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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Politics of Technology
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1456412
This article is part of the Research Topic Leadership, politics and society in the digital age View all 5 articles

INFORMATION, SOCIAL NETWORKS AND EMOTIONS: FEAR AND ANGER TOWARDS PEDRO SÁNCHEZ 2019-2021

Provisionally accepted
José Manuel Rivera José Manuel Rivera Nieves Lagares Nieves Lagares Erika Jaráiz Erika Jaráiz María Pereira María Pereira *
  • University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The objective of this research is to determine the relationship between the use citizens make of social networks to learn about politics and the emotions expressed towards political leaders, taking as a case study the current Prime Minister of Spain Pedro Sánchez. A quantitative methodological approach was used in this longitudinal study. This approach proposes both a descriptive and multivariate analysis of data from three databases. The analysis of results shows important differences between consuming political information on social networks and not doing so in terms of the type of negative emotions (anger and fear) generated towards Pedro Sánchez. Connecting these findings with previous cognitive approaches (Marcus, 2000, 2002; Marcus et al., 2017) led us to conclude that, while fear encourages citizens to seek alternative information, when they seek it through social networks the expression of anger increases. In this sense, preliminary results suggest that fear towards Pedro Sánchez becomes anger when information is proactively sought in social networks.

    Keywords: Social Media, political information, Fear, Anger, Spain

    Received: 28 Jun 2024; Accepted: 18 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Rivera, Lagares, Jaráiz and Pereira. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: María Pereira, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

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