Brazil's democratic institutions have been subjected to three episodes of high-stakes legal accountability within a single decade: the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff (2016), the imprisonment of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2018), and the imprisonment of Jair Bolsonaro (2025). Each was conducted through legitimate institutional channels. Each was justified through the language of constitutional legality. And yet each has generated sustained scholarly and political controversy over whether the legal mechanisms employed served to uphold democratic norms or to subvert them. The central question this study poses is: does the discourse of legal accountability in Brazil function as a mechanism of rule of law, or as a form of rule by law?
Despite a substantial body of scholarship on each of these episodes, existing studies treat them as discrete events rather than as manifestations of a shared discursive and institutional logic. The literature on the Rousseff impeachment largely predates and operates independently of the scholarship on the Lava Jato operation and Lula's imprisonment, and neither body of work has been brought into systematic dialogue with the still-emerging scholarship on the Bolsonaro prosecution. No study to date has examined all three cases together, nor applied a consistent analytical framework capable of generating comparative claims about the discursive strategies through which legal accountability has been constructed and contested across the full arc of Brazil's recent political crises.
This study addresses that gap. Drawing on Norman Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Ruth Wodak's Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) within a Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD) comparative framework, it applies a unified analytical procedure to the primary legal and parliamentary texts produced in each case: the impeachment proceedings and senatorial votes in the Rousseff case; Sérgio Moro's sentencing documents and the TRF4 appellate ruling in the Lula case; and the Federal Police indictment and STF proceedings in the Bolsonaro case. By holding constant the institutional context — the same 1988 constitutional framework, the same Supreme Court, the same media and political environment the MSSD design isolates the key variable of interest: whether accountability discourse operates symmetrically or asymmetrically with respect to democratic norms depending on the political identity of its subject. At the textual level, analysis attends to lexical choice, modality, and nominalisation. At the level of discursive practice, it examines the production and circulation of legal-political texts: who speaks, with what institutional authority, through which channels, and to which audiences. Wodak's DHA is applied to trace the recontextualisation of recurrent topoi, the topos of threat, the topos of legitimacy, the topos of democratic necessity across the three cases and across political-ideological lines. This study is currently in progress. It aims to offer the first systematic comparative analysis of the discursive mechanisms through which Brazil's democratic institutions have been simultaneously upheld and instrumentalised across a decade of political crisis, contributing to scholarship on judicial politics in Latin America.
