Lexical Architectures of Identity in Indonesia’s 2024 Presidential Debate (Round Three): Mapping of Religion, Parties, and Civics

Meiselina Irmayanti (Universitas Bengkulu)

Proceedings of International Conference on Religion, Social and Humanities
Vol 4 (2025): Religion and Social Transformation in the Digital Era

This study examines how identity is performed and deliberation sustained in public reactions to Indonesia’s 2024 presidential debate (Round Three) on YouTube. Grounded in Social Identity Theory (SIT), the study analyzes comments from two official streams, TVRI and KPU, using a transparent, event-anchored text-mining pipeline in Voyant: word frequency profiling, collocation mapping, topic segmentation with dictionary scoring, and KWIC-based frame diagnostics. The current research operationalizes deliberative emphasis via a topic-conditioned civics–morality ratio contrasting civic-institutional vocabulary (e.g., konstitusi, DPR, KPU, prosedur) with moral–absolutist tokens (e.g., halal/haram, kafir, dosa, benar/salah). Results are consistent across tools. Collocation networks are leader-centric and role/ticket-forward, with weak coupling between religious labels and candidate names. Topic panels diverge by venue: TVRI concentrates virtue predicates and salutations with only episodic institutional references, yielding a low civics–morality ratio; KPU is saturated with institutional and process terms, producing a high ratio. KWIC corroborates this split. TVRI windows around candidate tokens are dominated by acclamation/attack and scoreboard talk, while KPU windows embed address forms within rule-following, evidence, and programmatic language (e.g., aturan, bukti, data, program, prinsip). The study concludes that, during this debate, identity talk on YouTube was personalized rather than confessional or party-fused, and deliberative emphasis was contingent on institutional framing: the electoral authority’s channel scaffolded procedural reasoning, whereas the broadcaster’s thread incentivized expressive partisanship. The civics–morality ratio, conditioned by topics and triangulated with KWIC and collocation, offers an interpretable, reproducible indicator for assessing event-time discourse quality in platformed political talk. Keywords: Social Identity Theory; identity politics; Indonesia 2024 election; YouTube comments; religion.