Opinião Pública – Vol. 24, Nº 1 2018
Articles in this issue
Author: Thiago Aparecido Trindade
The central goal of this article is to advance the theoretical debate about the relationship between protest actions and public deliberation, problematizing a recent conception that advocates for an analytical conciliation between actions and deliberation and that understands protest as part of the deliberative process. The main conclusion is that theoretical approximation between protest and deliberation is problematic for two main reasons: i) it excessively stretches the concept of deliberation, taking away much of its explanatory power and ii) it eliminates the cleavage between disruptive politics and conventional politics. In this sense, the text seeks to give continuity to a theme that has gained increasing attention from theorists in the deliberative school, questioning what the best way is to think about the relationship between deliberative practices and protest actions.
Author: Camila Rocha
The aim of this article is to analyze the political perceptions and the electoral choices of the residents of a poor neighborhood of São Paulo called Brasilândia based on a series of in-depth interviews conducted between 2011 and 2013. Would these individuals relate their social ascent to the public policies implemented during the Lula Era? Would they be lulistas? If so, what would this mean, and what impact would it have on their perceptions of the Workers' Party (PT)? According to the data collected, the motivations for having preferences for the PT and/or Lula were not of a material nature, but rather of a symbolic one, since interviewees demonstrated a strong identification with the poor population that lives in the Brazilian Northeast. However, in spite of such identification, adherence to the PT and to lulismo in São Paulo’s poor neighborhoods has important fragilities.
Authors: André Borges e Robert Vidigal
Current debates on partisanship and electoral behavior in Brazil have pointed to the growing effect of voters’ party feelings toward the two major presidential parties—PT and PSDB—on presidential vote choice. This article contributes to the literature by casting doubt on recent analyses of party polarization in presidential elections. According to the polarization hypothesis, electoral competition between the PT and the PSDB has led to a growing differentiation among the electorate into two clearly separated and polarized blocs. Nevertheless, we claim that this hypothesis lies on fragile theoretical and empirical foundations. Despite the growing importance of partisan feelings in the explanation of voting behavior in presidential elections, our descriptive and multivariate analyses utilizing the 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014 ESEB surveys demonstrate that these trends are clearly not associated with an increase in mass polarization. We observe, instead, that ideological differences between tucanos and petistas are rather minimal. Finally, we also find that ideological convergence between the various subgroups of the electorate has grown over time.
Authors: Pedro Santos Mundim , Wladimir Gramacho e André Jácomo de Paula Pinto
The article analyzes the effects of cognitive judgments and emotional reactions to the state of the economy and the personal finances of respondents in two surveys on the approval of the Brazilian federal government. Based on the theory of affective intelligence, the work measures and compares the influence of these two perspectives on Brazilian public opinion in two different contexts. In November 2014, President Dilma Rousseff had recently been re-elected and the prevailing perception of the state of the economy was quite good. As early as April 2015, the government announced harsh measures of fiscal adjustment and increased public prices, completely reshaping the opinion of Brazilians on the economy. Our results confirm the expectation that reason and emotion act in a complementary way in forming public opinion about the federal government and that, in times of crisis, the relative influence of emotions is greater.
Author: Mads Damgaard
Through a content analysis of 8,800 news items and six months of front pages of three Brazilian newspapers, all dealing with corruption and political transgression, the present article documents the remarkable bias of media coverage toward corruption scandals. Said bias is examined as an informational phenomenon, arising from key systemic and commercial factors of Brazil’s news media: an information cascade of news on corruption formed, destabilizing the governing coalition and legitimizing the impeachment process of Dilma Rousseff. As this process gained momentum, questions of accountability were disregarded by the media, with harmful effects for democracy.
Authors: Dolores Rocca Rivarola e Nicole Marina Moscovich
The paper proposes a comparative interpretation of the visual role assigned in the electoral campaigns of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007 and 2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2010 and 2014) to the pro-government activists as a mobilized collective and organized support. This, after years of electoral campaigns that privileged a different image: that of the candidate directly linked with voters, without any mediation. The empirical material gathered and analyzed consists of a selection of Argentine spots and the whole of the electoral programs of the Free Electoral Air-Time (HGPE) (2016–2017) in Brazil. Using qualitative content analysis of the electoral advertising, we argue that the 2011 and 2014 campaigns (in Argentina and Brazil, respectively) display a greater visual hierarchy of the militants in comparison to the previous two campaigns (2007 and 2010). And, for the Brazilian case, we also state that the 2014 campaign introduced a second type of symbolic representation of activism, through references to the trajectory of Dilma as a youth militant during the military dictatorship.
Authors: Celi Regina J. Pinto e Augusta Silveira
This article analyzes the political trajectory of 62 women who, during 17 legislatures, exercised at least three terms, with at least one being in the position of federal representative, in order to answer the following question: what are the necessary requirements for women to have successful parliamentary careers in a country that places 151st among 187 countries reviewed in terms of women's participation in parliaments in 2017? The article is divided into two parts: the first part gives a general overview of the universe of women elected state and federal representatives between 1950 and 2014, a total of 653 deputies. The second part focuses on the 62 women who at least once reached the federal congress, the main focus of this study. The analysis of the trajectories of the 62 deputies showed that their long political careers follow the same traditional paths as their male peers, a finding that points to one of the main reasons for the scarce presence of women in Brazilian political life.
Authors: Marcio de Lucas Gomes e Jakson Alves de Aquino
Democracy is a political regime characterized both by the use of non-violent procedures to choose leaders, and by the democratic values and attitudes of its people. Democracy is based on interpersonal trust that ensures cooperation between individuals. Democratic systems function as a way of solving collective action problems by allocating citizens’ resources to promote public benefits. Hence, an individual’s satisfaction with the regime depends on the perception of other people as a cooperative. Moreover, institutional efficiency has an impact on public opinion; democracies that do not produce enough public goods tend to receive less support from their populations. In this article, we investigate the effects of criminological variables on satisfaction with democracy in Brazil, testing the hypothesis that there is both a direct effect—reducing instrumental support of the regime—and an Indirect effect—reducing interpersonal trust. We test this hypothesis with data from the 2014 AmericasBarometer. Tests conducted via linear regression models, simultaneous equations, and non-parametric models corroborate this hypothesis. However, causal mediation models, a more rigorous way of testing this hypothesis, revealed no significant indirect effects.