Who, what and when: how media and politicians shape the Brazilian debate on foreign affairs

• Autor(a) principal: Hardt, Matheus Soldi
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/101/101131/tde-09092019-155840/
• topic: Análise de tópicos; Brasil; Brazil; Discursos políticos; Jornais; LDA; LDA; Newspapers; Political speeches; Topic analysis

What do politicians talk about when discussing foreign affairs? Are these topics different from the ones in the newspapers? Finally, can unsupervised methods be used to help us understand these problems? Answering these questions is of paramount importance to understanding the relationship between foreign policy and mass media. Based on this discussion, this research has three main objectives: (a) to verify whether unsupervised methods can be used to analyze documents on international issues; (b) to understand the issues that politicians talk about when dealing with foreign affairs; and (c) to understand when and with which periodicity the mass media publish news on certain international topics. To do so, I created two new corpora, one with news articles published in the international section of two major Brazilian newspapers; and a corpus with all speeches made within the two Committees on Foreign Affairs of the National Congress of Brazil. I ran a topic model using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) in both. The results of this topic model show that LDA can be used to distinguish different international issues that appear in both political discourse and the mass media in Brazil. Additionally, I found that the LDA model can be used to identify when some topics are debated and for how long. The findings also demonstrate that Brazilian politicians and Brazilian newspapers are neither isolated nor unstable in what regards international issues.