Além das palavras: explorando os discursos presidenciais sobre a Amazônia brasileira entre 1985 e 2022

Abstract

The Amazon, which covers 60% of Brazil's territory, represents the largest natural reserve on the planet. It has strategic importance in the national political sphere, due to its low population density and territorial vastness, and internationally, due to its fundamental role in global climate preservation. Given this relevance, this study seeks to conduct an exploratory analysis of the Amazon in presidential speeches about the region. Specifically, we sought to understand how Brazilian presidents approached the region between 1985 and 2022. The theoretical framework used was discursive institutionalism, which values discourse as a way of accessing ideas and political agendas. To this end, we used a qualitative methodology with mixed methods: topic modeling and clustering using Python libraries such as LDA and BERTopic, and categorical content analysis using subtopics extracted using the previous method. With regard to the source of the data, a systematic review of national and international literature in the social sciences and humanities on the Amazon was first carried out. Topic modeling and clustering was applied to the abstracts of the articles found. Secondly, the presidential speeches used were filtered in relation to the Amazon theme using the database “Speeches by civilian presidents of Brazil - 1985-2022” (Gonçalves, Meira and Gondin, 2024). NVivo software was then used to code the speeches with the topics identified and carry out categorical content analysis. The analysis revealed a distinct hierarchy between the priority topics of academic production and the presidents in their speeches, suggesting that some topics that are important to the scientific community receive less political attention, and vice versa. Despite the identification of topics, further qualitative analysis is needed in future research.