Populism, Twitter, and COVID-19: narrative, fantasies, and desires
Cervi, Laura (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Departament de Periodisme i de Ciències de la Comunicació)
García Blesa, Fernando (Universidad de Lima)
Marín Lladó, Carles (Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. Departamento de Ciencias de la Comunicación y Sociología)

Date:	2021
Abstract:	During a global pandemic, the great impact of populist discourse on the construction of social reality is undeniable. This study analyzes the fantasmatic dimension of political discourse from Donald Trump's and Jair Bolsonaro's Twitter accounts between 1 March and 31 May. To do so, it applies a Clause-Based Semantic Text Analysis (CBSTA) methodology that categorizes speech in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) triplets. The study findings show that in spite of the Coronavirus pandemic, the main beatific and horrific subjects remain the core populist signifiers: the people and the elite. While Bolsonaro's narrative was predominantly beatific, centered on the government, Trump's was mostly horrific, centered on the elite. Trump signified the pandemic as a subject and an enemy to be defeated, whereas Bolsonaro portrayed it as a circumstance. Finally, both leaders defined the people as working people, therefore their concerns about the pandemic were focused on the people's ability to work.
Note:	10.3390/socsci10080294
Rights:	Aquest document està subjecte a una llicència d'ús Creative Commons. Es permet la reproducció total o parcial, la distribució, la comunicació pública de l'obra i la creació d'obres derivades, fins i tot amb finalitats comercials, sempre i quan es reconegui l'autoria de l'obra original.
Language:	Anglès
Document:	Article ; recerca ; Versió publicada
Subject:	Political discourse ; Populism ; COVID-19 ; Trump ; Bolsonaro
Published in:	Social sciences, Vol. 10 Núm. 8 (2021) , p. 294, ISSN 2076-0760

DOI: 10.3390/socsci10080294

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