Activity Politicians 2010–2019. Panel a: Number of Followers in Twitter per Politician 2009–2019. Panel b: Number of Tweets per Politician 2009–2019.
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Torres-Echeverry, N. Social media, meet old politics: preservation and innovation in Colombian presidential elections, 2010–2018. Theor Soc 52, 425–461 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09509-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-022-09509-w