Digital Mandates and Their Management: Strategies for Usage of Social Media by Brazilian Federal Legislators

Abstract

The study aims to analyse the strategies adopted by the Brazilian Federal Chamber of Deputies during the period 2019–2022 (56th legislature) on social media platforms. The survey with political advisers includes the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, WhatsApp, Telegram and LinkedIn. The sample consists of 155 informants, 30.21% of the total of 513 parliamentary offices. The conclusions show that 65% of the offices adopt specific strategies for each type of social media, although there is a wider principle, which is the constitution of multi-networks, in a coordinated and complementary way. Within these strategies, the disclosure regarding the parliamentarian’s own actions and the agenda of their electoral bases is prioritized over institutional legislative activities.

Representing “The People”: What Can Social Media Images Reveal About Populist Propaganda in Brazil?

“…The connection between Legislative and Executive power is made visible for the audience to witness. In this way, this cluster gives further evidence on the use of Twitter as a platform of interaction between political elites (de Barros et al, 2021). But these photographs call for further elaboration.…”

“…For example, we could attribute the predominance of black-and-white images to Twitter’s position in our media ecology as a source of news (Fontes & Marques, 2022). However, there is also evidence that these results may replicate, as some politicians circulate near-identical content across platforms (Bossetta, 2018) adopting coordinated and complementary strategies within multiple social media (de Barros et al, 2021). Future cross-platform research could help us answer this question, but insofar as Twitter is concerned, the existing literature is clear in stating that this platform is not necessarily conducive to horizontal, bottom-up communicative interactions between citizens and populist leaders in Latin America (Waisbord & Amado, 2017).…”

“…Thus, if politicians want to garner news attention, Twitter may enable them to do so (Wells et al, 2020). Furthermore, content that politicians (or their staff) post on Twitter tends to be cross-posted to other platforms, creating a coordinated and complementary strategy (de Barros et al, 2021). Indeed, much of the content we document in this article is also circulated on other digital spaces.…”