Mapping the Political Discourse in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies: A Multi-Faceted Computational Approach
2026-04-23 • Computation and Language
Computation and LanguageComputers and Society
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how politicians talk in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies over many years by examining their speeches instead of just their votes. They use computer methods to analyze changes in speaking style, topics discussed, and which politicians speak similarly. Their findings include speeches becoming shorter and more direct over time, big topic changes during national crises, and that regional and gender identities can be more important than political parties. This approach provides a new way to understand political behavior through speech patterns.
legislative behaviorparliamentary discoursestylometric analysistopic modelingsemantic clusteringBrazilian Chamber of Deputiespolitical speechdiachronic analysisvote-based analysis
Authors
Flávio Soriano, Victoria F. Mello, Pedro B. Rigueira, Gisele L. Pappa, Wagner Meira, Ana Paula Couto da Silva, Jussara M. Almeida
Abstract
Analyses of legislative behavior often rely on voting records, overlooking the rich semantic and rhetorical content of political speech. In this paper, we ask three complementary questions about parliamentary discourse: how things are said, what is being said, and who is speaking in discursively similar ways. To answer these questions, we introduce a scalable and generalizable computational framework that combines diachronic stylometric analysis, contextual topic modeling, and semantic clustering of deputies' speeches. We apply this framework to a large-scale case study of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, using a corpus of over 450,000 speeches from 2003 to 2025. Our results show a long-term stylistic shift toward shorter and more direct speeches, a legislative agenda that reorients sharply in response to national crises, and a granular map of discursive alignments in which regional and gender identities often prove more salient than formal party affiliation. More broadly, this work offers a robust methodology for analyzing parliamentary discourse as a multidimensional phenomenon that complements traditional vote-based approaches.