O púlpito, o pasto e a patente: as gramáticas da campanha permanente da Bancada BBB no Twitter (2019-2020)

Abstract

This thesis investigates the permanent campaign strategies mobilized by Silas Câmara, Alceu Moreira, and Capitão Augusto, leaders of suprapartisan thematic caucuses known as the BBB Caucus, through their individualized profiles on Twitter (currently X), between January 1, 2019, and December 31, 2020, a period encompassing the installation and initial phase of the 56th Legislature of the Brazilian National Congress. The objective is to analyze, both diachronically and synchronically, how these actors convert resources derived from their mandates and collective leadership into public legitimacy, visibility, and political capital under conditions of mediatization and platformization. The research combines Content Analysis (Bardin, 2011), Categorical Content Analysis (Sampaio and Lycarião, 2021), and Automated Content Analysis (Cervi, 2019; 2023), with computational procedures in Python applied to a corpus of 4,339 tweets: 203 by Silas Câmara, 2,732 by Alceu Moreira, and 1,404 by Capitão Augusto. The results show that defense of the thematic agenda prevails over explicit governmental alignment and reveal three grammars of representation: belonging, in Silas Câmara, articulated around faith, family, and territory; competence, in Alceu Moreira, grounded in expertise, institutional access, and sectoral results; and confrontation, in Capitão Augusto, marked by police identity and antagonism. In 2020, the changing political context produced distinct responses across the three cases. It is concluded that, among leaders of thematic caucuses, the permanent campaign operates as a communicational translation of collective representation into individual authority, configuring a form of permanently communicated representation within an environment of platformized visibility.