On doing politics:authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency in political discourse

Political discourses are fundamental to establish a connection between politicians and electorates. However, to date, we seem to know little about how politicians bond with electorates when speaking to them. This dissertation investigates certain aspects of everyday discursive politics that help connect politicians and electorates, such as authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency. In three articles, it discusses the theoretical, empirical, and methodological implications associated with re-conceptualizing each of these aspects. The first article conceives authenticity as a discursive performance and develops a framework to identify and compare how authenticity is performed in political discourses over time and across settings in the United States and Brazil. The second article demonstrates how transnational actors, as presidents, construct objects of policy, as the Amazon, into different policy problems depending on where and when they participate in politics. The third article introduces urgency analysis, a new methodology for text analysis that combines natural language processing and survey validated dictionaries to provide an interpretable measure of the urgency of political priorities in discourses. Altogether, this dissertation furthers our understanding of how valence factors – as desirable traits disconnected from policies – performed in discourse can influence electoral choices. Focusing on everyday aspects of discursive politics as authenticity, problem-construction, and urgency offers fruitful alternatives to understand what certain political discourses are and how they function to connect politicians to electorates.