Party competition under dictatorships: evidence from congressional speech in Brazil

• Ano de defesa: 2024
• Autor(a) principal: Funtowicz, Alan
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Competição partidária; Congressional speech; Dictatorships; Discurso parlamentar; Ditaduras; Emotive rhetoric; Natural language processing; Party competition; Processamento de linguagem natural; Retórica emocional
• Link de acesso: https://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/12/12138/tde-23072024-153716/

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.