Populist Rhetoric: A Research Proposal

This paper proposes a research to if the populist rhetoric disseminated during the campaign for the 2016 American Election had an effect in the 2018 Brazilian Election that lead to the rise to power of Bolsonaro. I plan on coding the speeches from both Bolsonaro and Trump during their campaigns to determine how populist the rhetoric is. Using data on the demographics of the voters for each candidate to explore the similarities between the bases, will assist me in defining if the candidate’s rhetoric attracted the same types of voters. Finally, I wish to check for any similarities in choices of words to assess the impact in rhetoric. This is a proposal in which there is no results yet. However, with the further research, I hope to find if there was indeed an effect of Trump’s rhetoric in Bolsonaro’s rhetoric that lead him to become the next President of Brazil

Hello everyone my name is Vanessa Soares da Silva and today I will be presenting my research proposal on populist rhetoric

So, my research question is, “Did the populist rhetoric propagated in the US during 2016 election affected Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power in Brazil, and If so, how?”

A bit of a background on Jair Bolsonaro, he is the current President of Brazil. He is the first Brazilian president with a military background in a couple of decades.

He ran with PSL, a conservative social party. At this point in time he does not have a political party.

However, I want to focus on the speech that he propagated during the campaign trail that he had in 2018, because to me it was very similar to how Donald Trump Ran his campaign, with speeches that I will talk about later in the research.

Before we can continue, during my research on populism and populist rhetoric, I found this article that talked about the online coverage of elections, and they analyze populist statements.

I wanted to talk about the dimensions they present. First dimension they argue that there is in populist rhetoric is that the candidate/politician praises the public’s resilience.

They [candidates] appreciate how people persevered through the “awful” administration in place prior to theirs, and now they are there to help and actually further the interest of the population.

The second dimensions that they present is that populist rhetorics usually blame the elite for problems in the country because by creating that clear barrier between classes they can alienate the middle and working class.

The third dimension that they present is to create others. Meaning making other groups or group common enemies so the population knows that the candidate they are supporting, will fight for them against the threat

So I wanted to present here the three dimensions in examples of both candidates

Both Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro severely criticized the previous administrations and basically said that the administrations didn’t care for the countries interests. That would be the first dimension.

The second dimension, they do separate the working class from the elite.

Also, in the pools they [Trump and Bolsonaro] did have a similar demographic voting for them. So during my research paper, I want to focus on how the speeches seem to attract the same demographic.

Because this is an ongoing research project, I do want to use coding of speeches. I do have a rubric that was provided by BYU Team Populism. They provide a rubric that defines if a speech is populist or not. So I will code some of Bolsonaro’s and Trump Speeches.

I want to put the data in SPSS or statcrunch to see if there is a relationship or not

I also would like to make sure I can put the data on the demographics of the voters.

Also going through some of the speeches to look for word choice similarities.

The next steps are to continue my research for more literature and data. I also begin to code speeches as soon as possible.