The Evolution of Political Polarisation in Brazil during the Bolsonaro Years

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Pablo Ortellado, whose interest is in the segregation of Brazilian political communities on social media during the Bolsonaro presidency. The network analysis literature offers two major approaches to measure this, focussing either on both the separation and internal cohesion of clusters, or solely the separation of clusters, and the former seems to align more with definitions of polarisation that focus both on increased separation between and increased cohesion within polarised groups.

Analysis of Facebook data from 2013 and 2014 seems to support such patterns: after the major protests in 2013, there is greater separation between the key antagonistic groups, but there is also greater cohesion between previously more separate but politically broadly aligned groups. This tendency strengthened even further ahead of the Bolsonaro election in 2016.

This project explored this further for Twitter data from 2018 onwards: over time, clusters on the left and right both grew more dense and more separate from each other; this supports the observation that Bolsonaro has polarised public discourse in the country.