Evangelical political representation

FM radios in Brazilian capitals

Abstract

The recent phenomenon of evangelical church sectors in the Brazilian political arena is composed of multiple variables and speaks out in the public space with polyphonic discourses. In this article, we researched the FM radios in the Brazilian capitals because we understood they display a significant sampling of those actors playing on the political, religious, and media stages. The category that expresses the political representation studied would be evangelical electronic coronelism. From this perspective, we do not ignore the religious identities that demand some morality in the public space. Still, we privileged the evangelical communication networks because of their institutional structures and political arrangements to try to analyze the object. The concept Cenário de Representação Política/Scenario of Political Representation (CR-P) served as theoretical support to think the evangelical electronic coronelism beyond a neologism. Researchers did empirical work in which the 82 members of the evangelical political caucus in the House of Representatives in its 56^th legislative term (2019-2022) were monitored based on their connections with the evangelical communication networks. This way, the study designed the alleged representatives of the evangelical electronic coronelism as the leading roles in this plot. Besides identifying the personal performances of the members of the parliament, we had to characterize the communication networks to which they are directly responsive or formally bound. The members of the so-called evangelical caucus in the House of Representatives in its 56^th legislative term, with a few exceptions, make use of and depend on, in good measure, the referred communication networks. That is the fundamental theoretical-methodological support of the concept Cenário de Representação Política (CR-P) in this qualitative research.