Elite versus mass polarization on the Brazilian impeachment proceedings of 2016

Abstract

Political events are often topics of heated discussions around the globe, revealing opinion divergences of the population. These contrasting ideas characterize political polarization, which has been boosted by the popularization of Internet access and social media over the last few years. This work studies political polarization by developing computational methods to analyze online and offline data in the context of the 2016 impeachment proceedings of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. We quantify the polarization among the Brazilian politicians at the House of Representatives (offline analysis) and among the Brazilian general public on Twitter (online analysis). We also looked at the popularity of politicians on Twitter and contrasted it with the polarization of the general public on this same media. Our results show that the politicians’ polarization increased after December of 2015, coinciding with the launch of the impeachment proceedings. The general public presented high values of polarization during the whole period, also revealing that the population was more polarized than its representatives. The politicians’ popularity analysis also shows that anti-impeachment politicians had a higher impact on the public opinion for the whole period of study than pro-impeachment politicians, which were popular only during a short but critical three months period.