Speech and deforestation: evidence from the impact of Bolsonaro’s tweets in the brazilian Amazon

• Ano de defesa: 2020
• Autor(a) principal: Herschmann, Stela Luz Andreatta
• Orientador(a): Ribeiro, Daniela Campello da Costa
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Inglês: Politics; Leadership; Environment; Impact; Social media; Social norms; Behavior; Deforestation; Amazon
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/30421

Can a leader’s speech affect real-life outcomes? Can politicians’ messages in social media change the perceived societal acceptance of behavior, such as illegal deforestation? To answer these questions, I explore the specific context of the rise in Brazil’s politics of a very influential leader with a clear discourse on socio-environmental issues, Jair Bolsonaro, to analyze the relationship between speech and deforestation. By looking at his official Twitter account, I create a measure of the intensity of negative discourse on the environmental issues, and, by interacting it with political support in the 2018 election, I find evidence of the effect of his speech on deforestation. One standard deviation increase on Bolsonaro’s negative tweets’ measure is associated with 7.81% more deforestation in municipalities that supported him than municipalities that did not. The effect is significant and robust to different empirical model specifications and definitions of political support.