Television Campaigns in the Chilean Constituent Elections: The Negative and Anti-system Discourse in the Success of the Social Movement La Lista Del Pueblo and its Electoral Base

ABSTRACT

The People’s List (Lista del Pueblo) was a group of independent candidates united on its anti-party sentiment that successfully participated in the Chilean elections to choose the constituents in charge of writing a new constitution. Based on the framework of negative political campaigns and through a deductive methodology and content analysis, this research looks at the strategy used in their televised spots (N = 357). Likewise, and through the study of the electoral database of this election, made up of 345 boroughs, the electoral bases of the People’s List are established to explore relationships between the television campaign and its results according to political, socioeconomic, and sociodemographic aspects. The findings indicate that this group used the public television spot as a tactic based on an anti-establishment message, which had the purpose of channeling the demands of the social outbreak of October 2019 by promoting anger against the political and economic institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-establishment
• negative campaigning
• TV slots
• content analysis
• Chile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

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36. See note 31 above.

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39. El Mostrador, “Estudio del CNTV revela que el 37% de quienes vieron la franja presidencial-parlamentaria dicen que le ayudó a decidir su voto,” December 1, 2021, https://www.elmostrador.cl/elecciones-2021/2021/12/01/estudio-del-cntv-revela-que-el-37-de-quienes-vieron-la-franja-presidencial-parlamentaria-dicen-que-le-ayudo-a-decidir-su-voto/.

40. Hansen and Treul.

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47. La Tercera.

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50. Centro de Estudios Públicos, Estudio Nacional de Opinión Pública.

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52. Ibid.

53. The videos analyzed are hosted on the Consejo Nacional de Televisión of Chile website and can be accessed at: https://cntv.cl/franjas-electorales/videos-franja-convencionales-constituyentes/.

54. See note 31 above.

55. Laurence Bardin, Análisis de Contenido (España: AKAL, 2001); Guido Stempel and Bruce Westley, Research Methods in Mass Communication (United States: Prentice Hall, 1989).

56. The codebook used for this manuscript can be accessed at: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zetub2rh0w1lki561jfuh/CodeBook_t.xlsx?rlkey=wv1zebae8b58nmg47uwdkwvd8&dl=0.

57. Klaus Krippendorff, Metodología y análisis de contenido (España: Paidós, 1990); Stephen Lacy, Brenda Watson, Daniel Riffe and Jeanette Lovejoy, “Issues and Best Practices in Content Analysis,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 92, no. 4 (2015): 791–811. doi:10.1177/1077699015607338.

58. Senado de Chile, La ley reforma la franja electoral para candidatos independientes a la Convención (Chile: Senado de Chile 2021), https://www.senado.cl/noticias/elecciones/a-ley-reforma-a-franja-electoral-para-candidatos-independientes-a-la.

59. See note 31 above.

60. Fuentes.

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62. See note 31 above.

63. Paula Catena and Cristóbal Fuentes, “De 27 a ninguno. Por qué ya no existe la Lista del Pueblo en la Convención,” La Tercera (April 22, 2022), https://www.latercera.com/la-tercera-sabado/noticia/de-27-a-ninguno-por-que-ya-no-existe-la-lista-del-pueblo-en-la-convencion/RITG7F5XTJFR3EHCA2MRANBXEQ/).

64. See note 60 above.

65. Morales.

66. See note 31 above.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received funding from Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) through the Millennium Science Initiative Program - NCS2021_063.