Opinião Pública – Vol. 27, Nº 2 2021
Articles in this issue
Authors: Rachel Meneguello e Pedro Neiva
Author: Gabriela Ribeiro Cardoso
Recent phenomena related to the so-called crisis of democracies, such as populism and political polarization, have posed new challenges to research on legitimacy and political support. Faced with the recognized limits of the estonian model, since the 1990s, several authors have proposed new analytical perspectives to studies on the phenomenon. In this article, we present and analyze, in addition to David Easton's original conception, five recent perspectives that have brought relevant innovations to studies on political support. In the final part, the advances and limits of this literature for the understanding of some dilemmas of contemporary democracies are discussed, especially the growing support of the electorate in various countries of the world for candidates and parties with authoritarian political platforms.
Authors: Fernanda Nalon Sanglard, Lucia Santa Cruz e Juliana Gagliardi
This article analyzes how two of the main vehicles of the great Brazilian press – O Globo and Folha de S. Paulo – addressed the 55th anniversary of the 1964 civil-military coup. It starts with a theoretical framework on memory and nostalgia and the analysis of content applied to journalistic narratives published between March 26 and April 2, 2019 to answer the following questions: Was there nostalgia in the narratives of political actors in relation to the dictatorship? How did journalistic narratives address this feeling and take a position on it? The results indicate the existence of disputed memories in relation to the dictatorship, which is evident in the speech of several actors. Although the vehicles do not align with the nostalgic sentiment, retrotopia was identified in 45% of the sources' statements and President Jair Bolsonaro was the main character of the news.
Author: Wladimir Gramacho
This article presents a crucial test for the theory of party cues by investigating the association between the legislative positions of the Brazilian political party system in a government-opposition dimension and the governmental assessment made by their supporters. The context of the test is the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government (1995-2002), characterized by successive economic crises, which would tend to reduce the parties’ influence over public opinion, in face of the traditional explanatory power of theories of economic voting and VP-functions. The results, based on multilevel models built upon seven surveys, suggest that party cues work even in a country like Brazil and in the adverse context chosen for this empirical test. The findings also indicate that party cues were stronger according to the media relevance of each political party.
Author: Camila Feix Vidal
This research is aimed at understanding the supposed US party polarization. Through a methodology that privileges the use of national platforms as an indicative of ideological portrait and gradation indicators, this study aims to empirically show in a historical perspective the approximations and distances between the two most important political parties in USA and, consequently, the rise or decline of ideologies as conservatism and liberalism. The time framed goes from 1936 (first election post New Deal) to 2016. The results indicate that there is a party polarization in recent period, not singular in the history of the country, but unique in the sense that both parties head to extremes of the political spectrum characterized, mainly, by a conservative ascendancy by the Republican Party with regards to social issues. Far from a centrist discourse or not committed supposedly intending to collect a higher number of electors, the US parties define themselves by opposed positionings. One still needs to know if this is a process that benefits democracy when representing society with all its idiosyncrasies or it is one process that harms democracy by contemplating extremes not always characteristics of the society as a whole.
Authors: Mariángeles Cifuentes Krstulovic e Patricio Navia
After a theoretical discussion on the determinants of perception of corruption and on the importance people give to fighting corruption as a priority for government action, we postulate 4 hypotheses and we test them for the case of Chile, a democracy with low levels perception of corruption, but with several corruption scandals in recent years. We use 43 (N=63768) national polls conducted by the Center for Public Studies (CEP) between 2000 and 2019 to estimate binary logistic models. The likelihood of mentioning corruption instead of other issues as a priority for government action is lower among people who approve of the president’s performance, higher in those who use more media to get their political information, lower in the first year and higher in the last year of every administration, and lower among those who think crime, employment and other social issues should be a priority for government action.
Authors: Cibele Satuf e Jorge Alexandre Barbosa Neves
Work underwent transformations that changed the values and determinants of their meanings, putting its centrality in check. This research investigates the meanings of work among Brazilians, as well as the influence of demographic and structural elements on this attribution. The meanings of work refer to individual interpretation, influenced by the social context, about work and what it represents. World Values Survey Brazilian’s sample was used. The influence of socioeconomic and structural characteristics was analyzed via structural equation modeling. The model was well adjusted, having a coefficient of determination of .951. Descriptive results indicated high valuation of work and strong perception of it as a social obligation. The SEM results indicated that men attribute higher meaning to work compared to women and that increasing age influences the attribution of meaning to work. Activities with creativity, intellectuality and independence have indirect (via NSE) and negative influence on the perception of work meanings. Analyzes prioritized the articulation between social and economic aspects with the process of meaning of work, a perspective little explored in the Brazilian’s scientific production, but fundamental for a broader understanding of the phenomenon, especially in stratified societies such as Brazil.
Authors: Flávio Pinheiro, Ivan Filipe Fernandes e Maria Herminia Tavares de Almeida
In this paper, we seek to explain the determinants of individual-level attitudes of Brazilians towards free-trade. We use national survey data collected by the project “O Brasil, as Américas e o mundo” and show that Brazilians support open trade. We argue that individual attitudes are guided by economic interests, ideational factors, and political values. The low exposure of the Brazilian economy to international competition seems to contribute to favorable opinions about access to imported goods. Ideological preferences, in turn, filter these perceptions regardless of the individual’s economic conditions. Overall, our results are similar to the findings of a broad literature on trade-policy preference in developed countries.
Authors: Telma Hoyler, Lucas Gelape e Graziele Silotto
Current interpretations on the inner workings of Brazilian city councils are rooted in the scholarly debate of national politics. In the latter, the presence of legislation proposals with territorial goals and concentrated electoral voting patterns are the main evidence of distributivism/clientelism. We argue, however, that such characteristics of legislative and electoral politics at the national level are ill-suited proxies for analysis of the local level, failing to capture nuances of political mobilization in cities. Instead, by means of a mixed-methods analysis of an instrument called representatives’ requests – in-depth interviews, participant observation, and local spatial autocorrelation hypothesis tests – we argue that city councilors' geographically targeted actions take place through a capillary and rooted structure of brokers that feeds back and creates ties throughout local mandates and voters.
Author: Marília Silva de Oliveira
This article aims to analytically bring closer the literature on social movements and political parties, traditionally approached as detached. We put forward a debate about the process of both collective and party identity along with elements that define social movement’s and political party’s strategy choice. We argue that issues related to identity and strategy will be crucial to movement-party interactions which can occur through the mediation of a sociopartisan leadership – who exercises influence on both social and party fields. The theoretical discussion was built from a case study in which we observed the articulation of environmental movement’s leaderships with political parties, specially the Partido dos Trabalhadores, from the eighties up to Rede Sustentabilidade formation. The intermediation of Marina Silva between social and political worlds was fundamental to getting social movement’s leaderships to enter the political parties arenas: legislative, executive, electoral. We conclude that prior relationship between environmental movement and Partido dos Trabalhadores was essential to environmentalists to engage on Rede Sustentabilidade formation.
Authors: Carla Giani Martelli e Rony Coelho
The main purpose of this article is to advance in the understanding of the term effectiveness that has been used to evaluate the results produced by participatory institutions. The literature review and the research into a corpus of 71 papers on the effectiveness of participation, presented in four editions of the “International Meeting Participation, Democracy and Public Policies”, show the multiplicity of meanings which the term effectiveness carries. We argue that the papers addressing this issue should define with accuracy what they intend to assess, as the conclusions of the participatory spaces validity and the necessary incentive to their continuity depend on the clarity of the evaluation object.
Authors: Catarina Helena Cortada Barbieri, Luciana de Oliveira Ramos, Ivan Osmo Mardegan, Juliana Fabbron Marin Marin e Lais Menegon Youssef
This article examines whether the use of Facebook tools in election campaigns mitigates or reproduces structural socioeconomic inequalities that candidates experience in society. We monitor the use of Facebook during the 2018 election campaign to specifically understand whether and how this social media was used by candidates for the post of federal deputy for São Paulo. From a database with more than 55 thousand posts from 465 candidates, we incorporate an intersectional look at the multiple identities of these women and correlate their social markers (socio-occupational stratum, educational level, age and race/color) with the use of Facebook during the election campaign. The results of the quantitative analyzes show that, instead of equalizing pre-existing socioeconomic inequalities, this social media ended up reproducing them throughout the campaign.
Authors: Rocio Zamora Medina, Salvador Gómez García e Helena Martínez Martínez
In the online politainment context, the use of political memes as a humorous and creative formula to configure the political image has become an increasingly common practice in electoral campaigns. Especially on the occasion of electoral debates, dissemination of political memes on social networks has captured the interest of scholars. This study takes into account the established political memes taxonomies and analyzes their persuasive capacity. Specifically, the research includes a quantitative analysis of the main memes spread on Twitter during the two electoral debates that took place in the 2019 electoral campaign in Spain: 4N and 7N. The study uses the perspective of integrated framing (textual-visual) and is based on the persuasive power of memes in relation to the importance of each of the elements of rhetoric (pathos, ethos and logos), with the aim of analyzing as well the consequences on its virality and repercussion on the social audience.