ABSTRACT

While scholarly attention has been devoted to social media’s potential mobilizing function, they may also contribute to demobilization discourses: social communication actively promoting nonvoting. This paper examines discourses around mobilization vs. demobilization in the context of the municipal elections in Jerusalem. As the sweeping majority of East Jerusalem Palestinians have continuously been boycotting Jerusalem’s municipal elections, this is a potent case through which to examine how demobilization functions in action, through social media conversations. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Twitter contents as structured by different languages, our findings show how mobilization and demobilization discourses can co-occur during the same election event. Users of different languages – reflecting different social and political identities – interpret the elections in contrasting ways, with tangible implications for (in)equality in political participation. The study thus contributes theoretically to several domains of political communication, including election studies, local politics, and language fragmentation in online political discourse.

摘要

虽然学术界一直关注社交媒体的潜在动员功能，但它们也可能有助于复员论述：积极促进无投票权的社会传播。本文考察了在耶路撒冷市政选举的背景下关于动员与复员的讨论。由于绝大多数东耶路撒冷巴勒斯坦人一直在抵制耶路撒冷的市政选举，这是一个有力的案例，可以通过社交媒体对话来检验复员行动如何发挥作用。使用对不同语言构建的 Twitter 内容的混合方法分析，我们的研究结果显示了动员和复员话语如何在同一选举事件中同时发生。不同语言的用户——反映了不同的社会和政治身份——以截然不同的方式解释选举，对政治参与的（不）平等有着切实的影响。因此，该研究在理论上对政治传播的几个领域做出了贡献，包括选举研究、地方政治和在线政治话语中的语言碎片化。