This paper analyzes how presidential candidates Fabricio Alvarado and Nayib Bukele used Facebook during the elections in Costa Rica (2018) and El Salvador (2019) respectively to develop a particular style of communication that blended populist elements and religious discourse. This style of communication extended traditional modes of populism that have prevailed in Latin America since the turn of the century (emphasizing the notion of the hero who comes to rescue “the people”) but expressed them in an explicitly religious way (stressing the role of a “messiah” who comes to alter the established political order). We conducted both content and multimodal discourse analyses of 838 posts made by these candidates on Facebook during their respective electoral campaigns. We argue that the study of these campaigns would be incomplete without accounting for the relationship between populism, religion, and social media. While populism gave political validity to religious discourse, a religious imaginary provided populism with charismatic and messianic authority. This populist/religious reason found an ideal expression in Facebook and, simultaneously, was resignified by this platform's affordances. In this way, we assess how fundamentalist Christianity has become a legitimating force of knowledge and politics in the context of epistemic tensions that shape contemporary Latin-American societies.

Forthcoming in Howard Tumber and Silvio Waisbord (Eds.) (2021). The Routledge Companion to Media Misinformation and Populism. London: Routledge. Populism, Media, and Misinformation in Latin AmericaLatin America has had a long, complex, and complicated relationship with populism.Political figures in the region are usually considered some of the very founders or most iconic representatives of populism (De la Torre, 2000), starting with classic forms of populism (Lázaro Cárdenas in Mexico, Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina, and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil), followed by so-called neo-populisms (Alberto Fujimori in Peru, Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico, Fernando Collor de Melo in Brazil, and Carlos Menem in Argentina), and more recent populist figures of the 21st century, such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. There is even an entire subfield of studies devoted specifically to Latin American populism (Retamozo, 2017).Historically, media systems have played a key role in shaping Latin American populism.

En este artículo se reflexiona sobre la capacidad de los medios para fijar la agenda de discusión pública de la ciudadanía en el contexto actual. Se discute la teoría de la agenda setting y su evolución temática y temporal en los últimos cuarenta años, asimismo se reflexiona en torno a tres asuntos específicos: 1) la problematización de lo que significa un clic, 2) la necesidad de orientación como generadora de interés por asuntos públicos y 3) el interés de la ciudadanía y su manera de participar en política en la actualidad. Se presentan ejemplos de dos campañas presidenciales (2014 y 2018) en Costa Rica. A pesar de la preferencia del público por el consumo de noticias sobre asuntos que no son de interés público, también se identifican pistas que apuntan hacia una ciudadanía con, por lo menos, algún grado de interés sobre asuntos públicos.

This paper analyzes the role of social media in electoral processes and contemporary political life. We analyze Costa Rica’s 2018 presidential election from an agenda-setting perspective, studying the media, the political and the public agendas, and their relationships. We explore whether social media, Facebook specifically, can convey an agenda-setting effect; if social media public agenda differs from the traditional MIP public agenda; and what agenda-setting methodologies can benefit from new approaches in the social media context. The study revealed that social media agendas are complex and dynamic and, in this case, did not present an agenda-setting effect. We not only found that the social media public agenda does not correlate with the conventional MIP public agenda, but that neither does the media online agenda and the media’s agenda on Facebook. Our exploration of more contemporary methods like big data, social network analysis (SNA), and social media mining point to them as necessary complements to the traditional methodological proposal of agenda-setting theory which have become insufficient to explain the current media environment.