Do Concepts Matter? Latin America and South America in the Discourse of Brazilian Foreign Policymakers

Abstract

By analyzing the content of 6,523 pronouncements by Brazilian decision-makers, this paper aims to present some quantitative evidence to answer the following questions: 01. How did Brazilian Foreign Policy decision-makers employ the concepts of Latin America and South America from 1995 to 2014? 02. Were South American terms prioritized over Latin American terms? 03. Did the diplomacy of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) invoke the idea of South America more than that of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) and Dilma Vana Rousseff (Dilma)? The principal conclusions we have reached are that South America was indeed more cited than Latin America and that this reached its peak during the Lula years. These results are signi icant because they corroborate the main conclusions of historians and qualitative analysts on this matter, through using a different approach based on quantitative methods.

Do Non-State Actors Influence Climate Change Policy? Evidence from the Brazilian Nationally Determined Contributions for COP21

“…From this perspective, content analysis is not a reductionist, positivistic approach" (Berg and Lune, 2004). It has also been used to analyse patterns of international relations published in research in South America (Medeiros et al, 2016) and the prevalence of certain concepts in the Brazilian foreign policymakers' discourses (Rocha et al, 2018).…”

Brazilian Regional Leadership Revisited: Testing the Long‐Term Determinants of South American Followership (1995–2015)

“…Nonetheless, empirical literature, particularly within the fields of discourse/content analysis and public opinion, has accumulated evidence on the sedimentation of this collective regional identity. Analyses of speeches by Brazilian authorities show that, since the end of the 1990s, references to 'South America' have outnumbered those to 'Latin America' (Rocha, Albuquerque and Medeiros, 2018) and that Commercial dependence H.3: The greater the commercial dependence of a country in the region on the regional power, the greater the followership.…”

“…Nonetheless, empirical literature, particularly within the fields of discourse/content analysis and public opinion, has accumulated evidence on the sedimentation of this collective regional identity. Analyses of speeches by Brazilian authorities show that, since the end of the 1990s, references to ‘South America’ have outnumbered those to ‘Latin America’ (Rocha, Albuquerque and Medeiros, 2018) and that only Brazil and some Mercosur partners have consistently mentioned this label in multilateral venues (Jenne, Schenoni and Urdinez, 2017). Public opinion polls, in turn, reveal that on average 43 percent of interviewees in the region identify themselves as Latin Americans, against only 4 percent of Brazilians (Onuki, Mourón and Urdinez, 2016).…”