Opinião Pública – Vol. 23, Nº 3 2017
Articles in this issue
Author: Patricio Valdivieso
The Latin American context of exposure to environmental risks demands a better understanding of the institutional factors that impact on local environmental management. Supported by mixed research methods, this study examines hypotheses on relationships between political, institutional, and social factors and municipal environmental management in the empirical context of Chilean municipalities. The results suggest that the combination of political factors, institutional arrangements and capacities, and relationships with society explain different municipal behaviors.
Authors: Cláudia Feres Faria e Isabella Lourenço Lins
This article evaluates comparatively the capacity of inclusion of the health and Social Assistance Conferences held in 2011 in Minas Gerais, through an analytical strategy that involves three distinct steps. Through a survey of 729 participants of these Conferences, this article comparatively analyzes: (1) who the participants of these Conferences are; (2) whether or not the impact of scale changes the participants’ socioeconomic and political profiles; and (3) what the PPC rules are concerning recruitment (who can participate) and representative processes (how are the delegate-representatives selected). The article found that these innovations include new actors, but they are not able to scale up and to get the higher scales, at least in Minas Gerais. To deal with these constraints, this article suggests the discussion and the changes on the PPC rules.
Author: Viviane Petinelli
This article examines the relationship between the institutional design of conferences on public policies and the actors benefiting from the proposals approved therein. The final recommendations of the 1st Conference on Aquaculture and Fisheries, on Urban Policy, on Environment, on Sports and the 1st Conference on Policies for Women and Policies for the Promotion of Racial Equality, which benefited a/some specific segment(s) participating in it, reflected the degree of political inclusion of the conference, understood not only as an inclusion of voices, but also as a translation of the right to a voice in decision-making. To do so, each approved proposal was classified according to the segment(s) directly interested. The analysis showed that different designs produce different results. Representation and deliberative rules play a key role in determining who most influences the proposals approved in those arenas.
Author: Thiago de Miranda Queiroz Moreira
The 1988 Constitution inserted the Public Defender’s Office in the Brazilian justice system in order to provide legal aid to people in need. At this time, the institution was a novelty in many parts of the country, and other institutional arrangements for legal aid were available in various places. This paper has analyzed the Constituent Assembly’s debate to identify patterns of conflict concerning the constitutional provision of a Public Defender’s Office. The debates reveal three avenues of objection to the standardization of legal aid through the Public Defender’s Office, which are institutional effects from previous state arrangements and from the centrality that the Public Prosecutor’s Office was acquiring in the justice system. We observe that institutions and public policy, by influencing actors’ aims and strategies, affect processes of institutional development and change. These findings contribute to the literature on Public Defense, which stresses the institution’s potential to promote social justice and the democratization of the justice system in Brazil. In spite of observing the institution’s incapacity to live up to its potential in practice, it isn’t able identify that this limitation is, largely, a consequence of the difficulty of inserting a Public Defender’s Office into an existing justice system.
Author: Glauco Peres da Silva
The purpose of this paper is to identify the effect of electoral district magnitude on the spatial concentration of votes. Usually, district magnitude is a proxy for intraparty electoral competition, which incentivizes the personal vote. Studies about Brazil and other countries have considered the personal vote an explanation for the regional concentration of votes. However, the difficulty in directly identifying the concentration levels still remains—even though the districts possess different magnitudes—because the concentration levels of different candidates must not be directly compared. Nevertheless, the electoral simultaneity of the federal and the state legislative elections offers a quasiexperimental case for the effect of different magnitudes over votes’ spatial concentration, controlling for the variation of disputed seats over time. The data ranges from 1998 to 2010 and results indicate the magnitudes lead to the regional concentration of votes, confirming theoretical expectations.
Authors: Alexandre Lima Baião e Cláudio Gonçalves Couto
There is little consensus among empirical studies regarding the electoral effect of individual budget amendments. The present article addresses this question by using regressions with panel data to study how a deputy's amendments affect his performance in the race for re-election. In addition, a regression discontinuity is estimated to assess how the mayor's party affects the proposition and execution of the budget amendments. The results show that only amendments made as transfers to mayoral administrations generate votes, especially when the mayor belongs to the party of the legislator. In addition, a larger volume of amendments is proposed and implemented in the municipalities.
Authors: Felipe Borba e Emerson Urizzi Cervi
This article presents an analysis of the electoral performance of 1,281 candidates who disputed elections for president, governors and mayor of capitals between 2002 and 2014 in Brazil. To do so, we used a set of variables in a multiple linear regression model to describe the combined effects of electoral advertising, campaign spending, and government evaluation of candidate performance. The results show that the impact of the variables will depend on the type of candidate. For example, electoral advertising more effectively explains votes for opposition candidates, while positive government evaluations are the strongest predictive variable for re-election candidates. With this, we hope to contribute to the literature on elections in Brazil, showing the importance of distinguishing between incumbents seeking re-election from opposition candidates.
Author: Karl Henkel
The article deals with the problem of the categorization of answers about politics, government, and democracy obtained through open-ended questions in a survey with a random sample of 800 interviewees. In order to identify the degree of comprehensibility of the questions, a pre-test and missing value analysis were carried out to elaborate a psychometric profile. In the categorization process, the deductive method was superior to the inductive one. The media and the life cycle position influences perception about politics and government. The validation of intra- and inter-coder reliability shows that coders, at a given moment, begin to accept irrational responses as rational ones, and that they can be subject to framing effects.
Authors: Gabriela Figueiredo Netto e Bruno Wilhelm Speck
This article analyzes the impact of campaign spending on the voting record of individual candidates in legislative elections in Brazil. We more specifically examine the existence of a Jacobson effect for candidates with access to other resources providing leverage to their campaigns. For the 2014 elections for Federal and State Deputy, we find money has less impact on the voting record of candidates presenting themselves as pertaining to an evangelical church. To identify this religious framing of individual campaigns, we resort to the official nickname candidates are allowed to use in electoral campaigns in Brazil. This technique has been successfully applied in previous research. The causal mechanism behind this lesser effect of money on the voting record of candidates evoking a religious connection represents the symbolic and real power of Protestant Churches in the electoral process in Brazil. This result is similar to other studies showing that the value of money in election campaigns varies depending on other candidate characteristics. Candidates who have other mechanisms at their disposal to access and mobilize potential voters, such as the support of a church either in the form of an institutional endorsement, access to voters or unaccounted funding, are less dependent on officially accounted for resources than other competitors.