Central American Crisis
Brandt 2.0: The Way Forward
5. Governing with Twitter: Is the Future of Decision-Making to be Written in 280
Characters?
Patricia Loggetto
Abstract: This article investigates whether Presidents Jair Bolsonaro's (Brazil) and Donald Trump's (United States) use of Twitter contributes to increasing accountability and political participation in their decision-making. A content analysis of their tweets reveals that they replicate the traditional relationship populist leaders have with the population, where the people are a passive recipient of information and a legitimizing force for populist leadership.
From the Newsfeed to Public Policy
The Brandt Report highlighted the need for inclusive development strategies that give citizens around the globe a voice in the agenda. To some analysts, populism is about giving citizens this type of voice. Populists claim to directly address the needs of citizens and circumvent institutions that truly or allegedly allow special interests and the elites to shape the agenda to the detriment of the masses. New populist leaders have increasingly turned to new technologies and social media to engage with citizens.
The Brazilian Decree No. 9.971 had an auspicious beginning.
A user asked President Jair Bolsonaro's Facebook page for lower taxes on electronic games. The president read the post and
signed the decree – born out of social media - a few weeks later.
In his own words,
'After reading in my [Facebook] the request from reader Vennicios M. Teles asking to lower taxes on electronic games, I decided to consult with our economic team. Currently, the IPI [tax on industrialized products] varies between 20 and 50%.
We finalized studies to lower them. Brazil is the second [biggest] market in the world in this sector (@jairbolsonaro, 2019a)'.
Social media have grown beyond politicians' communication strategy and now integrate e-government to bring transparency, fast communication, participation, and accountability (Bertot, Jaeger, & Grimes, 2012; Bertot, Jaeger, & Hansen, 2012;
Bonson et al., 2012; Devlin et al., 2020; Gigler & Bailur, 2014;
Linders, 2012; Stamati et al., 2015). They represent Web 2.0 principles by excellence, where users interact, build a network, and create and share content, different from previous channels that emphasized one-to-many communication (Porter, 2008;
Small, 2012; Stamati et al., 2015).
Government actors created accounts to interact with their constituents, disseminate information, provide alerts of emergencies, and receive feedback (Wigand, 2010). This paper focuses on Twitter, popular for public administration due to its low operating costs, personal character, the potential for going viral, and built-in capabilities that allow users to broadcast information, start conversations, and collaborate with stakeholders (Wigand, 2010).
The literature on politicians' use of Twitter spreads from network analysis to content and interaction patterns (Graham et
Patricia Loggetto
al., 2016). Research expanded to populist leaders' online behavior (Ituassu et al., 2019; van Kessel & Castelein, 2016;
Waisbord & Amado, 2017), as they seized the opportunity for unmediated communication and profited from Twitter's efficiency in spreading populist messages (Blassnig et al., 2020;
van Kessel & Castelein, 2016). Populism is a "thin ideology", a distinguishable pattern of ideas that places "the people" and their will at the center of legitimate politics and characterizes
"the elite" as opposing "the people" (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016; Stanley, 2008). Claims of truly representing the people's will and the use of public support as a source of legitimacy complement the core concepts (Mudde, 2004; Müller, 2016;
Urbinati, 2019; Weyland, 2001). Populists use Twitter's direct and permanent interaction to continuously reaffirm their alignment and position themselves as the real voice of the people (Müller, 2016; Urbinati, 2019; van Kessel & Castelein, 2016; Waisbord & Amado, 2017).
Populism's vague definition of 'the people' allows leaders to adapt the term to their interests, but also lacks a coherent ideology with enough range to answer political questions that emerge (Mudde, 2004; Stanley, 2008). Therefore, populism often combines itself with other ideologies (Mudde, 2004).
Such flexibility, allied with the frequent exchanges that mark the relationship between the Global North and South nowadays, helped to spread the phenomenon across the globe. This increasingly permutable divide allowed for goods, technology, knowledge, and people to flow, but also similar problems, which politicians in one hemisphere could observe and learn from the others' responses. With the perception that the established political powers have failed to answer certain
demands, the populist discourse has risen around the world (Stanley, 2008).
This article contributes to the literature by investigating how political leaders' governing strategies have incorporated Twitter, focusing on populist leaders employing Twitter to make the governing process more participative and accountable. It applies a content analysis to two populist leaders' accounts: Jair Bolsonaro (Brazil) and Donald Trump (United States). These presidents have an intrinsic relationship with social media, which played a decisive role in their campaigns and communication.16 They tweet often (on average more than five tweets per day during the period covered), share government-related content on their accounts, and, as exemplified, can, at times, integrate social media into their decision-making. Comparing their use of Twitter in the two arenas - accountability and participation - sheds light on the similarities shared by Global North and South populist leaders in this regard.
Four more sections comprise this article. Section 1 reviews how e-government integrated social media to its arsenal and how these platforms can increase participation and accountability.
Section 2 explains the theoretical framework, followed by findings in Section 3, and concluding remarks are provided in Section 4.