Banca de DEFESA: VICTOR DOS SANTOS FREITAS DITZ

SOCIAL REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE "CITIZEN OF GOOD" IN THE CONTEXT OF POLITICAL POLARIZATION

social representations; good citizen; policy

This research aimed to describe and compare the social representations that two social groups have about the figure of the “good citizen”, based on their declared political position of right and left. This “good citizen” phenomenon points to a radicalization and political polarization in the country, reflecting a high degree of intolerance for divergent opinions in a democracy. In dynamic terms, political polarization is born out of the country's political history, greatly influenced by recent history, where we have as a starting point a true social upheaval called the Jornadas de Junho 2013. Associated with a serious economic crisis and corruption scandals, the Brazilian political polarization moves from a polarization on political and economic ideas to a moral and spiritual polarization, in the form of a struggle between good and evil. We started with a psychosocial analysis based on Serge Moscovici's Theory of Social Representations and Jean-Claude Abric's Theory of the Central Nucleus, with the help of the Iramuteq software for elucidating the social representations in these studies. This is a quantitative and qualitative research . For that, we used a triangulation of methods, from three main sources for the description and investigation of the phenomenon: the first study consisted of a free evocation task with 208 participants and a questionnaire with 10 questions about conflicting themes of everyday life, which we called practical social ; the second study presented the result of the analysis of two journalistic sources from markedly ideological social media for the analysis of the social construction of the “good citizen” by different political groups; the third research presented a case study on former deputy Jean Wyllys, analyzing the contents of hate speech on social networks where the free manifestation of political thought occurs and its consequences for the polarized climate of Brazilian society. As a result of the research, the social representations of the “good citizen” for the right-wing group consisted of the cognems “honest, hardworking and empathetic” and reveal an idealized citizenship with characteristics of religious traits such as centrality. For the left-wing group, the central cognems were: “honest, hypocrisy and Bolsonaro”, highlighting a more politicized face of citizenship. In media studies, the right-wing media anchors the “good citizen” in the figure of President Jair Bolsonaro, while the left-wing media explores the hypocrisy of the relationship between patriotism and citizenship. Finally, the case study on former deputy Jean Wyllys demonstrated the most violent face of politics, which is driven by social networks and directly violates human rights in the country. It is hoped that this work will contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of political polarization in the Brazilian psychosocial scenario based on common sense and its social representations , with a view to the full exercise of citizenship in the country with respect to declared political positions.