Taking sides on Facebook: Political parties and the pension reform in Brazil

Abstract

The article analyzes how Brazilian political parties used social network sites to address the Pension Reform bill proposed by then-President Michel Temer (PEC 287/2016). We aim to understand (1) whether and to what extent government and opposition parties employed Facebook to discuss the Constitutional Amendment Project at stake; and (2) what arguments they adopted to support or criticize the bill. The corpus considers 222 posts published on the parties' Facebook pages between December 2016 (when the PEC was presented to the House of Representatives) and February 2018 (the month initially planned by the government to vote on the matter), examined by using quantitative and qualitative Content Analysis. The results show that, in general, the issue has drawn little attention from the parties, i.e., they despise digital communication platforms as a space for convincing public opinion. The manuscript is relevant since it empirically explores how parties mobilize digital tools to dispute the population's support when state policies are on the agenda, going beyond studies emphasizing electoral strategies.