The structuring of discourses on twitter during the 2017 French presidential election

This article describes and studies information exchanges on Twitter during the 2017 French presidential election campaign. Grounded in the theoretical framework of social representations, it investigates the discourses of the support communities of the five main candidates, using methods drawn from network analysis and the statistical analysis of text data. The findings highlight the weight of the psycho-sociological processes that regulate the way social groups relate to their political environment, and the way in which this relationship materializes through the structuring of communication on Twitter. This article thus shows how the ideological background of the different political communities can regulate their perception of certain objects of social representation connected to the presidential campaign.