Populism, Religion, and Social Media in Central America

Abstract

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.

Pandemic populism and permanent campaigning: How Central American presidents build political legitimacy on Facebook

“…Similarly, 60% of Salvadorians use Facebook, which is exactly the average for Latin America ( Latinobarómetro, 2018 ). Moreover, Facebook was a key in how both Carlos Alvarado and Nayib Bukele implemented presidential campaigns and developed their political careers ( Siles et al, 2021 ; FUSADES, 2020 ; Marroquín et al, 2020 ). Although Bukele posted almost identical content about the pandemic on both Facebook and Twitter, Alvarado published more frequently and relatively longer messages on Facebook than on Twitter.…”

“…Inter-rater reliability, as measured by the average kappa coefficient, was 0.70. We also compared these strategies with Alvarado's and Bukele's communication approaches to their respective presidential campaigns on Facebook ( Siles et al, 2021 , Siles, 2020 ).…”

“…Populist communication fundamentally relies on a symbolic dimension to sustain the division between “us” and “them” ( Block, 2013 ). A fundamental trait of populist communication is the emphasis on leaders, who often perform the role of charismatic and messianic figures ( Siles et al, 2021 ). This is consistent with what Amado (2016) has referred to as “pop politics,” which underscores personalism and spectacle in the construction of celebrity-like politicians.…”

“…Carlos Alvarado became the alternative to Fabricio Alvarado's threat. He won in the second round of the 2018 Costa Rican election, which was heavily polarized around the discussion of the rights of same-sex couples ( Siles et al, 2021 ).…”

Impacto del acceso a la información online sobre el bienestar personal en El Salvador durante el confinamiento.

“…Durante el estado de cuarentena en El Salvador, las redes sociales y, de manera especial Twitter, se convirtieron en un escenario ideal, para el discurso político del actual presidente de El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, lo cual en muchos casos distrajo la atención de la pandemia, centrándola más bien en su figura (Soto & Castex, 2020). Nayib Bukele ha sido ya objeto de estudio en varias ocasiones por su uso preferente de redes sociales como parte de su estrategia de comunicación y acción política (Siles et al, 2021;Lupu et al, 2020).…”