Politainment social audience and political engagement: Analysing Twitter conversations in Spain

Abstract

Politainment is a phenomenon that deals with the political communication of entertainment regarding its production, diffusion and intake in its different formats. It entails consequences regarding the dynamics of communication such as political informative decline, along with the loss of democratic quality giving prominence to a post-truth communication environment and promoting the celebritization of politicians. The academic basis upholds that, in the politainment environment, social networks play an important role acting as instruments that help promote information exchange, both horizontally and vertically, from an active, connected, empowered social audience which evidences participation, contribution, production and collaboration. This research is pioneer in identifying the kind of contents of politainment programmes that promote a greater engagement among the social audience. Therefore, it includes an empirical analysis from a quantitative and qualitative approach of the contents of tweets and comments with the highest level of interaction among prosumers from the profiles of the three most representative politainment programmes in Spain: El Objetivo, El programa de Ana Rosa and El Intermedio. The results achieved from this comparative analysis include significant differences regarding the politainment content promoted by these programmes and also in relation to the level of online engagement. Although the limited interaction from the social audience was a common pattern, the results show that tweets with hashtags, visual elements and the ones using the attribute of responsibility frame achieved a higher engagement level than the rest of them.