Social perception of insecurity during elections. How people react to campaign promises?

CALZADO, MERCEDES CELINA

Pittsburgh

Congreso; 2019 Latin American Social and Public Policy (LASPP) Conference; 2019

University of Pittsburgh. Center for Latin American Studies

The paper discouses the relation of audiences with electoral advertisements during last presidential Argentinian election in 2015. During this year, security was ranked as the most significant public concern in Argentina and was taken by political spaces as one of the central axes of the campaign.Taking this concern, four of the six presidential candidates produced specific advertisements on the subject and extensive interventions on social networks.However, how did the citizens understand the security promises of the presidential candidates? How did they interpret the political propaganda? The objective of this paper is to explore the interpretation that electoral audiences make of the audiovisual content of the candidates aroundthe problematic of urban security in the presidential election of 2015.We understand that we inhabit a space in which the reception of the media message is integral to the civic experience. Our work doesn´t take a critical position on the subject, as in the idea that political communication produces degraded citizenships. Nor do we take an optimistic position, such as those that consider that the new types of communication could increase the capacity of voters.Taking this perspective, we propose to work with the category of ?electoral audiences?, that is, as spectators exposed to political campaign discourse through political video tools and social networks. As a result, this citizenship is interpellated by mediatized politic, and they understand their experiences through the electoral communication.The method to carry out this research followed the question about how and why, and not about the effects. The method is qualitative because we try to understand the experiences of the citizens during political campaigns.We will follow the perception of the electoral audiences around security from the following points: first we introduce the discussion, second we analyze the significance of security for the audiences and how do they think the candidates should fix it, and at the end we consider if the political position produce changes in the perspective around the diagnosis of the problem, the causes and ways to produce changes.