Social Media Campaigns and Political Agenda-Setting: The Case of Mexico

The aim of this thesis is to understand how social media campaigns are affecting political agenda-setting in a new democracy such as Mexico. The thesis takes into consideration the role of traditional media and electoral events as part of elements with prospects of affecting political agenda-setting and social media campaigns. The thesis relies on combined methods to understand the dynamics of the variables above mentioned. A qualitative analysis performs an in-depth study of five paradigmatic social media campaigns. In the quantitative part of the thesis, timelines, multivariate and bivariate regressions are used to observe correlations between the variables. The results of the thesis provide some evidence regarding a correlation between social media campaigns size and levels of political agenda-setting affectation. Results also show that for this kind of campaigns, social media has a strong influence over traditional media. Finally, the study also provides evidence suggesting a correlation on how left leaning traditional media and opposition parties are more prone to be influenced by social media campaigns.