COMUNICACIÓN POLÍTICA, ELECCIONES Y DEMOCRACIA: LAS CAMPAÑAS DE DONALD TRUMP Y JAIR BOLSONARO

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This article aims to discuss possible impacts of digital political communication on Brazilian democracy, and democracy in general, considering 2016 presidential elections in United States and 2018, in Brazil. We propose a discussion within frameworks of Americanization, modernization, post-modernization and hypermediatization of campaigns, and in relation to John Dewey's idea of the eclipse of (1927). In this sense, we make a brief contextualization of both elections focusing especially on successful campaigns of both Donald Trump in United States and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. Both campaigns were analyzed as historical case studies, and more than 300 documents, including articles, news stories, reports and interviews, among other sources were read and analyzed by three distinct researchers. A content analysis was developed by using notion of computational propaganda as a reference, looking for practices that use data, algorithms, and automation to deliberately manage and disseminate information (and disinformation) in digital media. Following both contexts and discussions, we suggest: 1) a larger notion of hypermediatization as a framework for understanding digital political communication practices in electoral contexts, what we have called expanded hypermediatization; and 2) John Dewey's idea of the eclipse of to evaluate potential problems to public sphere raised by fragmentation of public into multiple mini-publics. In end, we hope to contribute to debates about how digital media may affect not only campaigns and elections, but also politics and democracy.