Do Concepts Matter? Latin America and South America in the Discourse of Brazilian Foreign Policymakers

By analyzing the content of 6,523 pronouncements by Brazilian decision-makers, this paper aims to present some quantitative evidence to answer the following questions: 01. How did Brazilian Foreign Policy decision-makers employ the concepts of Latin America and South America from 1995 to 2014? 02. Were South American terms prioritized over Latin American terms? 03. Did the diplomacy of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (Lula) invoke the idea of South America more than that of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) and Dilma Vana Rousseff (Dilma)? The principal conclusions we have reached are that South America was indeed more cited than Latin America and that this reached its peak during the Lula years. These results are significant because they corroborate the main conclusions of historians and qualitative analysts on this matter, through using a different approach based on quantitative methods.

Keywords: Brazilian Foreign Policy; Content Analysis; Foreign Policy Speech; Regionalism; Diplomacy