Opinião Pública – Vol. 21, Nº 1 2015
Articles in this issue
Authors: Patrick Silva, Andreza Davidian, Andréa Freitas e José Donizete Cazzolato
The effects produced by the method to convert votes into legislative seats have been at the center of the debate in Brazil since the 1988 Constitution, and since then political reform has never left the agenda of the political debate, both inside and outside of the university. The arguments are, in general, the strengthening of parties and the increase of electoral accountability. This article proposes to analyze the effects of changing the electoral districts. These issues are inscribed in a larger discussion about the impacts of the electoral system on the political system, as well as about the delicate balance between governability and representation. Consequently, they are directly related to the quality of the democratic system.
Authors: Enivaldo Carvalho da Rocha , Manoel Leonardo Santos, Mariana Batista da Silva e Dalson Britto Figueiredo Filho
What is the effect of campaign financing on the behavior of congressman? This article analyzes the vote of Brazilian federal deputies (1999-2007) in relation to the projects of interest to the National Confederation of Industry (CNI). Methodologically, the article combines descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis to test the hypothesis that, the higher the campaign financing by industry, greater parliamentary cooperation with the interests of this sector. We use cluster analysis, logistic regression models and Poisson to estimate the effect of campaign financing on cooperation. The results confirm the hypothesis partially. Relationship between industry funding and cooperation of parliamentarians was not found, but it is confirmed that the proportion of corporate resources influences positively the cooperation of Brazilian parliamentarians with the interests of the CNI, controlling by different variables. These results align to the international literature about the subject that finds a positive relationship between campaign contributions and Congressional behavior.
Authors: Fernando Guarnieri e Fernando Limongi
In this article we show that changes in the support base for Lula that become more evident in the 2006 elections are best explained by political variables. For this we turn to an original database, aggregated at the ballot station level, and we extend the analysis including other parties and elections preceding that election. On the one hand, an explanation of what happened in 2006 needs to explain what happened in 2002, which is when the PT reaches the presidency. On the other hand, given the compositional character of the vote, the explanation of what happens to the votes of the PT should explain what happens to the votes of his opponents. We note that the success of the PT and the expansion of its base from 2006 occur after the implosion of the PSDB in 2002 and the absence of competitive opponents. Explanations based on the advantages brought by the coming of PT to power do not give an accurate account of these dynamics. We suggest that a better explanation should focus on the pree- election coordination strategies adopted by the parties.
Author: Pedro Cavalcante
Is it worth to be a good mayor? Do voters reward or punish incumbent based on their fiscal outputs? On the one hand, researchers of the school of Michigan claim that voters are uninformed and lack political knowledge. Hence they frequently make myopic electoral decisions. On the other hand, the literature of electoral accountability, specially the retrospective voting, argues that even though voters are not completely informed, they make competent electoral decisions. Ultimately, citizens vote rewarding or punishing the incumbents based on their administration results. In order to test citizen competence and political accountability assumptions, this article examines if voters reward better fiscal policy performance by reelecting incumbent mayors, using indexes that reflect important aspects concerning fiscal outputs. The multivariate model results confirm the retrospective voting since it is observed significant effects of budgetary and financial management on the chances of the reelection of the mayors.
Authors: Iris Gomes dos Santos, José Geraldo Leandro Gontijo e Ernesto F. L. Amaral
This article analyzes the public spending on public safety policy in Brazil in the period of 1999-2010, noting particularly its relations with the ideological perspectives of the parties elected to the Executive (state governments). It was tested especially the hypothesis that spending on public safety policy would be greater in states ruled by right-wing parties, as part of the national literature points to the existence of most concern this political-ideological spectrum with the function social control. We used multivariate regression models and the main findings were: a) increased spending in left-wing and center-wing parties, compared to the right-wing parties; and b) approximation of the percentages of the collection invested in safety policy in the states, regardless of the incumbent parties.
Authors: Rubem Kaipper Ceratti, Rodrigo Fracalossi de Moraes e Edison Benedito da Silva Filho
This article aims to identify the variables associated to the Brazilian population trust in the country’s Armed Forces. The main source of data is a national survey conducted by Ipea in 2011 through the research project “System of Indicators of Social Perception”, with focus on defense and security issues. By organizing the survey data in the light of the literature on the subject, we built up a set of independent variables, whose impact on confidence was then tested using a model of ordinal regression. The main conclusion is that, despite prevails a high level of confidence in the military among all strata of the population, that trust is impacted differently according to socioeconomic and regional conditions, as well as the perception of individuals about the legitimacy and effectiveness of specific public policies.
Authors: José Szwako e Adrian Gurza Lavalle
The relationship between civil society and state has dramatically changed in Brazil along the last three decades. Civil society, social movements and participatory democracy literature have engaged in revising its underpinning assumptions in order to build a comprehensive diagnosis of such changes. This article presents a critical appraisal of the trends and theoretical innovations on the state-civil society contemporary Brazilian debate. It specifically examines a recent comprehensive diagnosis that updates some important conventional ideas about the Brazilian civil society. Such diagnosis describes and grasps the meaning of such changes as a historical shift between two moments: from an autonomous to an interdependent civil society vis-à- vis the state. We challenge such ideas from the standpoint of a relational and historical approach of state-civil society relation as mutually constitutive and drawing on an extensive literature review of both recent empirical studies on Brazilian civil society and sound grounded theory building diagnosis. We show that the ideas of the late birth of Brazilian civil society, the non relation between civil society, and political parties and the state during dictatorship, as well as the interdependence between them as a recent phenomena are conceptually and empirically flawed. Overall, we show the analytical benefits of an interactive and relational approach of state civil society interactions and autonomy.
Authors: Julian Borba e Ednaldo Ribeiro
Recent studies have identified reduction of the involvement of citizens in traditional forms of participation, predominantly related to the electoral processes and the formal institutions of representation, and increased engagement in types of action related to political protest. Different factors have been identified as enhancers of these actions, some microsocial or individual order, as feelings, attitudes and values. Focusing on the case of Latin America, in this article we present an analysis of the evolution of some indicators of involvement in these forms of action over a decade. Additionally, we assessed individual attributes which act as determinants of these behaviors. For this we use the time series data produced by the organization Latinobarómetro (1995-2007). The results indicate that, despite the relevance of discontent and the context of political and economic instability in the region, the key explanatory variables of protest activism are those linked to the political and cognitive individual resources.
Authors: Alcides A. Monteiro e Mário Miguel Montez
This article focuses on the phenomenon of collective action, using as an example the intervention carried out by a small group of people in defense of a public space of leisure and nature named “Mata Nacional do Choupal”, situated in Coimbra (Portugal), against the construction of a highway road. The analysis of this small group frames the understanding of the relationship between collective action and the phenomenon of threat, showing how such collective action is conditioned by an emotional dimension, from the individuals' relation to the goods that they enjoy. Thus, we point out the existence of a dynamic factor for mobilization and demobilization of collective action, arising from the relationship between the threat and the perception of risk by the elements of the group, which we call “directions of collective action”.