Opinião Pública – Vol. 26, Nº 1 2020
Articles in this issue
Authors: Maria do Socorro Braga e Aleksei Zolnerkevic
In 2018, Brazil held its eighth post-redemocratization presidential election, accumulating empirical evidence that are crucial to the analysis of the characteristics of electoral processes that may be responsible for substantial changes in the distribution of power among political parties. From a conceptual basis grounded in international literature on critical elections, this article aims to create a classification for Brazilian elections. As the main subsidy for this classification, it is analyzed simultaneously, in time and space, through factor analysis, the electoral performance of the first runners in the presidential elections of 1989 to 2018 in the first round of the scale of the Brazilian micro regions seeking to identify the support regions and periods of stability and changing voting patterns. As a result, presidential elections are classified into three types: maintained, deviant and converted (critical).
Authors: Renato Sérgio de Lima, Paulo de Martino Jannuzzi, James F. Moura Junior e Damião S. de Almeida Segundo
This article examines support to authoritarian positions from Brazilian population and dialogues with concerns about recent democratic disruptions and strengthening of antidemocratic positions post-30 years of the Federal Constitution. For this purpose, a survey was conducted with a representative sample of the adult population from the age of 16 years. 2,087 people interviewees answered a version of 17 items of the Adorno's authoritarianism scale (F Scale). The results indicate a strong adherence to authoritarian positions in all layers of society but even more intense for historically marginalized social segments. The fear of violence, which has been effectively exploited by the spokesmen of the extreme right-wing politician's to reinforce moral panic, may have been the propeller of authoritarian tendencies.
Authors: Ludmila Ribeiro e Flora Moara Lima
In this paper we analyzed data from police investigations and trials of intentional homicides shelved in Belo Horizonte between 2003 and 2013 in order to understand the clearance’s determinants. As independent variables, we used the characteristics of victim, crimes’ attributes and police procedures. The results inform that the homicides features and police truth-finding methods (centered on the flagrante delicto and the presence of eyewitnesses) were the variables that explained the clearance likelihood. However, the length of time may affect this result, since police inquiries that are not completed within five year are not likely to be trialed.
Authors: Marcelo Alves dos Santos Junior e Afonso de Albuquerque
This paper investigates the challenges posed by social media to the directive head of the parties to define the majority discourse. The hypothesis is that in a context of party fragmentation, social media offer opportunities for internal currents to vocalize dissatisfactions and to publicly negotiate their agendas publicly, which generates external noise and hinders consensus. The case study focuses on the coalition negotiations among PSOL factions, PT, PCdoB and Rede for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro City Hall election. This study has collected public data by querying the Facebook Graph API, searching fan pages of leaders, directories, factions and local representations. The sample is composed of 189 pages, from which 54 are connected to PSOL organization and 10 factions. The findings indicate the structural distance between the communicative subsystems organized around PSOL and PT / PCdoB, with separate clusters on Facebook and a strong public discussion about the composition of the electoral alliance.
Authors: Edite da Penha Cunha, Isabella Lourenço Lins e Márcia Miranda Soares
Federalism and social participation are relevant themes in public policy studies. However, there is little dialogue between these themes, a gap that this article aims to minimize when analyzing the effects of fiscal centralization of social assistance on the functioning and results produced by the councils. Would the federative dynamics of this policy also be reproduced in the councils, differentiating national and subnational institutions? To answer this question, the article adopts qualitative analysis to identify the strengthening or the constraint of fiscal centralism in excerpts of 658 minutes and 2,364 resolutions of five cases: CNAS; the state councils of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul; and the municipalities of Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre. The results indicate that the strong regulation of social assistance and the concentration of expenditures at the central level have important effects, promoting the strengthening of CNAS and constraints to the work of subnational councils in the definition and control of this policy in their financing.
Author: Augusto Neftali Corte de Oliveira
This research aims to investigate the continuity of neoliberalism in the Latin America electoral politics during the Pink Tide, showing its presence in the presidential platforms launched from 1999 to 2015. A content analysis, based on the Washington Consensus, which is a kind of neoliberal manifesto, is used as an approach in this research. The analysis used 94 platforms from 47 presidential elections that took place in 13 Latin American countries. The research reveals that neoliberalism in fact has lost ground and the Washington Consensus rules, such as privatization and reduction in public spending, have been emphatically rejected. Meanwhile the ground established by rules such as inflation control and public deficit reduction presents the neoliberal resilience during the Pink Tide, even in non-neoliberal presidential platforms. As far as it measures the presence of the Washington Consensus in Latin America political scene after 2000, this study helps to ponder on the anti-neoliberal agenda limits and the basis of the resumption of the ideology in the subcontinent.
Authors: Raquel Ribeiro e Gabrielle Poeschl
Globalisation generates intense debate and contradictory positions, being a particularly relevant object of social representations (SR). This article attempts to better understand the SR of globalisation by analysing how the normative social metasystem controls, verifies and selects the material produced by the operative system in contexts of social comparison. Using a multi-method approach, we conducted two studies, with semi-structured interviews (N=30) and a free association questionnaire (N=100), in the Porto Metropolitan Area, Portugal. Results highlight how social comparison contexts trigger arguments in favour of group interests and reveal the existing power relations between groups. The importance of identifying the relations that guide thinking about social objects and the applicability of SR theory for understanding complex, controversial, sociopolitical objects are discussed.