Evolution of the Presidential Discourse on democracy in Paraguay: a comparative analysis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30545/juridica.2023.jul-dic.3Keywords:
Democracy, Paraguay, presidential speeches, democratic consolidation, institutionsAbstract
The evolution of the concept of democracy in the speeches of the Presidents of Paraguay from 1989 to 2018 is analyzed. A documentary study was conducted using 14 codes grouped into three categories, which allowed for the identification of recurring thematic patterns in presidential speeches and their comparison across different mandates. Presidential speeches are a fundamental aspect for understanding the political and social dynamics of the country. This research addresses how the concept of democracy is employed by presidents in their speeches. This is relevant for comprehending how democracy is defined and promoted in political discourse and its impact on society. The results demonstrate that Paraguayan presidents, in their speeches, conceptualize democracy as pluralistic, transparent, just, and participatory, with strong institutions that are respected and provide access to education, justice, security, and economic development. They also emphasize the fight against corruption, inequality, and the promotion of regional integration. This approach falls within the realm of discourse analysis, not actions or performance analysis, but it is known that speeches, especially presidential ones, can have implications for governmental decision-making, although it is not the direct objective of this analysis.
Downloads
References
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Harvard University Press.
Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Sage.
Chilton, P. (2004). Analyzing political discourse: Theory and practice. Routledge.
Constitución de la República del Paraguay. (1992). Asunción, Paraguay.
Dahl, R. (1971). Polyarchy: Participation and opposition. Yale University Press.
Fairclough, N. (2001). Language and power. Pearson Education.
Ficcadenti, V., Cerqueti, R., & Ausloos, M. (2019). A joint text mining-rank size investigation of the rhetoric structures of the US Presidents' speeches. 905.04705v1.
Foucault, M. (1971). L’ordre du discours. Gallimard.
Fukuyama, F. (2014). Political order and political decay: From the industrial revolution to the globalization of democracy. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Goffman, E. (1959). The presentation of self in everyday life. Doubleday.
Gupta, A., Blodgett, S. L., Gross, J. H., & O'Connor, B. (2022). Examining political rhetoric with epistemic stance detection. 2212.14486v2.
Mounk, Y., & Foa, R. S. (2019). The signs of deconsolidation. Journal of Democracy, 30(1), 5-16.
Nikolaev, D., Ceron, T., & Padó, S. (2023). Multilingual estimation of political-party positioning: From label aggregation to long-input Transformers. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 9497–9511). Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Prabhakaran, V., Rei, M., & Shutova, E. (2021). How metaphors impact political discourse: A large-scale topic-agnostic study using neural metaphor detection. 2104.03928v1.
Peirce, C. S. (1931). Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Harvard University Press
Putnam, R. D. (1993). Making democracy work: Civic traditions in modern Italy. Princeton University Press.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1942). Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Harper & Brothers.
Shadish, W. R., Cook, T. D., & Campbell, D. T. (2002). Experimental and quasi-experimental designs for generalized causal inference. Houghton Mifflin.
Teten, R. L. (2003). Evolution of the modern rhetorical presidency: Presidential presentation and development of the State of the Union Address. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 33(2), 333-346
Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). Discourse as social interaction. Sage.
Van Dijk, T. A. (1993). Principles of critical discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 4(2), 249-283.
Wodak, R. (2001). The discourse-historical approach. In R. Wodak & M. Meyer (Eds.), Methods of critical discourse analysis (pp. 63-94). Sage.
Xiang, W., & Wang, B. (2022). A survey of implicit discourse relation recognition. 2203.02982v1