Comparando Agendas Diplomáticas: Ênfases temáticas de presidentes e de chanceleres brasileiros (1995 – 2019)
Comparing Diplomatic Agendas: thematic emphasis of Brazilian Presidents and Foreign Ministers (1995 - 2019)
By: Felipe Rocha
How were the thematic emphases of Brazilian Presidents and Foreign Ministers structured and what does this indicate about these actors’ perceptions of the role of Brazil internationally? The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to answer these questions by exploring and describing a large set of empirical data named Resenhas de Política Exterior do Brasil with different text analysis techniques such as Text Mining and Content Analysis. Having examined 1784 speeches from 1995 to 2019, the thesis revealed textual patterns for three dimensions: a) the Executive team; b) the agent’s position (either President or Foreign Minister); and, c) the speaker. As a result, we identified that the bulk of the speeches was highly similar and that themes associated with economy, trade, geographical entities, domestic and international institutions, historical figures, social issues, ceremonial and symbolic references were constantly repeated. Moreover, the thesis discovered peculiarities that can be explained either by the agent’s position or by a particular speaker: the main outlier being Foreign Minister Ernesto Araújo. Nevertheless, however much the Presidents have attempted to include some of their governmental initiatives in their utterances and thus expanded the mentions to the domestic arena of the decision-making process, we concluded the impact of this rhetorical activism was not expressive enough to modify the long-term repertoire of the Brazilian professional diplomacy
- Text Mining
- Content Analysis
- Cluster Analysis
- Geospatial Analysis
- Statistics
- R