Get Out the Vote with Violence - Online Mobilization in Violent Elections

How do partisans use and respond to narratives of violence in contexts of violent elections? We develop a theory to explain when and why party supporters respond to violence narratives intended to galvanize their copartisans in electoral periods. We test this theory using computational text analysis on over 1.2 million posts from 171 public groups supporting major candidates and parties on Facebook in Côte d’Ivoire from 2019-2020. We examine whether narratives of violence are more effective at incurring partisan support through engagements (e.g. likes, shares, comments) on social media. We show how leveraging social media data can provide real-time insight into the processes underpinning partisan use of violence information in elections.