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Lok Sabha Elections 2019:Analysing the Online Political Battlefield in IndiaAuthor: Devansh Manu Date: 2020-10-14 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/88 Advisor:Radhika Krishnan,Ponnurangam kumaraguru AbstractThe Lok Sabha Elections 2019 in the ’s largest democracy, India, was a significant electoral event.These elections are conducted to elect representatives across the country for a period of 5 years and arealso key to the process of selecting the Prime Minister, the highest authority in the Union cabinet. Inkeeping with global trends, the Indian elections saw a very prominent use of Online Social Media bypolitical parties to create discourses in their favour. We focus our study on Twitter, collecting over 45Million tweets, tracking more than 3,500 hashtags and over 2,500 political handles while monitoringtheir network interactions.We begin with a study of major political trends in the country since its independence in 1947. We lookat political alignments and realignments in the country that led to a shift from a Single Party dominantpolitical system to a strong two-party system we have today. Our study focuses on national politicaltrends, and not on individual states. We thus study two political blocs - the National Democratic Alliance(NDA, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party) and the United Progressive Alliance (UPA, led by the IndianNational Congress).We did a comparative analysis of various political parties in India and their Social media presenceduring the 2019 General Elections. We also perform a social network graph analysis for the verifiedpolitical handles who were active during the 2019 Elections. This helps us understand their relationshipswithin and across the parties. We are also able to see a direct correlation between the node-size of apolitical handle in its cluster, and its hierarchy in the party. This follower-following network shows anunmistakable relationship between politicians at an individual node level, and between the parties thatsupport each other at the cluster level.We then move on to analyse the nature of political discourse that parties attempted to propagate in theonline sphere. We analyze the Manifestos released by both the major political parties - BJP and INC. Weanalyze tweets collected during the 2019 elections to see how narratives were shaped and altered over time. We study the narratives propagated by the party already in power and how they were supportedor challenged by other parties. Spanning over 5 months, January to May 2019, we analyzed monthlychanges in the political messaging promoted by leading political parties and leaders. We then speculateon the impact of these changes on existing narratives during the campaigning and the elections.We further move onto a comparative discourse analysis between the 2014 and 2019 General Electionsin India. We begin by understanding how these elections were fundamentally different with regardsto the incumbency factor and various other politico-economic factors. Given the contrasting politicalscenarios, we observe how the ruling and the opposition party brought a change in the discourses duringthe two elections. We compare our results with the on-ground surveys (or the Mood of the Nation)conducted by Lokniti, a research programme run by the Delhi-based CSDS, across the nation.This thesis helps in getting a clear picture of the activity in the online eco-system during the 2019General Elections. The discourse analysis helps in understanding how the conversations were shaped onthe web and what impacts it had. Understanding the data and numbers from a socio-political perspective,we see how narratives that were formed online, steered the offline world and vice versa. The networkand social media analysis of the political handles aids in understanding how the political parties in Indiadrove their online battles. Adding on to a study conducted during the 2014 General Elections, we alsocontrasted the 2019 and 2014 General Elections in India. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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