Keywords: electoral process, computational social sciences, information shortcuts, social media, voting behaviour

What do we know about the voting behaviour of Moroccans after the Arab Spring and during the 2011, 2015 and 2016 elections? The question is worth asking in the wake of the three elections organised after the popular protests of early 2011, known as the ‘20 February Movement’. It is the impact of information shortcuts and social media on voters' choices that raises questions.
In the political dialectic, these elections demonstrated the technical incapacity of the state apparatus to deal with a ‘spontaneous and rapid’ reshaping of the political scene. The popular will expressed at these polls was able to escape the lock-in techniques that accompanied the reconstruction of the political system after the military plots of 1971 and 1972. This marked a crucial turning point in the electoral process in Morocco, and revealed significant difficulties in the operation of the electoral rules (electoral engineering) established since the founding experiment (1960-1963).
Numerous studies have commented on these changes on the basis of political cleavages and ideal-types derived from Moroccan electoral literature. But few studies have looked at the new information technologies and their wider impact on electoral behaviours and citizens' relationships with politics.
The aim of our contribution is to propose a political analysis of the information shortcuts used by voters as tools for apprehending and evaluating electoral offers. Our approach will be based on the results of field surveys conducted on the influence of new information and communication technologies in shaping public opinion in Morocco in electoral contexts during the period 2011-2021. This includes information circulating on social media, including television channel pages, media pages, WhatsApp groups and the accounts of ‘influencers’ on social networks.
Based on a thematical analysis of a corpus containing 1200 posts published by influencers politically committed to the Justice and Development Party (PJD) on Facebook during the election campaign periods of 2011, 2015 and 2016, The results show that political mobilisation via social media played an important role in the dynamics of the PJD Party's electoral campaign through the implementation of an effective system for sharing the Party's political information shortcuts at national level, which destabilised the traditional electoral mobilisation tools used by competing parties.
This contribution will also present the methodological challenges encountered in conducting alternative polls using computational social sciences during election periods in Morocco.
References:
AKESTOUR, Malika & SKOURI Hassan. (2023). The Role and Impact of Social Media in Morocco's 2021 Elections, in African Scientific Journal « Volume 03, Numéro 19 ».
Tolbert, Caroline. J., & McNeal, Ramona. S. (2003). Unraveling the effects of the Internet on Political Participation? In Political Research Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 2.
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YAHYAOUI, Mostafa. (2024). La médiation électorale post-printemps arabe au Maroc : une redéfinition ou une reproduction des délimitations des lieux et des liens, in La frontière, Laboratoire des recherches interdisciplinaires en sciences humaines et sociales, Cahiers de la Recherche Scientifique, n° 53.