The article is about the application of focus group method in electoral research and its contribution to the strategic planning of campaigns. The methodological approach and analysis were based on the nature of information that this kind of research may provide. The starting point was an experimental research conducted by the campaign of a re-election candidate to the House of Representatives of the state of Espírito Santo.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the nature of political discourse of the two main presidential candidates in Brazil in 2006, taking as a primary source the campaign conveyed through Free Electoral Propaganda Telecast. It starts with a classical theoretical approach that divides the Republican discourse into two branches: aristocratic and democratic. On the one hand, advocates of restriction and, on the other, supporters of the expansion of political participation in state affairs. The first branch is based the rhetoric of political class distinction and, therefore, uses the technical argument, the expertise as a core element of good government performance. The second branch is based on the use of identity between representatives and represented using, for this purpose, the political argument that good government depends on the deepening of democracy through political participation and priority attention to the most needy pop ulation. The main objective of the paper was to check to what extent Geraldo Alckmin’s and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s electoral campaigns in television were able to translate each of these republican traditions

The purpose of this paper is to present the results of our research on Internet use by candidates for councilor in Curitiba, Florianópolis and Porto Alegre. Through the examination of the online campaign of candidates who used websites, among about 1.400 applicants for the representative positions in these capitals, we evaluate the use these politicians have made of the Internet in municipal elections of October 2008. Our basic hypothesis is that the web pages of candidates for elected offices, especially the council, served mainly to disseminate traditional political practices, strengthening personalistic and clientelistic ties with the electorate.

The text aims to analyze the contribution and limits to the use of the concept of "political parallelism" for comparative studies in political communication. To the present, the concept has been used in a binary opposition to the "independent" or "objective" model of journalism, so that every situation that does not fit the later would be covered by the former. Alternatively, it suggests that this type of opposition makes sense only in the context of Western societies, and that both categories only apply in contexts in which political systems can coexist with a competitive environment of reasonable institutional stability.