Institutional Denialism

From the President's speeches to the formation of the Early Treatment Agenda (Off Label) in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

Resumo

Since the early efforts of Schattschneider (1960) and Bachrach and Baratz (1962), and further with the conceptualization of "policy agenda-setting" by Cobb and Elder (1971), studies on agenda formation have advanced. The Multiple Streams Model proposed by Kingdon (1984) emphasizes the interaction between problem, policy, and political streams as central elements in the agenda. Recent studies also explore the content analysis of presidential speeches and legislative productions as complementary approaches. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the convergence of these approaches sheds light on the process of public policy agenda formation and the role of political actors. In such a context this article proposes to reflect “What are the relations between the denialist discourses promoted by then President Bolsonaro and public policies during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil?”, seeking to investigate potential institutional denialism supported by denialist discourses. Web scraping techniques are used in Python to extract various types of content related to Bolsonaro during the COVID-19 pandemic, including false statements, tweets, Telegram posts, and government publications. The extracted content is filtered to focus on the early treatment agenda and denialist positions regarding vaccines, lockdown, and mask usage.