Presentation
Populism, Storytelling, and Polarization in Mexico
APSA Preprints
(2022)
Abstract
According to the ideational definition of populism, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), has certainly exhibited a populist narrative (Sarsfield 2022). Departing from such conceptualization, this work tries to explore, however, the contextual dimensions in AMLO's narrative that here, following a growing literature on political rhetoric, we call “storytelling” (e.g., Engesser et al. 2021). We define the idea of storytelling as the “art of telling a story where emotions, characters and other details are applied” in order “to promote a particular point of view or set of values” (Nordensvard and Ketola 2021, p.2). Focusing on a single-case study, this work concerns what are the stories that AMLO uses in his Twitter account and which of these stories provokes greater polarization among his followers. Although the results are not conclusive, findings suggest that some specific populist stories -in particular, what we call "stories of conspiracy" and "stories of ostracism"-, indeed tend to induce polarized attitudes.
Keywords
- Populism,
- Storytelling Polarization Mexico
Disciplines
Publication Date
Fall October 24, 2022
DOI
0.33774/apsa-2022-5cnnk
Citation Information
Rodolfo Sarsfield and Zacarias Abuchanab. "Populism, Storytelling, and Polarization in Mexico" APSA Preprints (2022) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/rodolfo_sarsfield/21/