Visibilidade e representação: as conexões midiáticas e políticas dos deputados federais da Zona da Mata Mineira

Abstract

This research intends to investigate the interface between the field of the communication and the field of the politics, specifically focusing in the federal deputies' mandates with electoral home in Juiz de Fora (Marcus Pestana – PSDB, Margarida Salomão – PT, Wadson Ribeiro – PC do B e Júlio Delgado – PSB) and their strategies of visibility on media and political and electoral connection with the citizen/voter in the first two years of political office. We discuss the tensioning among the fields of the communication and of the politics, especially in function of the new massive and digital ambient environment in which happens some disputes to offer valid consensus to political practice, whose function is more and more strategic for the visibility in mediated society. The literature on political science seeks to explain particularist legislative behaviors in which benefits intended for certain localities would meet the necessity for congressmen to maximize their electoral gains. Considering the participation of the communication in the representative process and the adaptations of the policy to its grammar, some authors believe that the limits between the campaign and the government have lost their specificities, since the techniques of campaign began to be part of the exercise of mandates and Interest in re-election would be a great motivating factor during governments. In this sense, it is based on the hypothesis that the connections with the citizen/voter, which can guarantee the legitimacy of the mandate as well as the political capital of the federal deputy occur in varied forms, depending on the electoral district, voter profile, and which implies in political variables (the link established with political, community and religious leaderships and social movements that function as opinion leaders and mediators, visits to neighborhoods in Juiz de Fora and nearby cities, allocation of funds to municipalities where they have higher votes, etc.) and the communicational variables (good visibility in the media, channels of communication with the voter). From the point of view of empirical research, this paper is divided into three parts: 1) analysis of the political trajectory of the congressmen and the respective distributions of votes in the state of Minas Gerais in the 2014 elections, with emphasis on the meso-region of Zona da Mata, in which the city of Juiz de Fora is located; 2) verification of the commitment of parliamentary amendments allocated in the mesoregion and the connection with the respective votes; 3) content analysis of the posts published in the official pages of the deputies on Facebook, regarding the type of messages posted and the links established in the interactions with the citizen/voter. In a complementary sense, in-depth interviews were conducted with the federal deputies to discuss the political and communicative strategies of the mandates in order to understand the way in which the parliamentarians choose to emphasize certain communicative and political actions to the detriment of others possible. In view of the analyzes made, it can be stated that different political trajectories, in association with distinct political and communicative actions in mandates, results in different emphases in the use of communicative tools by the specificities of mandates and degrees of efforts with respect to the Regions served by mandates.