Politics on the Web: Using Twitter to Estimate the Ideological Positions of Brazilian Representatives

Abstract

The use of social media has become increasingly widespread among citizens and politicians in Brazil. This means of communication served as a key arena for debate and propaganda during the 2014 legislative and presidential elections, when a very polarized political scenario emerged. New approaches have been developed that use information from the social network structure constructed by political actors on social media platforms, such as Twitter, in order to calculate ideal points. Can data from the decision to 'follow' a profile on Twitter be used to estimate politicians' ideological positions? Can approaches like this show the variance of political positions even within a very fragmented legislative body, such as the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies? This article presents and analyzes the successful application of a Bayesian spatial model developed by Barberá (2015), using data from Brazil. This method allowed to capture differences between parties and political actors similar to those found by means of roll call votes. It also makes possible to calculate ideal points for actors who participate in the public debate, but are not professional politicians. Keywords: Bayesian inference; election campaigns; political participation; social media; Brazil.(*) http://dx.doi. org/10.1590/1981-3821201700030003 For data replication, see www.bpsr.org.br/files/archives/Dataset_Souza_Graça_Silva The authors are indebted to the blind-reviewers of BPSR and to Thomas Cook for their comments, which resulted in significant improvement of the original article. We would also like to acknowledge João Victor Dias' assistance as well as FGV DAPP, where the initial steps of this work were taken. Thanks are equally due to Cesar Zucco Jr., Fabiano Santos and Julio Canello who provided access to data for estimates comparison. Brazil may be regarded as an interesting case to test this method due to its congressmen's high use of social media in a multiparty legislative body that has one of the largest party fragmentation in the world. In addition, applying this method to a case that does not belong to the usual United States/European Union axis allows for greater robustness of the findings.Following this introduction, we present an overview of the debate about the Internet and political science methods (Section 02), a brief account of Brazilian politics around the time we gathered the data (Section 03), the method that was adopted (Section 04), the data used (Section 05), and the results (Section 06). We then conclude Once we consider the origin of the data inputted in the calculations, namely the social media platforms, it is possible to dismiss part of what led us to consider the existence of government-opposition interference. As we are dealing with connections in a virtual social network, the distance between the PT and the PSDB is greater in our estimation approach than in other ideological position estimation methods due to these parties' historically longstanding competition for the Presidency. For users of social media platforms, the h...

Polarización en Twitter. El caso de Brasil a través de cinco conflictos políticos

“…El aumento de esta pluralidad también motiva la emergencia de conflictos entre los usuarios, que pueden mostrar no solo visiones del mundo diferentes, sino también las expresiones de polarización ideológica (Souza et al, 2017), disputas por los enfoques de acontecimientos públicos en la lucha por la hegemonía (Laclau y Mouffe, 2014) y la influencia de la opinión pública. En este sentido, la comunicación digital ha promovido una nueva mediatización vinculada a la adecuación de los mensajes políticos al discurso, estrategias y lógicas de los medios, pero al mismo tiempo mantienen la dependencia a los medios de comunicación (Casero-Ripollés et al, 2016;López-García, 2017).…”

“…El aumento de esta pluralidad también motiva la emergencia de conflictos entre los usuarios, que pueden mostrar no solo visiones del mundo diferentes, sino también las expresiones de polarización ideológica (Souza et al, 2017), disputas por los enfoques de acontecimientos públicos en la lucha por la hegemonía (Laclau y Mouffe, 2014) y la influencia de la opinión pública.…”