How is social policy framed in public rhetoric in Brazil and South Africa? Have the discourses used by governments changed over time, and if so, in which respects? A frame analysis of governmental discourse since the mid-1990s allows us to identify creations and disputes on official images of social policy in these unequal democracies. According to my research in progress, social policy has been portrayed as a matter of justice (highlighting the enforcement of rights), modernization (economic and educational policies), and redistribution (distributive reforms or income transfer programs). Variations are noticeable in the relations between the agenda of reducing inequality and the governmental priorities.
It will also be presented the results of a frame analysis of the anti-corruption discourse of Operation Car Wash (2014-2021), made with Joris Thijm (Ph.D. candidate, University of Lisbon). Based on dozens of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by Brazilian prosecutors and judges responsible for this anti-corruption probe, four frames of corruption – inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease – were identified, and a tension between the more political, proto-populist frame and the more technocratic ones was noticed.

• Mario Luis Grangeia is a visiting researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, with a project about official images of social policy in Brazil and South Africa associated with the SNF project on elites and inequalities led by Prof. Graziella Moraes Silva. He is also a communication adviser in the Brazilian Federal Prosecution Service and led a team project at the Escola Superior do Ministério Público da União that pointed out limits to the Public Prosecution Service’s activism for the right of education.
   

• Moderation: Graziella Moraes Silva