Are Frames of Conflict Extended to Tackle Corruption Scandals? The Case of the Spanish Government’s Corrupt Plots

Abstract

Perceptions of corruption can have serious effects on the functioning of democracies. Consequently, the appropriate communicative management of scandal narratives can make a difference to any political player affected by them. Spain has recently experienced these dynamics with the so-called ‘Begoña Gómez’ and ‘Koldo García’ cases, both pointing to the President and other high-profile members of the National Government. By employing a software tool for qualitative analysis of messages, we collect all the mentions of key terms and people related to these two alleged influence peddling cases in which the Spanish Government has been involved throughout the last year and a half. Word clouds with the key terms of both cases have been obtained to detect the linguistic framing devices adopted by members of the Spanish Government, their opponents and six digital newspapers in the social media platform X, thus allowing us to describe the communicative frames in conflict in the public sphere. We also analyze the bonds between these key terms and sentiment statistics for the messages in which they are employed during the first quarter of 2025. Rather than taking control of the narrative, the members of the Government and Socialist Party avoid mentioning the scandals, but they do depict a political context in which collusion between the right-wing and the far right-wing represents a threat for their electoral base. The media are more active than the politicians themselves in framing the cases of corruption, generally more as a judicial than a political matter.