Opinião Pública – Vol. 25, Nº 1 2019
Articles in this issue
Authors: Kristin Wylie, Pedro dos Santos e Daniel Marcelino
This article explores the causes and consequences of extreme non-viable candidacies, also known as “laranja” (orange) candidacies in the Brazilian political lore. We first define and delineate what makes a candidate a laranja, engaging the comparative literature on sacrificial lambs and using district-level electoral results to operationalize the concept. We then advance a typology of laranjas with four ideal types that vary along dimensions of legality and intentionality. Next, we apply descriptive statistics and a hierarchical logistic regression model to explore the individual, party, and district-level characteristics of extreme non-viable candidates and assess whether and how laranjas are distinct from non-laranjas. Finally, we illustrate the gendered character of laranjas, documenting how the candidate gender quota law in Brazil has been associated with a proliferation of candidatas laranjas (women extreme non-viable candidates).
Author: Mauricio Yoshida Izumi
The spatial theory of voting assumes that voters will cast their votes for the candidate whose policy position is closest to their own views. The goal of this paper is twofold: the first one is to test this assumption for the Brazilian presidential elections from 2002 to 2014. In order to do that we use data from the Brazilian Electoral Study along with scaling methods. The results suggest that the probability of a voter casting her vote for the candidate whose policy position is closest to her own is pretty high. The second goal of this paper is to assess if this result holds despite voters’ political sophistication. In other words, we test if ill-informed voters make their electoral decisions based on non-spatial candidate characteristics. The results contradict this idea. Politically ill-informed voters also choose the candidates whose views are closer to their own.
Authors: Luciana Tatagiba e Andréia Galvão
This article proposes analyzing the characteristics of the protests in Brazil between 2011 and 2016, a socio-economic and political context marked by the contradictions and the decline of the PT’s government. The analysis is based on a protest database drawing from the Folha de São Paulo newspaper. We hold that the protests precede the outbreak of the economic crisis and when the peak in 2013 is reached, they produce changes in the political context, opening unprecedented political opportunities for a heterogeneous set of actors, on both to the right and to the left of the PT, to manifest their differences in relation to the government. The protests show the limits of the PT’s class conciliation politics and constitute the scenario of instability that contributed to Rousseff's impeachment, so there is no discontinuity between 2013 and 2015–2016. The pattern of protest in this period is characterized by the combination of two distinct dynamics: political polarization and heterogenization of actors and claims.
Authors: Rogério B. Arantes e Thiago M. Q. Moreira
Brazil has experienced an outstanding expansion of accountability and legal institutions. However, the performance of these public agencies has been raising doubts about the effects they exert on democracy. This article comparatively analyzes the development of three legal institutions—the Public Prosecutor's Office, Federal Police, and Public Defender's Office—adopting the state pluralism theoretical approach that highlights that groups of public servants must act in their own interest in order to obtain prerogatives, functions, and autonomy. The outcome, not without frequent conflicts between these actors, is a pluralization within the State, before the proliferation of agencies that mirror their own ambitions. This approach helps to understand the current Brazilian context, plagued by the controversial interference of these institutions in the political and democratic dynamic.
Authors: Suzeley Kalil Mathias, Jose Augusto Zague e Leandro Fernandes Sampaio Santos
This paper aims to analyze the operationalization of the Brazilian Armed Forces toward accomplishing its constitutional missions during Dilma Rousseff’s government. Our sources include government speeches during the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas (CDMA) and the political action taken by the federal government in response to the public security situation in the city of Rio de Janeiro. The main hypothesis is that there is a difference between the government’s discourse in the international arena and the domestic measures taken towards the matter, each with a different target: the first being the Armed Forces, guaranteeing their main function of defending the country and assuring that they are detached from the center of political decision-making; the second being the middle class and its demand for increased public security. The conclusion is that Rousseff’s military policy resulted, in opposition to what was planned, in a higher degree of politicization of the Armed Forces followed by a bigger militarization of public security.
Author: Alejandro Lezcano Schwarzkopf
This article aims to carry out a comparative study between the Participative Budget (PB) from Porto Alegre and the Participative Decentralization from Montevideo, having as the analytical centre the role played by the party-political systems in the two countries. In this sense, the investigation intends to offer some elements which help to answer the following question: to what extent the distinctive nature from the party systems from Brazil and Uruguay and their relations with the civil society and the State can change the elaboration and functioning of new Participative Institutions? In the analysis we aimed to break up the normative dichotomy which separates the civil society from the political one present in most of the academic works about participative institutions in Brazil. After an investigation based on secondary sources about the two experiences and primary sources with members of the Neighboring Councils, in Montevideo, and with delegates of PB, in Porto Alegre, the conclusion was on the distinctive influences of the political systems in the studied cases. In Montevideo, predominates, hegemonically, the participation of people with a long trajectory in the political party. In the case of PB from Porto Alegre, the low institutionalization of the party-political system allowed that participants were not constrained by the party identities.
Authors: Pedro Floriano Ribeiro e Luis Locatelli
The ‘time factor’ has not been systematically considered in cross-national studies on party organizations. Relying on the largest dataset to date on party organizations, namely the Political Party Database Project (PPDB), the article tests the impact of time as a two-level variable (duration of democracy and age of parties) on parties’ organizational strength in new and established democracies. We add original data from three Latin American countries to the nineteen countries covered by the first PPDB database (132 parties overall). The results suggest that parties in established democracies have less members and more money than those of newer democracies. Among the latter, the greater capacity for mass mobilization produces stronger parties—as in Latin America—compared to the Eastern European countries. The findings challenge the traditional view of the exceptional weakness of Latin American parties and point to the importance of time as a multilevel variable: besides the national context, the “ancestral” party origin in previous regimes have a large impact on organizational strength.