Asymmetric regional parallelism in the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff: The editorial framings of O POVO (Ceará) and Gazeta do Povo (Paraná)

This article investigates whether Brazil’s regional press mirrors subnational electoral cleavages during the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. Drawing on debates about political and regional parallelism, we compare editorials from two leading state newspapers located in electorally opposed contexts: O POVO is located in the state of Ceará, a Workers Party (PT) stronghold and Gazeta do Povo in Paraná, a predominantly anti-PT state. Our corpus comprises 60 editorials published between March 2015 and August 2016. Using content analysis, we coded editorial framings in terms of problem definition, causal attributions, consequences, those deemed responsible, proposed solutions, and explicit stances on the impeachment of Rousseff. We test two competing hypotheses: (H1) regional parallelism, whereby newspapers align with their state’s prevailing partisan preferences; and (H2) a “default” hypothesis, whereby regional outlets reproduce the national press’s anti-PT bias regardless of local electorates. Mixed results support partially both hypotheses. Gazeta do Povo consistently frames the impeachment as a legitimate constitutional response to a crime of responsibility and endorses Rousseff’s removal as the only viable solution. O POVO, by contrast, foregrounds the economic crisis, avoids projecting consequences, and remains largely non-committal, oscillating between criticisms of the impeachment and acceptance of its formal legality. We argue that these patterns indicate neither clear regional parallelism nor uniform anti-left bias, but an asymmetric regional parallelism in which conservative regions exhibit strong anti-PT advocacy while PT-leaning regions display moderated, centrist editorial postures constrained by political and economic elites.