by Alessandra Maia Terra de Faria, Carlos Trucíos, and Marcelos Cantañeda de Araújo

Reviewed by Matheus Lucas Hebling

Find out what and how presidential candidates tweet and are tweeted.

Introduction

This research aimed to follow the tweets related to the main presidential candidates according to the opinion polls available for the 2022 elections in Brazil.

Results

Followers

Daily tweets spanning from October 3rd to October 29^th of 2022 (the day after the second turn elections in Brazil) were collected for each one of the candidates running in the Brazilian second turn presidential elections. Tweets were collected from both candidates’ timelines and Twitter users mentioning the candidates, totaling more than 69 million tweets, the largest volume of monthly data obtained since the beginning of the survey. Data were extracted through a Twitter API used exclusively for academic purposes and analyzed using R software.

The authors thank Twitter for the academic accounts granted to them.

Herein is the updated data (October versus September, data as of November 29th, 2022) of Twitter followers for each of the candidates.

• Bolsonaro – from 10.5 up to 11.2 million (about 6.7% of the increase in followers in comparison to the previous month)

• Lula – from 6.3 up to 7.5 million (about 19% of the increase in followers in comparison to the previous month)

Candidates’ tweets

In Figure 1, we report the number of tweets on the candidates’ timelines, among the last two running for the second turn that was part of our survey: Lula and Bolsonaro, according to the frequency with which the candidates tweeted in October.

Figure 1: Timelines

For the first time, we observed a considerable distance between the percentages of the manner in that candidates positioned themselves on the social network. Lula da Silva increased his activity substantially and Jair Bolsonaro decreased his interactions.

Figures 2 and 3 present the most frequent words in the candidates’ timeline tweets and the most frequent words in the candidates’ timeline tweets weighted by the inverse document frequency (TF-IDF), respectively.

Figure 2: Most frequently used words in the candidates’ timeline.

The analysis of the most frequent words in candidates’ timeline tweets (Figure 2) allows us to present a dominant scenery of subjects they deal with. In common, both profiles present the term “people” [“povo”] which was a novelty in September and was kept in the political public scenario of Twitter through October, in addition to “Brasil”, “Lula”, “Bolsonaro” and “country” [“país”]. If we observe Bolsonaro’s profile itself, the terms “bigger” [“maior”], “path” [“caminho”], “million” [“milhões”], “2022” and “against” [“contra”] stood out. Comprehensively, in Lula’s profile, the emphasis remained on the verb “to do” [“fazer”], now accompanied by the terms “folks” [“gente”], “day” [“dia”], “government” [“governo”] and the explanatory conjunction “because” [“porque”].

Figure 3 TF-IDF by candidates’ timeline

In Figure 3, the TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) reflects the frequency of words in candidate timeline tweets that are infrequent for the candidates. Thereby:

• In Lula’s profile, the verbs “to vote” [“votar”] and “know” [“sabe”] stand out, as well as the terms “president” [“presidente”], “universities” [“universidades”] and “hunger” [fome].

• It is remarkable that Bolsonaro’s profile presents no verbs. The terms that appear are “path” [“caminho”], “2022”, “reduction” [“redução”], “corruption” [“corrupção”], and “drugs” [“drogas”].

Tweets about the candidates

The total number of tweets mentioning each candidate is displayed in Figure 4 and the daily evolution in Figure 5.

Next, in Figure 4, we present, in descending order (from the most cited to the least cited), the total number of tweets that mentioned the name of each candidate surveyed in the month of October: Bolsonaro and Lula.

To collect the tweets mentioning the respective candidates, the words “Bolsonaro” and “Lula” were used as search criteria.

Figure 4: Number of tweets mentioning the candidates.

The volume of tweets about the candidates more than doubled. To give you an idea, in September the number of tweets mentioning Bolsonaro was 16,784,820 and Lula’s was 13,899,696.

The daily evolution of tweets mentioning each candidate is shown in Figure 5. We can observe that although Jair Bolsonaro remained in the lead for most of the second round, if we consider interactions on the social network, this fact did not make his advantage overwhelming, especially when we notice the number of followers that is largely favorable to him at that time and until the present day when compared to the opponent, then-candidate Lula da Silva, later elected president.

Figure 5: Daily evolution of tweets mentioning the candidates.

Word clouds 

Finally, we present below both word clouds with, excluding stop words, the top 100 words used in the interactions of Twitter users in October. For better visualization, each candidate’s name was taken from its cloud.

A word cloud is a graphical representation of the most frequent words within a text or set of texts.

When analyzing word clouds, each one corresponds to a candidate. It is important to point out that each candidate’s name was taken from its cloud, for better visualization of the associated words. It should also be noted that each cloud reflects the 100 most relevant words associated, excluding stop words, to each candidate in the interactions of Twitter users from the third day until the twenty-ninth of October.

In text analysis, stop words are quite common words such as “and”, “from”, “the”, etc. These words are not useful for analysis and are often removed before analysis.

Figure 6: Word cloud for Bolsonaro

Figure 7: Word cloud for Lula

When analyzing the clouds, we share the first impression of each one:

• Bolsonaro: “Lula” appears in the foreground alone. In the background, we have the words “president” [“presidente”] and “Brasil”. Then “video”, “against” [“contra”], “in”, “government” [“governo”], and “now” [“agora”].

• Lula: in the foreground, we see “president” [“presidente”], “Brasil” and the English preposition “in”. In the background stood out other English terms, that probably relate to the internalization of comments about Brazilian elections in 2022. We can observe the words “demand”, “withheld”, “Brazil” (with “z”), “PT”, “response”, “vote” [“voto”], “votes” [“votos”], “turn”, “has”, “account”, “learn”, “more”, “learn”, “legal” (The word legal in Portuguese has both possible meanings: as something “cool” and as something “juridical” as it means in English).

Sentiment analysis

The sentiment of each tweet was constructed by identifying the sentiments of the basic units (the words) using the Oplexicon v3.0 and Sentilex dictionaries, from the LexiconPT Package. Thus, each word found in the dictionaries receives 1, -1, or 0 scores, depending on whether the feeling is positive, negative, or neutral, respectively. Words not found in the dictionaries also receive a 0 score. The values assigned to each word within the tweet were added up, and depending on the result positive, negative, or zero, the sentiment of the tweet is classified. In Figure 8, feelings (Negative, Neutral, and Positive) are presented in percentages per candidate. It is possible to highlight a balance between the feelings expressed in the tweets of the three candidates. Such data will be monitored over time comparatively. This is a picture, a sentimental snapshot from the 03^rd until the 29^th of October on Twitter.

Candidate Lula obtained a higher percentage of positive and neutral feelings compared to candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who obtained the highest percentage of tweets classified as negative comparatively (31.49%).

Figure 8: Sentiments of tweets per candidate

Next, it will be possible to look at the word cloud of each candidate, separately, according to the feelings attributed to each tweet, in Figures 9 and 10. Words in pink appear in tweets rated as associated with positive feelings, words in blue appear in tweets rated as associated with negative feelings, and words in beige appear in tweets rated as neutral. The word clouds are considered the 200 most frequent words.

Figure 9: Word cloud Sentiments for Bolsonaro

Figure 10: Word cloud Sentiments for Lula

• Bolsonaro: Tweets related to the candidate Bolsonaro that were classified as associated with positive sentiments are characterized by words such as “in”, “learn”, “Brazil”, “response”, “demand”, “account”, “more”, “to”, “withheld”, “has”, “been”. Tweets classified as associated with negative feelings are characterized by words such as “to vote” [“votar”], “Roberto Jefferson”[1], “bad guy” [“bandido”], “dude” [“cara”]. Finally, tweets considered neutral highlight “move” [“mexa”], “salary” [“salário”], “Janones[2]”, “Lula”, “22”, “censored” [“censurou”].

• Lula: Tweets related to candidate Lula that were classified as associated with positive feelings are characterized by words such as “in”, “learn”, “been”, “legal”, “demand”, “account”, “response”, “more”, “has”, “to”, “withheld”, “Brazil”. The tweets classified as negative are characterized by “to vote” [“votar”], followed by “corruption” [“corrupção”], “dude” [“cara”], and “convict” [“presidiário”]. Finally, tweets with neutral sentiment are mainly characterized by the terms “Bolsonaro” and “president” [“president”], followed by “turno” [“turn”] and “13”.

Final comments

The presentation of this dataset aimed to contribute to interpretations about the movement on Twitter of presidential candidates in the 2022 elections in Brazil, as well as about what is said about them in the interactions of users of the platform, considering a long-term analysis, with data collected from April to October 2022. This Report considers data until the last day after elections in October, in comparison to what was found in September. The material obtained before can be found and compared with former Reports of August, July, June, May, and  April.

[1] Known as “the sniper of Bolsonaro” (https://congressoemfoco.uol.com.br/area/pais/bob-jeff-o-sniper-de-bolsonaro/), Roberto Jefferson’s account on Twitter ( @bobjeffcensored ) was suspended in 2021, after what he was indicted and arrested for the first time. ( https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-presidential-election-season-is-marred-by-violennce-11664632154). In 2022, by the moment opinion polls suggested that candidate Lula would finally defeat candidate Bolsonaro, former congressman Mr. Jefferson violated conditions of his house arrest, posting a video on social media verbally attacking a justice of the Supreme Court. As the Federal Police arrived at his home in the countryside of Rio de Janeiro to escort him back to jail, Mr. Jefferson welcomed them with dozens of shots from his military-grade assault rifle, as well as two grenades. The ensuing standoff was an unmitigated disaster for the Bolsonaro campaign, which seemed confused about how to react. (Read more about the incident at: https://brazilian.report/cartoons/2022/10/27/bolsonaro-roberto-jefferson-radicalism-violence/). The international press noticed by them that there was a 40% increase in violence against candidates during that moment in Brazil, with 140 attacks between July and September of 2022. That was considered one of the most bitter campaigns since the country’s return to democracy in 1985, marked by a series of brutal killings that police believe were politically motivated. (Find more about that topic at: https://www.wsj.com/articles/brazils-presidential-election-season-is-marred-by-violence-11664632154

[2]Representative André Janones (@AndreJanonesAdv) is the son of a domestic worker and a wheelchair-bound father from a small city in the interior of Brazil. He paid his way through law school by working as a bus fare collector and only became a federal lawmaker in 2019. He joined forces with candidate Lula’s campaign in August, and he was the most prominent Lula ally to drop the gloves in a bruising run-off race that took even Bolsonaro’s campaign by surprise. (Read more about his influence at https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/how-maverick-brazil-lawmaker-helped-lula-beat-bolsonaros-propaganda-machine-2022-11-10/ )

Alessandra Maia Terra de Faria, Social Sciences Department at PUC-RIO / PPGCS – UFRRJ. E-mail: alessandramtf@puc-rio.br

Carlos Trucíos, Department of Statistics, University of Campinas. E-mail: ctrucios@unicamp.br

Marcelo Castañeda de Araujo, Department of Business/UFRJ.

by Matheus A. Botelho and Denise Cardozo

Reviewed by Matheus Lucas Hebling

In recent years, political scientists, public policy managers, and other bureaucrats at different levels dealt with incredibly contradictory processes in the formulation of public policies, especially in the federal government.

The government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro (2019-2022) reversed the logic of formulation and implementation of public policies that seemed to have been sedimented in recent decades, much of this due to the consolidation of democratic institutions after the enactment of the Federal Constitution of 1988, which solidified three assumptions for organizing the political and social sphere in Brazil: overcoming military authoritarianism by expanding social participation and electoral and party processes, expansion of political and social rights, in addition to establishing the division between the three powers and check mechanisms and balances (Avritzer, 2020).

We highlight another position regarding the concept and purpose of public policies by Saraiva (2006, p. 27), which he defines as “a flow of public decisions, aimed at maintaining social balance or introducing imbalances aimed at modifying this reality”. Saraiva’s definition seems more connected to the agreement established by the 1988 federal constitution and Latin American constitutionalism, particularly when establishing the “fundamental objectives of the republic”, in its art. 3, called by many jurists as a transforming clause (Bercovici, 2013).

Saraiva’s position seems to us to be very connected with the normative and axiological indications of the 1988 federal constitution. Maria Paula Dallari Bucci reminds us that the issue of public policies gained space in Brazil from the 1990s onwards, “aspiring to settle the social debt, for the realization of social rights, with the ambitious and generous treatment given to it by the Federal Constitution of 1988” (2021, p. 25).

What we assume for our considerations below, about the government of Jair Bolsonaro, is that, not always, or rarely, the decision-making agents or policy implementers were those who promoted alternatives to social problems that, in one way or another, enter the agenda-setting of the media, and also of the government ( policy agenda-setting ) since the various instances of the federal government were occupied by military personnel from the three armed forces, disproportionately, preferred to the detriment of scientists, specialists in public policies, technicians and so on. (Capella and Brasil, 2015; Avritzer, 2020).

Usually, formulators of alternatives, known as policy communities or members of the policy subsystem, make up ministerial offices, non-governmental organizations, unions, and universities, among other organizations, and participate in the political process in different ways (Capella and Brasil, 2015), however, what we observe during the years of government was the removal of these formulators of alternatives, whether in command positions [1]in different spheres of government, or the impracticability of the functioning of national councils for the formulation, evaluation, and social control of public policies [2].

The attempt by the then government was responsible for making it impossible for a dozen of these councils to function, including the Council to Combat Sexual Violence against Children and Adolescents, the Council for the Elderly, the Council to Combat LGBT+ Discrimination, among many others [3].

Several factors lead us to believe that in recent years the federal government has adopted an irrational logic and conditions contrary to the evidence, which seems to us to be the path to be adopted in consolidated democracies. The allocation of resources without technical criteria with what was called the “Secret Budget” generated budget disparities between different states and municipalities, the most urgent needs of each location or region were left aside to the detriment of the interests of parliamentarians according to its influence in the political field, indicating, therefore, that the irrationality and paradoxes in the decision-making process in public policies during the government of Jair Bolsonaro did not come only from the presidency of the republic and its ministerial team. The clientelistic logic is resumed as a political grammar at the federal level – if one day it ceased to be -, in the relationships established by members of the national congress and their respective voters, to the detriment of universalist procedures (Nunes, 2019).

In addition, the inhumanity in the conduct of governance at the federal level over the Covid-19 pandemic also points to the conduct in the opposite direction to scientific evidence, contrary to social indicators and the recommendations of experts at that time.

The reconstruction of the Democratic State of Law must be guided by a coalition between bureaucracy and politics ( politics ), uniting technique to political processes in the conduct of policies ( policy ) based on evidence, standardizing it whenever possible, since the concept of evidence is still not a consensus in the literature on the subject, therefore, it is necessary to deepen this debate (Pinheiro, 2020), without, however, fooling ourselves by imagining that the transposition of evidence to the normative sphere can solve problems since positive law does not is enough to improve decision-making processes in public policies, especially in implementation and in its conduction by bureaucracy at street level (Lotta, 2023)

The democratic setback in the Bolsonaro government was, in addition to threats to institutions, the removal of policies communities and the policy networks of decision-making processes in the formulation, evaluation, and social control of public policies, as already mentioned. This withdrawal, sometimes gradually, sometimes abruptly, and radically [4], as in the extinction of FUNAI’s regional instances, which resulted in major losses in the implementation of policies.

The intersection between technique and politics, with bureaucrats in control of legality and elected officials in control of legitimacy, may be able to resume the interrupted construction (Furtado, 1992) and readjust the institutional order that was slowly consolidated between the promulgation of the Constitution, in 1988, and the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016.

We reached the end of our contribution with three propositions, composing a premise to continue this debate on the democratic setbacks in the formulation, implementation, evaluation, and social control of public policies in the government of Jair Bolsonaro, between 2019 and 2022:

1. Jair Bolsonaro’s inauguration in 2019 implied the adoption of an agenda of anti-scientific measures with little or no support in evidence;

2. As a result of the first premise, experts, scientists, bureaucrats, and policy networks have naturally withdrawn or been withdrawn by the government from decision-making and social control;

3. Finally, these measures led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Brazilians during the Covid-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2022, a reduction in vaccination coverage rates for other diseases, the return of Brazil to the United Nations hunger map, the expansion of social inequalities, in addition to the ineffectiveness and inefficiency of a series of adopted policies.

What we deduce is that the legal field and/or positive law must be able to curb the implementation of public policies that are out of line with the real needs of the population and that have dubious effectiveness or results, using it as a mechanism of fiscal responsibility, overcoming the stigma of fiscal responsiveness with austerity, but associating it with responsibility for the quality of public spending. This is the true need for intervention and judicial control of public policies.

References

AVRITZER, Leonardo. Política e antipolítica: a crise do governo Bolsonaro. Todavia, 2020.

BERCOVICI, Gilberto. A Constituição brasileira de 1988, as “constituições transformadoras” e o “novo constitucionalismo latino-americano”. Revista Brasileira de Estudos Constitucionais – RBEC. Ano 7. n. 26. p. 285-305, 2013.

BRASIL, F. G.; CAPELLA, A. C. N. O Processo de Agenda-Setting para os Estudos das Políticas Públicas. RP3 – Revista de Pesquisa em Políticas Públicas, v. 1, n.1, 2015

BUCCI, Maria Paula Dallari. Fundamentos para uma teoria jurídica das políticas públicas. São Paulo: Saraiva Jur, 2021.

CAPELLA, Ana Cláudia Niedhardt; BRASIL, Felipe Gonçalves. Análise de políticas públicas: uma revisão da literatura sobre o papel dos subsistemas, comunidades e redes. Novos estudos CEBRAP, p. 57-76, 2015.

DIREITO E ECONOMIA: Políticas públicas e regulação por evidências. [Locução de] Ana Frazão. Entrevistada: Gabriela Lotta., 16 mar. 2023. Podcast.  Disponível em: https://open.spotify.com/episode/28eIaPEA1dbOV17f0vKqxx. Acesso em 22. mar. 2023.

DYE, Thomas R. Understanding public policy, New Jersey, Florida State University, 2000.

Elias, Norbert. O Processo Civilizador 2: formação do Estado e civilização. Companhia das Letras, 1993.

FURTADO, Celso. Brasil: A construção interrompida. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1992

NUNES, Edson. A gramática política do Brasil: Clientelismo, Corporativismo e Insulamento burocrático. Garamond, 2019.

PINHEIRO, Maurício Mota Saboya. Políticas públicas baseadas em evidências (PPBEs): delimitando o problema conceitual. Texto para Discussão, Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas Aplicadas, Brasília, 2020.

SOUZA, Celina. Políticas públicas: uma revisão da literatura. Sociologias, p. 20-45, 2006.

[1]As in the case of the resignation of Fernando Galvão from the presidency of the National Institute for Space Research, INPE, after disclosure by the agency about the rampant increase of approximately 88% of illegal deforestation in the Amazon.

[2]Decree 9,759, of April 16, 2019, reformulated the operating logic of federal government councils and collective deliberation bodies. The decree was revoked on January 1, 2023, by President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva.

[3]https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2019/05/entenda-decreto-que-poe-fim-a-conselhos-federais-com-atuacao-da-sociedade.shtml

[4]https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2022/10/governo-bolsonaro-extingue-conselho-fiscal-e-comites-de-participacao-indigena-da-funai.shtml

* Matheus A. Botelho has a MA and is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the Federal University of São Carlos (PPGPOL/UFSCar).
** Denise Cardozo has a MA in Political Science from the Federal University of São Carlos (PPGPOL/UFSCar).