God, nation and family in the impeachment votes of Brazil's former President Dilma Rousseff : a corpus-based approach to discourse

Abstract

Brazil’s Lower House of Congress voted the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff on 17 April 2016. In addition to voting, 511 out of 513 Deputies decided to use their time at the microphone to justify their choices. Internet users and online newspapers soon began commenting on the vocabulary used by legislators, in most cases associating words related to God, family and nation to the pro-impeachment speeches. In order to verify whether the lexical choice of the pro- and counter impeachment Deputies really differed, I combined corpus linguistics and discourse analysis to examine the transcripts of those talks by investigating the keywords used by the representatives of the two largest modes of vote — yes and no. A combination of effect size and statistical significance measures were applied for the identification of keyness. The recurring keywords showed that, contrary to reports, the lexical choices of the largest two groups of voters statistically coincide in that they both try to legitimate their choices through appeal to religion, altruism, and shared responsibility, although the manual analysis showed that those words were sometimes used with different meanings by each group. A brief account of the keywords exclusive to each mode of voting is also provided. They reveal the Deputies’ obvious opposite sides towards the result of the process: pro-impeachment Deputies appealed to patriotism and promised a better future should the impeachment be approved, whereas their opponents reminded their interlocutors of the then President’s social programs. The combination of techniques used allowed a more finely-grained analysis of the Deputies’ speeches than one based solely on word count.