THE WANING OF AFFECTIVE POLARIZATION: analysis of governors’ speeches on Twitter in the 2022 electoral campaign

In this article, we analyze how the polarization occurred in the electoral campaign for governor in 2022 around the two tensioning political figures, Bolsonaro and Lula. For this purpose, all publications made on Twitter during the first round electoral campaign by Brazilian governors were analyzed. The central question is, how did the state governors position themselves in the regional electoral dispute in consonance with the alignments in the national electoral dispute? The tweets were captured using the Netlytic software. For data analysis, descriptive statistics were used from Excel and speech analysis from the Iramutec application for R language. From the research, we concluded that, unlike the polarization seen at the national level, in state campaigns there was a cooling of tension and a rearrangement of the discourses of the political elites in order to avoid friction and address the issue of public policy.

Polarization; Elections 2022; Twitter; Lula; Bolsonaro