A tendência à “presidencialização” no parlamentarismo britânico: a cobertura do The Times e do The Guardian nas eleições gerais do Reino Unido em 2015 e o processo de personalização da política

Abstract

This dissertation intends to seek and analyze evidences of personalization of politics, that is, the enhancement of personal characteristics rather than ideas or party ideologies, in the context of the British parliamentary system. Despite of not being a new concept, personalization is extended today in a highly mediated society by the media. What guides the work is the hypothesis that the parliamentary system tends to a "presidentialization", assuming, as already checked in this system of government, increasingly personalistic characteristics, contradicting its core focus on the structures and the party order. In this context, it is safe to say that communication factors interfere and can be decisive in the conduct of an electoral process – even in parliamentarism – with the media coverage targeting personalized elements. Thus, the media would behave sometimes as stages, sometimes as political actors, encouraging the americanization trend in campaigns around the world, with the lack of ideologization of disputes and the decline of party identification as common consequences, elements of the called "new electoral ambience". The methodology applied was the categorical content analysis, which included 66 publications of the British newspapers The Times and The Guardian during the preceding week to the general elections to the British Parliament in 2015. The publications were classified into four categories: emphasis on people, with customization being shown instead of other content; emphasis on the political parties, highlighting the texts that prioritized dealing with partisan and ideological issues; emphasis on public policies, highlighting news that address topics of general interest of the population, such as health or education; finally, the subjects who had an emphasis on the electoral dispute itself, with the publication of results of opinion polls or possibilities, were grouped. At the same time it was adopted the methodology developed by Research Laboratory of Political Communication and Public Opinion (Doxa) of the current IESP-UERJ. The model takes into account the valency, that is, positive, negative or neutral orientation of news coverage, which allowed us to identify the position of each of the newspapers in each category.