Abstract
The objective of this article is to analyze the content of public communications in situations of political crisis. We aim to establish whether and to what extent there was partisan instrumentalization of the digital social media channels administered by State institutions during the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. We analyzed all posts published between 2015 and 2016 on the official Twitter profiles of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, Federal Senate, Presidential Palace and Federal Supreme Court. We considered all posts with the words ‘impeachment’, ‘impedimento’, (‘impeachment’) ‘afastamento’, (‘impeachment’) and ‘golpe’ (‘coup’) (n=795). Our methodology comprised a combination of quantitative (descriptive statistics) and qualitative (content analysis) strategies. We found that the Federal Senate’s twitter profile most frequently posted the word ‘impeachment’, while the term ‘golpe’ was most frequently posted by the Presidential Palace profile. Over half of the publications fit into the category of ‘dissemination of news’. The Presidential Palace’s Twitter profile exhibited a distinct pattern of behavior, predominantly posting tweets associated with the ‘promotion of ideas and expression of positions’. Therefore, the Presidential Palace favored a communications strategy with a partisan bias. This research is relevant as it uses empirical data to discuss phenomena tied to studies on public and political communication.
Highlights
The objective of this article is to analyze the content of public communications in situations of political crisis
MARQUES, 2017; ZÉMOR, 2012), or do they seek to fulfill an instrumental role by aiming to favor the perspectives of leaders, governments and parties (BARROS and MIOLA, 2015; BUCCI, 2015; WEBER, 2007)? In order to investigate whether and to what extent State public communications are instrumentalized in this way, we proposed a study of posts on the official Twitter profiles of four Brazilian State institutions: the Chamber of Deputies, the Federal Senate, the Presidential Palace and the Federal Supreme Court (STF)
Discussion of the results and conclusions This article proposed two objectives: to classify and understand the content relating to the impeachment process published on the Twitter profiles administered by the Chamber of Deputies, Federal Senate, Presidential Palace and Federal Supreme Court; and to verify whether and to what extent, there was any instrumentalization of official communication platforms for partisan purposes
Summary
The Federal Senate, with 477 tweets, was the profile with the highest number of posts, representing almost 60% of all publications during the period. Was the Chamber of Deputies, with 132 posts, the Presidential Palace with 101 and the Federal Supreme Court with 85
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