What do State Institutions Say? Twitter as a Public Communication Tool During the Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff

The objective of this article is to analyze the content of public communications in situations of political crisis. We aim to establish whether and to what extent there was partisan instrumentalization of the digital social media channels administered by State institutions during the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. We analyzed all posts published between 2015 and 2016 on the official Twitter profiles of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, Federal Senate, Presidential Palace and Federal Supreme Court. We considered all posts with the words ‘impeachment’, ‘impedimento’, (‘impeachment’) ‘afastamento’, (‘impeachment’) and ‘golpe’ (‘coup’) (n=795). Our methodology comprised a combination of quantitative (descriptive statistics) and qualitative (content analysis) strategies. We found that the Federal Senate’s twitter profile most frequently posted the word ‘impeachment’, while the term ‘golpe’ was most frequently posted by the Presidential Palace profile. Over half of the publications fit into the category of ‘dissemination of news’. The Presidential Palace’s Twitter profile exhibited a distinct pattern of behavior, predominantly posting tweets associated with the ‘promotion of ideas and expression of positions’. Therefore, the Presidential Palace favored a communications strategy with a partisan bias. This research is relevant as it uses empirical data to discuss phenomena tied to studies on public and political communication.

本研究旨在分析政治危机情境下的公共传播内容，并探究在迪尔玛·罗塞夫（Dilma Rousseff）弹劾案期间，国家机构运营的数字化社交媒体渠道是否存在党派工具化现象，以及其程度如何。本研究分析了2015年至2016年间，巴西众议院、联邦参议院、总统府以及联邦最高法院的官方Twitter账号发布的全部推文。我们筛选出包含"impeachment"（弹劾）、"impedimento"（弹劾）、"afastamento"（弹劾）以及"golpe"（政变）的全部推文，共计795条。本研究采用定量（描述性统计）与定性（内容分析）相结合的研究方法。研究结果显示，联邦参议院的Twitter账号最常使用"impeachment"一词，而总统府账号则最频繁使用"golpe"（政变）一词。超过半数的推文属于"新闻传播"类别。总统府的Twitter账号展现出独特的运营模式，其发布的推文大多与"理念推广与立场表达"相关。由此可见，总统府采用了带有党派偏向的传播策略。本研究通过实证数据探讨与公共及政治传播研究相关的议题，具有一定的学术价值。