Polarization and emotional discourse in the political agenda on Twitter: disintermediation and engagement in electoral campaign

The relevance of social networks as agenda setters and prosumers as simultaneous content creators and consumers outside the media encourage political communication to focus on the use of digital platforms as part of their direct persuasive strategy towards the user-voter. This research analyses first level agenda and the political discourse on Twitter as a space of micro-segmentation to Delve into the strategy of personalization, polarization, and emotional discourse of political candidates during the election period. To test this process of disintermediation, a case study on the six main candidates for elections of the Community of Madrid during the election campaign (April-May 2021) is conducted. The method combines a content and a discourse analysis concerning the tweets published by the political representatives on their Twitter profile during this period (N=817), as well as the videos (N=367) and images (N=202) that accompany them. The codification is carried out using a self-developed software that allows to download the tweets, obtain the interactions and classify the messages according to four categories: source of the tweet; topic, differentiating between political issues and citizen concerns according to the CIS (2021); framing; and multimedia storytelling elements. The main results confirm that, in disintermediated political communication in social networks, political leaders use a personalist, polarized and emotional discourse, with high engagement concerning the multimedia storytelling. The research confirms a discourse about politics, but not about policies.