Party competition under dictatorships: evidence from congressional speech in Brazil

This paper examines the role of political competition and emotional rhetoric on congressional discourse during the Brazilian military dictatorship era. Leveraging historical archives of Congressional records, we curated a comprehensive database of parliamentary speeches from 1975 to 1986. Specifical...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Funtowicz, Alan
Tipo de recurso: tesis de maestría
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2024
País:Brasil
Institución:Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
Repositorio:Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:teses.usp.br:tde-23072024-153716
Acceso en línea:https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12138/tde-23072024-153716/
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Competição partidária
Congressional speech
Dictatorships
Discurso parlamentar
Ditaduras
Emotive rhetoric
Natural language processing
Party competition
Processamento de linguagem natural
Retórica emocional
Descripción
Sumario:This paper examines the role of political competition and emotional rhetoric on congressional discourse during the Brazilian military dictatorship era. Leveraging historical archives of Congressional records, we curated a comprehensive database of parliamentary speeches from 1975 to 1986. Specifically, our analysis explores an exogenous political reform that increased party competition within the opposition during the redemocratization phase under the military regime. By combining theoretical frameworks drawn from the party competition literature with newly developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, our findings unveil a significant increase in the primary opposition partys use of predominantly negative emotional rhetoric. These results highlight the impact of political competition on nonpolicy attributes in party strategies and demonstrate how NLP methods can be integrated with models of party competition to study political speech.