Discurso político no Facebook: análise das páginas dos candidatos à Prefeitura de Pelotas em 2016

Abstract

This study seeks to analyze the political discourse on Facebook. It is object are the fanpages of the candidates to Pelotas Prefecture in 2016, namely Paula Mascarenhas (PSDB), Anselmo Rodrigues (PDT), Jurandir Silva (PSOL) and Miriam Marroni (PT). The theoretical foundation is constructed from two bases. The first is rhetoric and its relation with politics, based in Aristotle’s (Rhetoric), Perelman’s (1993) and Fidalgo’s (2010) studies, focusing on: the discussion about the image, concept of Fidalgo, and its relations with politics, also using the studies of Serra (2015) and Ferreira (21015); and the idea of political discourse, inspired by Van Dijk’s studies (2002). The second study base is the role of the Internet in politics, discussing: the question of the public sphere, using Habermas (1984; 1997) and Bastos (2011), and other authors; the concept of social network sites and networking conversation characteristics, based on boyd and Ellison (2007), boyd (2007) and Recuero (2010; 2012); the idea of social capital and its role on the Internet, from Lin (1999) and Recuero (2010); and changes of politics in the light of new technological tools, using studies such as Gibson (2013) and Santos and Rodrigues (2013). To perform the proposed analysis, it was used two collection methods: A temporal cut, observing the fanpages for 20 days; and a thematical cut, where all posts were classified into categories that emerged of data, with a total of nine discourse categories created. Then, a publication of each category that achieved a frequence equal or greater than three was analized, totaling 15 analyzes: five Paula’s posts, three Anselmo’s posts, three Jurandir’s posts and four Miriam’s posts. The methodological apparatus used for the analysis was based on the Herring’s (2004) proposal of computer mediated discourse analysis.