Abstract

Social networks offer a digital communication space that helps to disseminate the messages of political actors. Studying the strategies used on these channels can help to understand social dynamics, especially in the context of electoral processes. However, most research on political communication focuses on democracies in the Northern Hemisphere. To fill this gap, this study examines the Facebook accounts of Chilean political actors during the first round of the 2021 presidential election campaign, analyzing from a quantitative perspective, the content of the posts of the seven main parties and candidates. The corpus consists of a sample of 909 posts that were manually coded according to the categories of topic, populism, and negative campaigning. At the party level, differences are examined on the basis of ideology and institutional novelty. The results show that newer and more radical opposition political formations use populist rhetoric and divisive issues. However, the level of populism in this campaign is lower than in other regions, and the absence of attacks against ethnic or cultural minorities stands out. The analysis of user engagement shows that newer parties generate more interaction with their content and gain greater visibility as a result. These findings provide a detailed insight into the digital communication strategies used during the election campaign in Chile and help to broaden the focus of political communication studies to the South American context.