Can political leaders influence whether society complies with legal requirements – simply through what they say? The current study uses the example of Brazil to show that this can absolutely be the case. The huge country is home to the largest section of the Amazon rainforest. In 2018, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro as their president. In the first months of his term of office, he and his ministers repeatedly made derogatory remarks about the protection of this valuable ecosystem.
The study shows that statements by the Bolsonaro government accelerated the destruction of the rainforest. “We analyzed data from the initiative MapBiomas Alerta,” explains Dr. Gustavo Magalhães de Oliveira. “This initiative reviews and validates deforestation alerts from various sources covering the whole of Brazil. We also examined more than 3,600 Twitter posts that Bolsonaro and his ministers of agriculture, environment, and foreign affairs published in 2019.” The researchers analyzed which of them indicated a lower enforcement risk for infringements against environmental laws. Overall, they identified 38 such posts.
Deforestation depends on the reach of the statements
Political messages are only effective if they are heard. The researchers thus estimated the Twitter reach for 578 municipalities in the Amazon region. To do this, they analyzed how many tweets relating to the topic of “forest” were posted there by citizens between 2015 and 2018. The higher the Twitter activity in a municipality, the greater the likelihood that relevant tweets from the government would not go unread there.
“We assume that such messages spread through word of mouth,” explains the postdoctoral student at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics (ILR) at the University of Bonn. “Supporters share them, as do critics, and they are discussed locally until they reach the people who actually make decisions about deforestation. They view them as a political signal.” The analysis showed a direct and far-reaching response: In the regions at greatest risk, deforestation increased significantly in the months when Bolsonaro and his ministers had published posts opposing forest conservation. “The impacts were not limited to Twitter,” explains Dr. Oliveira. “We see the same pattern when we analyze other forms of exposure, such as television.”
Effect depends on economic incentives
Interestingly, the researchers found that the government statements had no influence on municipal environmental fines or deforestation bans. “Our analysis indicates that, as a result of the messages, people change their expectations of the extent to which they will be prosecuted for breaking the law,” stresses Oliveira. “The effect is thus not attributable to any changes in the local enforcement of forest conservation laws.”
The phenomenon appears to be driven by economic incentives. As a result, the government’s messages did not fall on any more fertile ground in municipalities with high levels of support for Bolsonaro than elsewhere. By contrast, the effect was stronger in areas where agricultural returns are high and where nature conservation policy has restricted deforestation in the past. The researchers estimate that, in 2019 alone, between 190 and 1,700 square kilometers of forest fell victim to the statements by the Bolsonaro government.
The study provides evidence of how powerful words can be – at least when they come from people with great political influence. It is quite possible that this effect goes beyond forest conservation and the context of the Brazilian Amazon region.