Los perdedores de las elecciones presidencialesderrotas electorales en las Américas

Abstract

ABSTRACT The focus of this research is the electoral defeats and losers of presidential elections from the perspective of political consent to the defeat. The starting point is that without the losers there would be no democratic game, and that the winners represent only ‘one side of the coin’ in the democratic concert. This study is concerned with how the losing candidates respond to electoral defeat in the presidential elections and, within them, in the specific cases in which the results are to close, how they react to their defeat and what is the course of action they take afterwards through the analysis of their response of the content of their speech. This thesis delves into the acceptance or rejection of defeat. And, for this purpose, it is proposed to build a typology on political consent to defeat in order to identify consent (acceptance or rejection) and response (institutional or challenging) as well as the dimensions that configure the types of losers by combining them. The study is performed through the content analysis of the political concession speeches with the Nvivo software. The technique consisted in the codification of all speeches through the formation of a framework that identifies the main attributes of the typology and the other attributes that encompass the scheme of the speech domains: 1) electoral and campaign; 2) institutions and other actors; 3) general; 4) post-electoral; 5) protest - mobilization. This allowed us to observe and compare each of the speeches, identifying patterns and behaviors of the losers, as well as finding out how each candidate spends their 'energy stock' on their concession speech. With the data and the content analysis performed, the final step of the template was completed and the cases analyzed were located in a dimension within the typology in each of the corresponding cells: mature, disloyal, moderate and radical.