Digitize the political link? The electoral campaign in Río Cuarto and the participatory institutions in Buenos Aires City during the covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

The covid-19 pandemic and social distancing measures taken to confront it have strongly impacted political ties. Just as many aspects of daily life have had to be “digitized”, also a large part of the electoral campaigns and the forms of citizen participation were carried out in this way. This article proposes a comparison between two forms of activism and political ties at the local level: the campaign for the elections of the municipality authority of the City of Río Cuarto in 2020 (the first municipality in Argentina to hold elections in the pandemic) and the experiences of institutionalized citizen participation promoted by the Government of the City of Buenos Aires (which incorporated the platforms for synchronous encounters so widespread in the pandemic). Through in-depth interviews, non-participant observation of meetings, events, social networks and document analysis, we note how the digitalization of political ties caused by the pandemic tended to weaken the affective and collective dimensions of politics.