Affective Action and Delayed Dissent: Why Colombia’s Referendum Opponents Tweeted Their Outrage a Year After the Theft of Their Vote

Abstract

This interdisciplinary thesis explores the reasons behind a delayed response from Colombia’s peace deal opponents following the government’s overturning of their referendum victory. Existing literature failed to explain why a group of individuals would not immediately respond to a significant event, and why an eventual response would take place on Twitter, rather than in the form of a physical demonstration. This thesis develops an innovative methodology from the fields of communications and political and social psychology to draw nuanced significance from a population of tweets. This research finds that deeply rooted psychological predispositions explain both the timing of the peace deal opponents’ response and the virtual form in which it took place. The research here advances the uses of Twitter data in the social sciences, particularly for the study of social movements and human behavior.