Emotional Rhetoric and Political Competition Under Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from Brazilian Congressional Speeches

Raphael Corbi () and Alan Funtowicz ()

No 2025_11, Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP)

Abstract: This paper investigates the role of political competition and emotional rhetoric on congressional discourse in the context of Brazil`s transition from a two-party to a multi-party system during the late stages of its military dictatorship. Drawing on historical Congressional archives, we built a comprehensive database of parliamentary speeches from 1975 to 1986. Our analysis focuses on a political reform that intensified opposition party competition during the re-democratization process, revealing a notable increase in the use of negative emotional rhetoric by the primary opposition party. These findings highlight how political competition shapes non-policy aspects of party strategies and demonstrate the effectiveness of using natural language processing methods to analyze political speech.

Keywords: Party competition; Congressional speech; Emotive rhetoric; Natural Language Processing; Dictatorships (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C55 D72 P16 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08-14
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.repec.eae.fea.usp.br/documentos/Corbi_Funtowicz_11WP.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spa:wpaper:2025wpecon11

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Pedro Garcia Duarte ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).