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Main Authors: Soriano, Flávio, Mello, Victoria F., Rigueira, Pedro B., Pappa, Gisele L., Meira Jr., Wagner, da Silva, Ana Paula Couto, Almeida, Jussara M.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21897
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author Soriano, Flávio
Mello, Victoria F.
Rigueira, Pedro B.
Pappa, Gisele L.
Meira Jr., Wagner
da Silva, Ana Paula Couto
Almeida, Jussara M.
author_facet Soriano, Flávio
Mello, Victoria F.
Rigueira, Pedro B.
Pappa, Gisele L.
Meira Jr., Wagner
da Silva, Ana Paula Couto
Almeida, Jussara M.
contents Analyses of legislative behavior often rely on voting records, overlooking the rich semantic and rhetorical content of political speech. In this paper, we ask three complementary questions about parliamentary discourse: how things are said, what is being said, and who is speaking in discursively similar ways. To answer these questions, we introduce a scalable and generalizable computational framework that combines diachronic stylometric analysis, contextual topic modeling, and semantic clustering of deputies' speeches. We apply this framework to a large-scale case study of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, using a corpus of over 450,000 speeches from 2003 to 2025. Our results show a long-term stylistic shift toward shorter and more direct speeches, a legislative agenda that reorients sharply in response to national crises, and a granular map of discursive alignments in which regional and gender identities often prove more salient than formal party affiliation. More broadly, this work offers a robust methodology for analyzing parliamentary discourse as a multidimensional phenomenon that complements traditional vote-based approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_21897
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Mapping the Political Discourse in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies: A Multi-Faceted Computational Approach
Soriano, Flávio
Mello, Victoria F.
Rigueira, Pedro B.
Pappa, Gisele L.
Meira Jr., Wagner
da Silva, Ana Paula Couto
Almeida, Jussara M.
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Analyses of legislative behavior often rely on voting records, overlooking the rich semantic and rhetorical content of political speech. In this paper, we ask three complementary questions about parliamentary discourse: how things are said, what is being said, and who is speaking in discursively similar ways. To answer these questions, we introduce a scalable and generalizable computational framework that combines diachronic stylometric analysis, contextual topic modeling, and semantic clustering of deputies' speeches. We apply this framework to a large-scale case study of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, using a corpus of over 450,000 speeches from 2003 to 2025. Our results show a long-term stylistic shift toward shorter and more direct speeches, a legislative agenda that reorients sharply in response to national crises, and a granular map of discursive alignments in which regional and gender identities often prove more salient than formal party affiliation. More broadly, this work offers a robust methodology for analyzing parliamentary discourse as a multidimensional phenomenon that complements traditional vote-based approaches.
title Mapping the Political Discourse in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies: A Multi-Faceted Computational Approach
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.21897