From Leaks to Ripples? An Analysis of Brazilian Political Discourse on Social Media

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: Using text-as-data methods, we describe and analyze the political agenda of Brazilian politicians, members of the public, and media outlets during the first year of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. In this period, the first Car Wash Leaks were released: a series of journalistic articles suggesting improper behavior of judges and prosecutors involved with Brazil’s main anti-corruption operation. Our study of over 5.5 million tweets is based on Barberá et al. (2019)’s framework: We use an LDA model to uncover agenda topics and a vector-autoregressive approach to study the association between shifts in attention to a topic by one group and subsequent shifts of attention by other groups. We find that (i) the agenda of right and left-wing members of the public have a greater correspondence with each other than with the agenda of politicians with similar ideological leaning; (ii) attention shifts of the public have a greater association with subsequent attention shifts of politicians than the inverse relationship. In mapping the political agendas to the Car Wash Leaks, we find evidence that (iii) right-wing politicians ignore the Car Wash Leaks during their release whereas other actors increase their attention to the topic and (iv) the framing of corruption-related topics when new leaks were released was polarized.

Type of resource	text
Date created	June 4, 2021

Author	Paixao de Queiroz, Ana Carolina
Advisor	Gentzkow, Matthew

Subject	Brazil
Subject	agenda-setting
Subject	political discourse
Subject	Stanford Economics Department
Genre	Thesis

Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/wn208jr2311

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Preferred Citation: Paixao de Queiroz, Ana Carolina. (2021). From Leaks to Ripples? An Analysis of Brazilian Political Discourse on Social Media. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/wn208jr2311

Stanford University, Department of Economics, Honors Theses

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