How Brazil’s State Twitter Accounts Framed Rousseff’s Impeachment

📌 Research Goal

The study examines whether and to what extent state-managed social media were used for partisan purposes during the impeachment crisis of President Dilma Rousseff.

📄 What Was Collected

All posts published in 2015–2016 on the official Twitter accounts of four Brazilian institutions were collected: the Chamber of Deputies, the Federal Senate, the Presidential Palace (Presidency), and the Federal Supreme Court. The dataset includes every tweet that contained the Portuguese keywords: “impeachment,” “impedimento,” “afastamento” (all referencing impeachment), and “golpe” ("coup") — total n = 795.

📊 How Content Was Examined

• A mixed-methods approach combined descriptive statistics with qualitative content analysis.
• Tweets were coded into content categories such as dissemination of news and promotion of ideas/expression of positions to assess differences in communicative purpose across institutional accounts.

🔎 Key Findings

• The Federal Senate’s Twitter account most frequently used the term “impeachment.”
• The Presidential Palace’s account used the term “golpe” ("coup") more often than the other institutions.
• Over half of all posts fell into the category “dissemination of news.”
• The Presidential Palace exhibited a distinct pattern: a predominance of tweets categorized as “promotion of ideas and expression of positions,” indicating a partisan-leaning communications strategy.

💡 Why It Matters

These results provide empirical evidence that state-run social media can be differentially instrumentalized during political crises. The analysis highlights how institutional Twitter accounts vary in language and purpose, and it contributes to broader debates about public communication, politicization of state channels, and the role of digital platforms in high-stakes political events.