Interactividad controlada entre élites políticas y ciudadanos: diálogos públicos en Facebook en las campañas electorales jaliscienses de 2018

Abstract

This research presents an observation of the public Facebook profiles of the three most important candidates for the government of Jalisco during the 2018 elections. The main objective was to analyze how candidates communicated with Facebook users and, in particular, how they are promoting, or not, public dialogues during electoral campaigns. Based on a qualitative text analysis of the candidates' publications, the research found that a) the structural and conjunctural conditions did not exist for all Jalisco voters to participate in the dialogues between political elites and citizens; b) that the political campaigns did not present public and explicit strategies that encouraged such dialogues; and that c) even so, there were interactions between politicians and Internet users. These interactions were concentrated in small talks and not in substantial exchanges about public issues. The article concludes that the three campaigns used Facebook to establish a “controlled interaction” with Internet users, a type of interaction that is far from the promises that web 2.0’s celebratory views made to contemporary democracies.