#IamMetiria: A qualitative case study of agonistic welfare policy debates on Twitter
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Date
2022-08-01
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Abstract
#IAmMetiria began on Twitter in July 2017, after a speech by New Zealand Green Party co-leader, Metiria Turei, challenging political consensus on welfare policy. Turei confessed she lied to authorities in the 1990s, prompting a flood of supportive posts. Soon after, right-wing oppositional tweets were posted (n = 288) contesting the arguments of Turei and her supporters, and left-wing responses to those arguments (n = 214). Drawing on Mouffe’s dissensual model, this article undertakes a close, qualitative analysis of those 502 tweets, in order to move towards a method for empirically distinguishing between antagonistic and agonistic tweets, identifying the latter as putting forward arguments which can be identified by the researcher and potentially engaged with by ideologically opposed adversaries. The results show a majority of the tweets were agonistic, with implications for the future study of social media policy debates and for the online practices of scholars.
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Agonism, debate, democracy, Laclau, Mouffe, social media, Twitter, welfare policy
Citation
Salter LA. (2022). #IamMetiria: A qualitative case study of agonistic welfare policy debates on Twitter. New Media and Society. 24. 8. (pp. 1932-1949).