The presidential campaign of Jair Bolsonaro in Twitter: an analysis of the proeminence of traditional moral values as a discursive strategy

• Grant number: 20/09292-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2020
• End date: September 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science
• Principal Investigator: Sylvia Iasulaitis
• Grantee: Isabella Vicari
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Twitter is, in the contemporary scenario, an important political tool, since it enables horizontal communication between voters and candidates, allowing the development of new discursive strategies by the candidates. This investigation aims to analyze how the victorious candidate in the 2018 Brazilian presidential race, Jair Bolsonaro, took advantage of this digital social network to disseminate ideas, positions and propositions. Bearing in mind that the social and political values that circulate through the microblogging server also reflect the valuing orientations of a population, we aim to identify which values were employed by Bolsonaro during the electoral election and to verify which is the most prominent valuation dimension in his speech. With the help of the Content Analysis technique, we intend to analyze and categorize a corpus of 809 tweets, previously collected from the account @jairbolsonaro in the period between July 22, 2018 and October 27, 2018. The contents will be categorized according to four dimensions of cultural variance idealized by Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel: traditional values, as opposed to rational-secular values, and survival values, as opposed to self-expression values. Once the categorization is done, the two pairs of opposition will be transfigured in two different axes so that we can calculate an index of values. Based on an in-depth analysis of the data, we intend to support the hypothesis that, as demonstrated in an exploratory study on the first electoral round, Jair Bolsonaro prioritized traditional moral values during the course of his campaign, basing a rhetoric that pointed to Brazilian society as "misrepresented" due to the "inversion of values".