Tweeting in defeat: How candidates concede and claim victory in 140 characters

Abstract

The concession and victory speech is a ritual in American politics, described by Corcoran as a “rite of capitulation,” in which both candidates at the end of an election sanction the legitimacy of the process, agree on the outcome, and start the political transition. Concession and victory speeches emerged as a distinct convention in the television era, but as web services like Twitter take on a larger role in electoral politics, traditions like the concession are being adapted to new formats. The literature has identified a series of substantive and procedural conventions for conceding and claiming victory, but it is unclear how these conventions hold up as technology evolves. An examination of 200 Twitter feeds from congressional, senatorial, and gubernatorial candidates during the 2010 midterm elections shows that while candidates touch some of the traditional concession themes, the procedural rules to concession have not migrated unchanged to the online world.

Critically assessing digital documents: materiality and the interpretative role of software

“…These influences are best illuminated in the efforts to digitise that are able to demonstrate a shift in interpretative potential (Levy, 2001;McGregor, 2014), and when expectations built into software design may exclude forms of expression (Junker & Luchian, 2007) or encourage particular types of authorship (Mirer & Bode, 2015). When it comes to the digitally native document, our awareness of co-authorship and interpretation lessens as we lack a point of comparison.…”

“…These selective facilitations of use afford us both new possibilities and new limitations. Whether we are shifting professional practices in response to hard character limits on Twitter (Mirer & Bode, 2015) or being threatened with cultural exclusion due to a lack of language encoding (Junker & Luchian, 2007), the author of any digital document is an entanglement of a human author and their software tools.…”

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“…Previous works on election matters and speeches (Opeibi 2007;Osisanwo 2011Osisanwo , 2012Osisanwo , 2013Osisanwo , 2016aOsisanwo , 2016bOsisanwo , 2016cOsisanwo , 2017Osisanwo 2013a, 2013b) have focused on different aspects of election and election defeat, other than the experiential meanings construable through the transitivity processes in election defeat. Related studies by Weaver (1982), Corcoran (1994Corcoran ( , 1998, Lakoff (2001), and Mirer and Bode (2015) have discussed the themes, generic structure and rhetorical style of victory and concession speeches. Okoye and Mmadike (2016) and Koussouhon and Dadjo (2016), relying on speech acts and pragmatics, identify the illocutionary acts and the impacts of context in concession speeches.…”

Political communication in Social Networks Election campaigns and Digital Data Analysis: A Bibliographic Review

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“…Of considerable relevance is the link between electoral communication and major events covered by traditional media, such as leaders' television debates, party assemblies, talk shows, "concession speech" or news items of general interest (Diakopoulos & Shamma, 2010;Bruns & Burgess, 2011;Jürgens et al, 2011;Elmer, 2012;Jungherr et al, 2012Jungherr et al, , 2013Larsson & Moe, 2012Bruns & Highfield, 2013;Hanna et al, 2013;Jungherr, 2013Jungherr, , 2014McKinney et al, 2013;Mirer & Bode, 2013;Bentivegna, 2014;Graham et al, 2014;Lietz et al, 2014;Kalsnes et al, 2014;Sanjari et Khazraee, 2014;Štětkaet et al, 2014;Vargo et al, 2014;Conway et al, 2015;Jungherr et al, 2016). In particular, messages peak at crucial moments such as when the public flocks to Social Networks for comments (Bentivegna & Marchetti, 2014;Lin et al, 2014), often, with evaluative, oppositional, ironic-denigrating or conspiracist readings and context considerations, with collective negotiations of meanings (Shamma et al, 2009;Ampofo et al, 2011;Elmer, 2012;Haw-thorne et al, 2013;Jungherr, 2014;Kalsnes et al, 2014;Kreiss, Meadows & Remensperger, 2014;Trillng, 2014;Coffey et al, 2015;Freelon & Karpf, 2015;Rowe, 2015;Jennings et al, 2017;Pătruţ, 20...…”