Affective-Rhetorical Regimes in Brazilian Presidential Inaugural Discourse: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and Religious Invocation

Abstract Introduction Presidential inaugural addresses are symbolic sites where political authority, national identity, legitimacy, and collective emotion are publicly assembled. This study asks whether Brazilian presidential rhetoric displays distinct affective-rhetorical profiles across military-authoritarian and post-1988 democratic contexts. Methods We analyzed 15 inaugural, investiture, and related official addresses delivered by 11 Brazilian presidents between 1964 and 2023 using lexical frequency analysis, NRC Emotion Lexicon annotation, hierarchical clustering, Spearman correlation, centered log-ratio principal component analysis, and Firth penalized logistic regression. Results Presidents shared a national-institutional vocabulary, but Bolsonaro showed unusually high lexical salience of “God”. Emotional distributions were broadly comparable, yet multivariate analyses separated military-era and democratic profiles. Anger and disgust were most clearly associated with the non-democratic pole in simpler models, while religious invocation modified but did not account for this separation. Bolsonaro’s profile lay closer to the authoritarian affective space than most democratic presidents, whereas Costa e Silva was more ambiguous. Discussion/Conclusions Democracy and authoritarianism in this corpus appear not only as institutional categories but also as historically situated affective-rhetorical formations. Computational text analysis can therefore identify how presidential language organizes national belonging, legitimacy, conflict, and emotion, provided that lexical patterns are interpreted alongside their historical context.