Political Identity, Decision-Making and Communication in the Age of Digital Media: A Case Study on the 2016 US Elections

Acknowledgments: This research was supported by a grant from the project POSDRU/187/1.5/S/155383.IntroductionThe US presidential elections, which have been decided this past November, have been called one of the most peculiar electoral cycles in recent history (Inglehart, Norris 2016). The party primary elections have featured two unexpected surges in popularity for candidates with little nation-wide recognition as political figures, both being portrayed as populists outside the mainstream doctrines of their respective parties. The general election on the other hand, has been carried by a controversial outsider candidate, with no political experience, despite losing the popular vote by the widest margin in United States history.In the Democratic primary, the unexpected candidacy came from Bernard "Bernie" Sanders, an independent, little-known, political veteran that had held various congressional seats for the state of Vermont since 1991 (Chadwick, Stormer-Galley 2016). Despite his early handicap, and the near-certainty of most political commentators of the victory of his opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Sanders managed to gather over 43% of the primary votes, and raised around $230 million in donations, most of it in the form of small donations from individual donors - a record for political campaigns in the US (Chadwick, Stormer-Galley 2016). The main focus of his campaign has been concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the richest Americans, with other important issues being environmental concerns, anti-militarism, gender and racial equality and civil rights to privacy.The Republican primary election ended up being dominated by Donald J. Trump, a New York real-estate businessman and TV personality, whose only previous forays in the political scene had consisted in various proposals at a third party candidacy and his association with the 2011 conspiracy movement surrounding president Barack Obama's citizenship, claiming that he had been born outside the United States, and demanding he produce his birth certificate (Pham 2015). His platform centered around a series of nativist and protectionist positions, such as anti-immigration, opposition to free-trade deals and introduction of additional trade tariffs, imposing strict controls on the entry of Muslims in the US, as well as practicing a higher degree isolationism in regard to diplomatic relations. Trump ended up winning the Republican primary elections, with nearly 45% of the final vote, despite the opposition of a large portion of the Republican Party elites and leading intellectuals, and their concerted effort in the later part of the primary election cycle to prevent him from winning.What is especially puzzling in this debate is not simply the shift in tone of the policies that a good deal of voters respond to (when compared to the previous electoral cycles), but the complete inability of the upper echelons of either party to put forward a credible insider candidate that can mobilize this popular shift into partisan support. This coincided with some of the largest-scale usage of social media in any US presidential campaign to date, as the percentage of American adults using social media has increased to around 78% (compared with 56% during the 2012 election and 24% during the 2008 election) (Statista, 2016), with 44% of voters getting their election news through this channel at the beginning of the year (Greenwood, Perrin, Duggan 2016). In the following paper, I will briefly explore how exactly this unique situation came to be, how is public discourse and its content shaped by the current medium of online social networking and communication, how this medium is built from a concrete institutional perspective, and what is the relationship between the way in which voters construct their identity and the way in which candidates have their public images crafted in relation to this type of discourse produced by our current media-industrial complex. …